NASA's 1st flight to moon, Apollo 8, marks 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, a tumultuous year of assassinations, riots and war drew to a close in heroic and hopeful fashion with the three Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis on live TV as they orbited the moon.

To this day, that 1968 mission is considered to be NASA's boldest and perhaps most dangerous undertaking. That first voyage by humans to another world set the stage for the still grander Apollo 11 moon landing seven months later.

There was unprecedented and unfathomable risk to putting three men atop a monstrous new rocket for the first time and sending them all the way to the moon. The mission was whipped together in just four months in order to reach the moon by year's end, before the Soviet Union.

There was the Old Testament reading by commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders.

Lastly, there was the photo named "Earthrise," showing our blue and white ball humanity's home rising above the bleak, gray lunar landscape and 240,000 miles (386 million kilometers) in the distance.

Humans had never set eyes on the far side of the moon, or on our planet as a cosmic oasis, surrounded completely by the black void of space. A half-century later, only 24 US astronauts who flew to the moon have witnessed these wondrous sights in person.

The Apollo 8 crew is still around: Borman and Lovell are 90, Anders is 85.

To Lovell, the journey had the thrill and romance of true exploration, and provided an uplifting cap for Americans to a painful, contentious year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, nationwide riots and protests of the Vietnam War.

The mission's impact was perhaps best summed up in a four-word telegram received by Borman. "Thanks, you saved 1968."
"In the beginning," Anders read, "God created the heaven and the Earth ..." Borman ended the broadcast with, "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."