Apollo 8 Launched 40 Years Ago Today

NASA

On December 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission with astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders launched on the first manned mission of the Saturn V rocket from Cape Kennedy, Florida. While the actual landing on the lunar surface by Apollo 11 the following summer is generally more often remembered, it was this mission that first marked humanity's breaking away from the immediate vicinity of Earth to visit another world. This Christmas time mission was a major inspirational moment for me.

Paul Spudis remembers and comments and provides several other links (Hat tip to HobbySpace).

Coming at the end of a very troubled year for the nation and the world, the journey of Apollo 8 provided an uplifting and unifying experience for the world and inspired Time Magazine's Men of the Year selection.

SO it seemed to Christopher Columbus in 1500. In the closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year would be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

The year's transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man's view of himself and his destiny. For what must surely rank as one of the greatest physical adventures in history was, unlike the immortal explorations of the past, infinitely more than a reconnaissance of geography or unknown elements. It was a journey into man's future, a hopeful but urgent summons, in Poet Archibald MacLeish's words, "to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

The inspirational highlight of the mission was the Christmas Eve telecast from lunar orbit where the crew read from the first verses of Genesis.



Some addirional thoughts and videos on this epic mission are posted at The Discovery Enterprise.