Review: Book Shows Apollo 8 Was A Big Risk For 3 Astronauts

“Rocket Men” (Random House), by Robert Kurson

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The first astronauts to orbit the moon ended their 1968 Christmas Eve television broadcast with a personal message for the people of Earth.

No one knew what the three Apollo 8 astronauts would say — not their worried wives 240,000 miles away nor the buttoned-down NASA engineers who meticulously planned every moment of the high-stakes mission to reach the moon before the Soviets.

With the moon showing on TV screens, Bill Anders began reading: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth ...” Then Jim Lovell and Frank Borman followed by reading a few lines each from the book of Genesis. The plain voices reading the Bible’s creation story made grown men weep, Kurson writes, and sent people outside to peer at the sky in wonder.