On December 21, 1968, three astronauts named Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders strapped themselves into a tiny cone-shaped capsule on top of a Saturn V rocket - the most powerful machine humans had ever built. At 7:51 in the morning, the rocket erupted with 7.5 million pounds of thrust, shaking the Florida coast and roaring into the sky. Apollo 8 was on its way to become the first crewed spacecraft ever to leave Earth's gravity and fly to another world.
For three days, the crew sped across 240,000 miles of empty space. On Christmas Eve, they slipped into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to see the far side, the gray pocked half that always faces away from Earth. They circled 10 times. On their fourth orbit, they watched in stunned silence as Earth - a swirling blue and white marble - rose above the dead gray Moon. Anders snapped a photograph that would become one of the most famous images in human history, the "Earthrise."
That Christmas Eve, the three astronauts read aloud from the Book of Genesis as a billion people around the world listened on radio and television, the largest audience in history. They wished everyone "a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth." When Apollo 8 splashed down safely on December 27, NASA had pulled off something extraordinary. Just six months later, Apollo 11 would actually land on the Moon, but Apollo 8 was the journey that showed humanity our home from far away for the first time.
