On Christmas Eve 1968, three U.S. astronauts became the first human beings to travel to a celestial body when Apollo 8 dropped into the moon's orbit. Cmdr. Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders awed millions who tuned in to the space travelers' live TV broadcast. The astronauts transmitted photos of the moon, but more significantly, of Earth, from their spacecraft.

After three orbits spent photographing the lunar surface, Frank Borman shifted the orientation of the capsule to see the horizon. Suddenly, Bill Anders realized he was seeing the home planet hovering over the lunar horizon in what was, in essence, the first human-witnessed “Earthrise.”
The crew of Apollo 8 didn't claim to see God, but they were clearly impressed by His handiwork. "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth," Lovell said during one of the six broadcasts.

Moreover NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion — it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just 2.5 degrees wide in order to survive the fireball of reentry, a cautious commander would also consider it a couple of minis too many. So Borman ordered his crewmates, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, to keep the brandy stowed.

“You saved 1968.” That was the short telegram message sent by an anonymous well wisher to Frank Borman upon his return to Houston after his space capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 27, 1968, having traveled 240,000 miles to the moon, and survived a 25,000 mile per hour reentry through the earth’s atmosphere to conclude his voyage with his two fellow astronauts.

The launch of Apollo 7 in October was a major victory for NASA, putting the space program back on track after a 22-month interruption because of a launch pad fire that had killed three astronauts in January 1967.

But beyond the monumental aspects of such a scientific achievement, the feat was a major psychological and emotional boost for many Americans at the end of a particularly bad year in U.S. history: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered; in June, Bobby Kennedy followed; in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. 

Only 24 human beings have ever laid eyes on a view of the whole Earth from space. But thanks to a new generation of missions carrying high-resolution cameras beyond Earth orbit, moving HD footage of the whole planet is now available for all of us to marvel at.