Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
Fifty years ago this week, NASA launched the Apollo 8 mission. It was mankind’s first adventure outside low Earth orbit, the first trip around the moon, and the first time anyone got to see Earth as a distant object, a blue marble in space. And it wasn’t even supposed to happen.
Astronauts Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Lovell were not supposed to visit the moon at all. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had assigned these men to Apollo 9, a fairly routine test of the lunar excursion module (LEM) in Earth’s orbit. But during the summer of 1968, U.S. officials feared an unexpected Soviet jaunt to the moon, so just 16 weeks before the scheduled liftoff, they reassigned the…
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