The Earthrise on Christmas eve

The Apollo space program left us with an array of memorable photographs from their lunar missions. The difficulty is how to decide what was the best photograph of the program? Is it astronauts, rockets, the collection of space craft or the lunar surface?

For me, I find it hard to go past the Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 as the command module orbited the moon on Christmas eve of 1968. I wasn't born yet so for me these achievements by NASA amaze me, I wasn't able to follow these space flights during the height of the space race. Amazingly, no country or space agency has the capability to return people to the moon more than fourty years after Apollo 17 in December 1972 - that's insane.

Apollo 8 was the second manned space flight of the program with Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders as the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit travelling into the gravity field of another celestial body. The command/service module made 10 orbits of the moon and was only the second Apollo mission to carry crew into space after the Apollo 7 mission just 2 months earlier.

These manned missions were to build to the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969 with Apollo 9 launched in March of 1969 and only a couple of months later Apollo 10 in May of the same year. What I find amazing is the rate that NASA was launching Apollo missions, I can only imagine the frantic activity at Cape Canaveral during this period. The space race was flat out, that's for sure.