Space: Apollo 8 (Launch)

American space mission, the second human spaceflight mission of NASA's Apollo space program. It was launched on 21 December 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it, and return safely to Earth.

The three-astronaut crew, Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders, became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, the first to directly see the far side of the Moon, and then the first to witness Earthrise.

The 1968 mission, the third flight of the Saturn V rocket and that rocket's first manned launch, was also the first human spaceflight launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The mission was originally planned as Apollo 9, to be performed in early 1969 as the second test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the Lunar Module and the Command/Service Module in an elliptical medium Earth orbit. But when the Lunar Module proved unready to make its first test in a lower Earth orbit in December 1968, it was decided in August to fly Apollo 8 in December as a more ambitious lunar orbital flight without the Lunar Module. This meant Borman's crew was scheduled to fly two to three months sooner than originally planned, leaving them a shorter time for training and preparation, thus placing more demands than usual on their time and discipline.