Earthrise apollo 8 1968, If you had your druthers during Christmas week 1968, you’d have wanted to get as far away from Earth as possible. The entire planet was a mess—southeast Asia was in flames, Czechoslovakia was living under a Soviet crackdown, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered and cities across the country had been torn by rioting.
As it happened, three men out of the 3.5 billion human beings then at large did have the chance to get out of Dodge, and so, on the morning of December 21, the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—climbed atop their Saturn V rocket and set out for humanity’s first manned mission to orbit the moon.
For a trip that began with nothing short of an act of chemical violence—7.5 million lbs (3.4 million kg) of thrust exploding out of the bottom of a 36-story rocket, accelerating the crew to an escape velocity of 25,000 mph (40,000 k/h)—the actual moonward coast was a rather lazy thing.
As it happened, three men out of the 3.5 billion human beings then at large did have the chance to get out of Dodge, and so, on the morning of December 21, the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—climbed atop their Saturn V rocket and set out for humanity’s first manned mission to orbit the moon.
For a trip that began with nothing short of an act of chemical violence—7.5 million lbs (3.4 million kg) of thrust exploding out of the bottom of a 36-story rocket, accelerating the crew to an escape velocity of 25,000 mph (40,000 k/h)—the actual moonward coast was a rather lazy thing.
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