Viewpoints

Many of us have heard the heroic tales of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, the missions to send men to the moon, but what about the other missions? When Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders fearlessly took off in December of 1968 and safely orbited the moon, they paved the way for the future space exploration to come. Author Jeffrey Kluger recently wrote Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon about this mission and its impact on history and science. In August 1968 NASA made a bold decision: In just 16 weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Borman, Lovell, and Anders were s