On December 24, 1968, in what was the most watched
television broadcast at the time, the crew of Apollo 8 read in turn from
the Book of
Genesis as they orbited the moon. Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman recited
verses 1 through 10, using the King James
Version text.
Apollo 8, the second manned mission in the United States Apollo space program, was
launched on December 21, 1968 and became the first manned space craft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it and return
safely to Earth. The three-astronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command
Module Pilot James Lovell,
and Lunar Module Pilot William
Anders — became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first
to see Earth as a whole planet, and then the first to directly see the far side of
the Moon. The 1968 mission, the third flight of the Saturn V rocket and
the first manned launch of the Saturn V, was also the first manned launch from
the John F.
Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape
Canaveral.
Originally planned as a second Lunar Module/Command
Module test in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in
early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more
ambitious Command Module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December,
because the Lunar Module was not yet ready to make its first flight. This meant
Borman's crew was scheduled to fly two to three months sooner than originally
planned, leaving them a shorter time for training and preparation, thus placing
more demands than usual on their time and discipline.
Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon. It orbited
ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a
Christmas Eve television
broadcast in which they read the
first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the
time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's
successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S.
President John F.
Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the
1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when
their space craft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean.
Photo Legacy: Making your memories last forever http://www.photolegacy.com
Research courtesy of Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8
Images courtesy of NASA under The Commons Agreement of
Flickr
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg
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