Apollo 8 — first humans to orbit the Moon

On Christmas Eve 1968, an estimated one billion people in 64 countries tuned in as three Americans circled the Moon. While the lunar sunrise crept across a grey horizon, Bill Anders began to read: in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Jim Lovell and Frank Borman carried the verses on as the camera showed a desolate surface sliding past the window. It was the most watched broadcast in history to that point, sent home by the first human beings ever to leave their planet.

Four months earlier, Apollo 8 had been a different mission entirely. The lunar module was running late, and intelligence suggested a Soviet Zond spacecraft might loop the Moon first with a cosmonaut aboard. In August 1968, NASA managers made one of the boldest calls of the space age: send the command module alone, all the way to the Moon, on the first crewed flight of the Saturn V. The crew launched on 21 December 1968, and three days later fired their engine behind the Moon, out of all contact with Earth, to drop into lunar orbit.

For twenty hours they circled ten times, photographing landing sites for the missions to come. On the fourth orbit, Borman rolled the spacecraft and the Earth rose over the lunar horizon, blue and impossibly alive above a dead landscape. Anders grabbed a camera loaded with color film while Borman joked that the picture wasn't on the flight plan. The frame he caught, Earthrise, became one of the most reproduced photographs ever made and the unofficial emblem of the environmental movement.

On Christmas morning, the engine burn that would bring them home had to work on the first try, behind the Moon and beyond all help. When Apollo 8 swung back into radio contact, Lovell announced that mission control should be informed: there is a Santa Claus. The capsule splashed down in the Pacific on 27 December, met by the USS Yorktown. At the end of a year of assassinations, riots, and war, a stranger's telegram to Borman said it best: thank you Apollo 8, you saved 1968.