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Apollo VIII
December 1968
Frank Borman, Jim
Lovell, and Bill Anders
were the first humans ever to leave Earth's
gravitational pull and go somewhere else! This was
the first manned trip around the Moon.
They made 10 orbits before heading home. This was the Apollo
VIII mission where on
Christmas Eve, 1968 Bill Anders began quoting the first verses
from Genesis.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . . ."
Then, he passed the verses over to the other crew members and they joined
in reading aloud in
a broadcast heard around the world.
Two of the crew claimed credit for the photo. Jim Lovell tells
a pretty good story about that
in one of his books. Anyway, this photo appeared in Time
Magazine and ended up on
everything from posters to postage stamps. It packs a visual
and emotional wallop.
The thing about it, though, is this: the picture's
turned the wrong way!
The ship
orbited the Moon from right to left, not down to up. They
emerged from behind the moon
with it on their right and the bright blue Earth was to their left.
The photo really looks like this:

Read the many fine books written by astronauts.
One is the story of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell
or The Last Man
On the Moon by Eugene
Cernan and Don Davis
(NY: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
created by Don, not a corp., 2003
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