NASA's Apollo 8 mission, launched in 1968, represented a vital milestone in human space exploration: carrying the first crew to beyond low Earth orbit and toward the moon.

Apollo 8′s original mission was to be the first manned craft launched atop the massive 363-foot Saturn V and test the first edition of the lunar module (LM) in Earth orbit.

Apollo 8 ended the space race. "I was there to participate in the Cold War battle with the Soviets," says Frank Borman, now 90 years old and the oldest living former American astronaut, from his ...

Remembering 1968: Apollo 8's Christmas greeting from the moon 08:28. Although the moon seems ever so familiar, we're really barely acquainted. Only a few souls have ever ventured there and back ...

Apollo 8 would use the third model of the Saturn V booster, and the one designated for the mission was built in Kennedy’s famous and enormous Vehicle Assembly Building in December 1967.

The Apollo 8 landed safely back on Earth on December 27. Borman, Lovell, and Anders emerge from the rescue helicopter on the deck of the Yorktown. NASA.

On the morning of Dec. 21, 1968 NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft lifted off atop a Saturn V rocket from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center on humanity's first journey to another world.

Retired Maj. Gen. William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic "Earthrise" photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday, June 7 ...

this December 1968 file photo provided by NASA shows Earth as seen from the Apollo 8 spacecraft. The images provided by the NASA mission were the first to how the planet in its entirety. (NASA) On ...

Watch: Apollo 8 crew's Genesis reading. The full audio of Apollo 8's Christmas Eve message. NASA produced this video some years later, adding video footage from multiple Apollo missions.

The chronograph was also essential gear for Apollo 8, the first manned 240,000-mile flight to orbit the moon, including the foreboding “dark side” that humans had never set eyes on before.