Apollo 8
second crewed flight of the United States Apollo program
Apollo 8 (December 21–27, 1968) was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth's gravitational sphere of influence, and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing and then returned to Earth. The three astronauts—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to see and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise.
Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, and was the second crewed spaceflight mission flown in the United States Apollo space program (the first, Apollo 7, stayed in Earth orbit). Apollo 8 was the third flight and the first crewed launch of the Saturn V rocket. It was the first human spaceflight from the Kennedy Space Center, adjacent to Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida.
Originally planned as the second crewed Apollo Lunar Module and command module test, to be flown in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more ambitious command-module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December, as the lunar module was not yet ready to make its first flight. Astronaut Jim McDivitt's crew, who were training to fly the first Lunar Module flight in low Earth orbit, became the crew for the Apollo 9 mission, and Borman's crew were moved to the Apollo 8 mission. This left Borman's crew with two to three months' less training and preparation time than originally planned, and replaced the planned Lunar Module training with translunar navigation training.
Apollo 8 took 68 hours to travel to the Moon.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Apollo 8” as second crewed flight of the United States Apollo program. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as second crewed flight of the United States Apollo program. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q184201. VIAF identifies the subject as 145769786. The Library of Congress control number is no2004052875. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1969.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apollo 8” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.