Apollo program: Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center, placing its crew on a lunar trajectory for the first visit to another celestial body by humans.
Apollo 8 (December 2127, 1968) was the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing, and then departed safely back to Earth. These three astronautsFrank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anderswere the first humans to personally witness and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise.
Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, and was the second crewed spaceflight mission flown in the United States Apollo space program after Apollo 7, which stayed in Earth orbit. Apollo 8 was the third flight and the first crewed launch of the Saturn V rocket, and was the first human spaceflight from the Kennedy Space Center, located adjacent to Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida.
Originally planned as the second crewed Apollo Lunar Module and command module test, to be flown in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more ambitious command-module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December, as the lunar module was not yet ready to make its first flight. Astronaut Jim McDivitt's crew, who were training to fly the first lunar module flight in low Earth orbit, became the crew for the Apollo 9 mission, and Borman's crew were moved to the Apollo 8 mission. This left Borman's crew with two to three months' less training and preparation time than originally planned, and replaced the planned lunar module training with translunar navigation training.
Apollo 8 took 68 hours to travel the distance to the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times over the course of twenty hours, during which they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first ten verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 10 and, with Apollo 11 in July 1969, the fulfillment of U.S. president John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the northern Pacific Ocean. The crew members were named Time magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their return.
The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third United States human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which succeeded in preparing and landing the first humans on the Moon from 1968 to 1972. It was first conceived during Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration as a three-person spacecraft to follow the one-person Project Mercury, which put the first Americans in space. Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal for the 1960s of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in an address to Congress on May 25, 1961. It was the third US human spaceflight program to fly, preceded by the two-person Project Gemini conceived in 1961 to extend spaceflight capability in support of Apollo.
Kennedy's goal was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module (LM) on July 20, 1969, and walked on the lunar surface, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command and service module (CSM), and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last, Apollo 17, in December 1972. In these six spaceflights, twelve people walked on the Moon.
Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968. It encountered a major setback in 1967 when an Apollo 1 cabin fire killed the entire crew during a prelaunch test. After the first successful landing, sufficient flight hardware remained for nine follow-on landings with a plan for extended lunar geological and astrophysical exploration. Budget cuts forced the cancellation of three of these. Five of the remaining six missions achieved successful landings, but the Apollo 13 landing was prevented by an oxygen tank explosion in transit to the Moon, which destroyed the service module's capability to provide electrical power, crippling the CSM's propulsion and life support systems. The crew returned to Earth safely by using the lunar module as a "lifeboat" for these functions. Apollo used the Saturn family of rockets as launch vehicles, which were also used for an Apollo Applications Program, which consisted of Skylab, a space station that supported three crewed missions in 1973–1974, and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, a joint United States-Soviet Union low Earth orbit mission in 1975.
Apollo set several major human spaceflight milestones. It stands alone in sending crewed missions beyond low Earth orbit. Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, and Apollo 11 was the first crewed spacecraft to land humans on one.
Overall the Apollo program returned 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar rocks and soil to Earth, greatly contributing to the understanding of the Moon's composition and geological history. The program laid the foundation for NASA's subsequent human spaceflight capability, and funded construction of its Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Apollo also spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and human spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers.