Let's Go to the Moon this Christmas - 6

Time to get busy. Slowing from 15,000 miles per hour and positioning Apollo 8 into a stable orbit around the Moon was a precise and risky procedure. It involved turning the spacecraft around and firing its powerful Service Module engine for precisely four and a half minutes — an eternity of time when even a couple of seconds is enough to send a spacecraft spinning irretrievably off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down enough to insert it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the Moon instead.
Orbital mechanics also demanded that the manoeuvre should take place on the dark side of the moon, entirely out of radio contact with Earth. At 68 hours and 58 minutes into their journey, the crew strapped in and vanished around the Moon's far side, out of sight, out of contact with everything they had ever known.

Ten minutes later, Jim Lovell typed the instructions for the engine burn into the on-board computer, and the computer flashed back "99:40," which was it's code for "Are You Sure?". Lovell was. He pressed the 'Proceed' button. The engine ignited, performed flawlessly and the burn worked exactly as scripted. That and subsequent burns inserted Apollo 8 into an lunar orbit 68 miles high at its 'peak' and at it's lowest point just 60 miles above the tops of the lunar mountains.
And even before Apollo 8 came around the other side of the Moon and back into radio contact with Mission Control, Houston, Bill Anders had spotted and photographed what no human being had ever witnessed before. It is surely the most iconic photo of the space age and one of the most iconic of any age - Earthrise over the Moon.


This photograph became important and iconic after the astronauts had returned to Earth. At the time it's existence was unknown to those watching and listening to the live coverage from NASA.
But what was to follow later, on Christmas Eve in the U.S., early on Christmas Day in the U.K., no-one had predicted or prepared for. It was historic - the largest worldwide television audience ever at that time tuned in to see the Astronauts broadcasting a 'normal' PR slot from their Apollo spacecraft.
They got that.
But what they also witnessed was the ultimate Christmas Special, transmitted live to planet Earth from a quarter of a million miles away, 60 miles above the surface of the Moon....