Apollo 8 read from Genesis while orbiting the Moon

On December 24, 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit another world. Apollo 8 was a daring leap: the mission flew to the Moon barely a year after a launchpad fire had killed three Apollo 1 crewmen, and it carried no lander, only nerve.

During a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, the three men took turns reading the first ten verses of Genesis, closing with Borman’s wish for everyone “on the good Earth.” Estimates of the audience run from half a billion to a billion people — roughly one in four humans alive at the time.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

The flight also produced Earthrise, Anders’s photograph of a blue planet hanging over a gray lunar horizon, an image widely credited with energizing the modern environmental movement. For a turbulent year, it was an unexpectedly quiet ending.