 It's Christmas, which for space nerds means it's a time of year to celebrate the Christmas miracle that was Apollo 8, and that's what we're talking about today on Vintage Space. Apollo 8 launched on December 21st of 1968, and it really was a bit of a Christmas miracle. After losing three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire, the force to revisit to the command service module put NASA badly behind schedule to reach the moon by the end of the decade. But all things considered, NASA actually recovered from the fire pretty quickly, and a lot of it is due to some very bold decisions at management level. They made the decision to do all uptesting of the Saturn V. Rather than test each stage of the rocket individually and slowly put it together for one launch, NASA management had Warner Von Braun launch the rocket in one go on Apollo 4. It worked, proving that the rocket was ready to take men to the moon. Apollo 8 was a similarly bold move for NASA, and one that took the agency away from its original schedule. NASA's original plan for the Apollo missions had all the systems and spacecraft, both the command service and lunar modules, tested fairly extensively in Earth orbit before going to the moon. This included a high Earth orbit mission, one that would simulate re-entry from lunar distances. But the end of the decade was approaching, and the lunar module was running badly behind schedule. Rather than wait, NASA opted instead to take Apollo 8 to the moon with just the command service module and a dummy lunar module for ballast. Most of the way to the moon, the crew couldn't actually see their target, that's because the spacecraft was just not oriented in the right direction. They got their first very up close view of the moon on December 24th of 1968. At Christmas Eve, they did a live TV transmission from lunar orbit. Each of the astronauts made some observations about the moon. Lunar module pilot Jim Lovell was struck by the awe-inspiring vast loneliness, something that made him realize just what he had back on Earth. Command module pilot Bill Anders saw the sky as a forbidding and foreboding expanse of blackness. Commander Frank Borman saw the moon as a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing. It was during this TV broadcast as well that the crew very famously read from the book of Genesis on live television to the entire United States and the world. But for all its first, the most amazing was the first time men saw the moon up close and saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. There are some really fantastic images from Apollo 8, both of the Earth and the moon, and I've compiled some of my favorites into a gallery on my blog Vintage Space over at Popular Science. The link to that is below. If you are around to see Apollo 8's Christmas Eve broadcast from the moon live, let me know in the comments what it was like, because I was not around but I still love watching the footage. And for Vintage Space type content every day of the week, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And of course, with new episodes going up every Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.