Apollo 8

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” -President John F. Kennedy, 25 May 1961

Apollo 8 was the first manned space mission to leave Earth orbit and travel to another celestial body.  Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders logged a record number of firsts in December of 1968 with Apollo 8’s successful launch, execution and recovery.

  • First manned flight of the Saturn V rocket
  • First manned space mission to leave earth orbit
  • First humans to directly see the dark side of the moon
  • First humans to see Earth from beyond low Earth orbit
  • First manned launch from the John F. Kennedy Space Center
  • First successful launch and recovery of humans into deep space

The mission was originally intended as a Lunar and Command Module medium Earth orbit test flight to take place in early 1969. However,  because the race against the Soviets to reach the moon was heating up and the lunar module was not yet ready, the mission was changed and the time frame bumped up.

Apollo 8 launched on 21 December, 1968. It took almost three days for the astronauts to reach the moon and 20 hours to make ten lunar orbits. They returned to Earth with a successful splashdown in the Pacific on 27 December, 1968.

“You saved 1968.”

In recent times, when space flight has become more common and communication around the world is instantaneous, it is sometime hard to keep in perspective the impact Apollo 8 had. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy had been assassinated. The US had suffered over 6,000 causalities during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A year earlier, the Apollo 1 crew had been lost in a fire, and Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during a space flight. The world needed something good to happen. After the successful mission, an American wrote in a telegram to the Apollo 8 crew, “You saved 1968.”

Mission commander Frank Borman was asked to carry a bulky TV camera. Borman had been opposed because of weight during the mission planning (they were even discarding extra rations) but he was ordered to take the camera. He later recalled that for the first broadcast, CBS interrupted a playoff game between the Vikings and Colts and the network was swamped with protesting calls.

The crew knew that they would be going into orbit on Christmas Eve and struggled to find something to say. NASA’s instructions to the Apollo 8 crew for the Christmas Eve broadcast were only “Say something appropriate.” Overloaded in the short 4-month training for the mission, Borman appealed to his friend Si Bourgin for help, who in turn discussed it with reporter Joe Laitin. It was Laitin’s wife who came up with the idea of reading from Genesis.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, over 1 billion people around the world (including many behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow and East Berlin) were able to watch a grainy black and white TV picture and hear the scratchy voices of three men over 250,000 miles away describing the alien world outside their windows. As the broadcast came to a close, Bill Anders began speaking.

William Anders:
For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell:
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Frank Borman:
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.

Earthrise photograph captured by William Anders, December 1968

Earthrise captured by Bill Anders, December 1968

Links

Development/History of the Apollo 8 patch [Click Here]

Credits

Thanks to HFM Volunteer Steve Kessinger for researching & writing this material