🛰️ Mission
Apollo 8
The first people to leave Earth behind and go somewhere else.
- Launched
- 21 December 1968, 57 years ago
- Worked for
- 6 days, until 27 December 1968
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Came home after ten times round the Moon, and splashed down in the Pacific
- Best known for
- The first time anyone saw the far side of the Moon, or the whole Earth at once, with their own eyes
Did you know?
- Nobody had been further from Earth than a few hundred kilometres. Apollo 8 went 380,000.
- Earthrise was not on the flight plan. Bill Anders saw it through the window, called for colour film, and took it in a hurry.
Where it went
The Moon
Earth’s only natural moon, and the only other world people have walked on.
Earth
Our home, the only world known to have life.
More NASA photos of Apollo 8Straight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.