In
S68-49389, taken over two months before the launch of Apollo 8, the spacecraft (atop the Saturn V rocket) is slowly, carefully being transported from the Kennedy Space Center's (KSC) Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to Pad A, Launch Complex 39, a three-mile journey. Over the course of the next two months, the spacecraft would undergo a series of tests, which continued until the day before the launch. Although it was the second crewed mission in the Apollo space program, Apollo 8 produced a series of awe-inspiring firsts, and it helped pave the way for subsequent missions, including the Moon landing. Many challenges faced the crew and its mission: an accelerated schedule, which left the astronauts less time to train and prepare; ruptured fuel lines and bad igniter lines, which were fixed a mere three days before the scheduled launch; and a success rate that the crew themselves thought was only fifty-fifty. Despite all this, the Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit; the first to be captured by (and then escape) the gravitational field of another celestial body; the first to see Earth as a whole planet and the first to directly see the far side of the Moon. While orbiting the Moon, the crew also became the first humans to witness (and photograph)
Earthrise.
