NASA’s Apollo program was set up in response to President John F. Kennedy’s challenge in the early 1960s to put a man on the moon by decade’s end – and to beat the Communists to it. The first test run missions to the moon began with unmanned rockets launching to photograph the moon and select a comfortable landing spot, followed by the launch of manned flights into orbit to test whether humans can survive space and weightlessness exposure long enough to go to the moon. Apollo 7 was the first to confirm that humans can indeed survive in space, and its follow-up mission was the first to take humans beyond earth’s orbit.

On this day, December 27, in 1968, the Apollo 8 crew returned to earth, after a successful and relatively trouble-free roundtrip to the moon’s vicinity.

Apollo 8 orbited the moon for around twenty hours, providing some of the first televised images of the moon, a Christmas Eve broadcast accompanied by a reading of the first 10 chapters of the Book of Genesis.  At the time of broadcast it became the most-watched television show in history.