Join us on Friday December 19, 2025 at 7:30 pm at the VBAS Planetarium for our monthly member meeting. Admission is open to the public.
Apollo 8
In 1968 the Space Race was in full tilt. The Apollo program was on schedule to make it to the Moon before the end of the decade. However, reports held that the Russians were still ahead of NASA to get to the moon. To further complicate the issue, the Lunar Excursion Moduel (LEM), the vehicle necessary to land on the moon and that Apollo 8 was supposed to test in Earth orbit only, was not going to be ready for the scheduled test flight. In a classified meeting and with only a few months left to prepare, NASA charged Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Boreman, Jim Lovel, and Bill Anders with a new mission. They would no longer be testing the LEM in Earth orbit. They would go without the LEM and orbit the Moon before Christmas. As a result, these three astronauts would become the first people to leave Earth orbit and see the far side of the Moon. As part of their new mission, they were to photograph the surface of the Moon and find an adequate landing site for the upcoming Apollo 11 mission. But what they discovered and photographed on December 24th, on their fourth orbit around the moon, was nothing anyone anticipated or planned for.