🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
The year 1968 was by all measures a terrible one for America. Two of our nation's leaders were assassinated—Senator Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Following King's murder, a series of riots swept across the nation's biggest cities—Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati among them—with the National Guard deployed to bring those riots to an end. The war in Vietnam continued to escalate, as did protests and civil unrest across the nation.
What brought American troops to Southeast Asia—and drove a wedge in America's social and political landscape—also propelled America into space: our global struggle with our communist adversary, the Soviet Union.
It was that race to space with the Russians that allowed one of America's darkest years to come to a triumphal end when NASA's Apollo 8 crew did something few in America, or the world, thought could be done: orbit the moon. And orbit the moon not once but 10 times.
"This was the first time anyone traveled 240,000 miles from the Earth to the moon," Jim Lovell, one of the three Apollo 8 astronauts, told a reporter. "Apollo 11, all they had to worry about was the last 50 miles."
The Apollo 8 mission was a first of many kinds: the first to take humans to the moon and back, the first to launch on the Saturn V with a crew on board, the first to launch from NASA's Moonport, the first to launch humans deep into space, the first to have pictures taken by humans deep in space, the first to have humans witness the Earth rising over the lunar surface and the first to have live TV coverage from deep space—and featuring images of the lunar surface.
On Christmas Eve, Americans and the world—nearly a billion people—watched in awe as America's intrepid space explorers broadcast a message while orbiting the moon. What would they say? What could they say?
NASA press officials gave the crew little in the way of instruction. "The head of public information told me we were going to have the largest audience that's ever seen anything on television and you've got five or six minutes," Lowell told C-SPAN in 1999. "I asked her what I should do, and she told me to do what was appropriate."
In what was a technical miracle of its time, a TV camera on board took footage of the crater-filled surface while the astronauts prepared their message to the world from space. "We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you," Bill Anders began.
He then started the largest mass-televised Bible reading in world history, as each of the three crew members took turns reading the first 10 verses of Genesis.
"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," Anders said, reciting the most familiar verses from the world's most familiar book. "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."
Lovell picked up where Anders left off.
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day," he read. "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 was next and finished the last of the first 10 verses from Genesis.
"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so," he read. "And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas, and God saw that it was good."
Having completed the shared reading from Genesis, Borman closed things out. "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."
Each of the astronauts, Lovell said, agreed to the Bible reading before they went to space. Indeed, the crew couldn't take an entire Bible into outer space because it was too heavy, so they printed the verses on flame-resistant paper instead.
"It's a foundation of Christianity, Judaism and Islam," Lovell said, explaining why they chose to read from the Book of Genesis. "It's the foundation of most of the world's religions. They all had that basis of the Old Testament."
Not all Americans were happy with the Bible reading. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair filed a lawsuit against NASA, alleging First Amendment violations. The case was dismissed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal.
Lovell said the astronauts weren't sure how the broadcast would be taken but thought it would be well received. He noted as much during a news conference after the Supreme Court's ruling: "They said, 'Don't worry about it.'"
All three astronauts were issued cameras for the trip, mostly for aiding future Apollo missions. On the fourth pass around the moon, the space capsule was positioned so the crew could see the Earth. Anders aimed his camera at the distant blue circle and snapped what would become one of the most famous pictures in world history: the "Earthrise" photograph.
Years later, Lovell recalled the impact that moment had on the crew. "Looking back at the Earth on Christmas Eve had a great effect on all three of us, because of the wonderment of it," he said. "The Earth looked so lonely in the universe—it's the only thing with color, and all of our emotions were focused back there on our families."
The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, their spacecraft safely splashing down in the northern Pacific. All three crew members were named Time magazine's "Men of the Year."
Their mission set the stage, a mere seven months later, for the Apollo 11 crew to make history when two of the three crew members—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—walked on the moon.
"I'm not a poet," Lovell told a packed Washington National Cathedral during the National Air and Space Museum's 50th-anniversary tribute to the Apollo 8 mission, "but it was strange that we'd worked and come all the way to study the moon but what we really discovered was the Earth."
Lovell closed things out by talking about the many messages of thanks he and the crew received. One, he noted, was the shortest—and best: "Thanks, you saved 1968."
