This Christmas, NASA is celebrating the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8 and the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon. The astronauts of Apollo 8 took this iconic photo of the first-seen Earthrise on Christmas Eve in 1968.
NPR has nice coverage of it here.
Astronaut Bill Anders: “Oh, my God, look at that picture over there. There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” To astronaut James Lovell: “You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?”
Lovell: “Oh, man, that’s great! Where is it?”
Anders: “Hurry. Quick.”
Lovell: “Down here?”
Anders: “Just grab me a color. A color exterior. Hurry up. Got one?”
Lovell: “Yeah, I’m lookin’ for one. C368.”
Anders: “Anything quick.”
Anders: “I think we missed it.”
Anders: “Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now, just calm down. Calm down, Lovell!”
A few years later, astronauts in the Skylab (the fellows who tracked Comet Kohoutek) would celebrate their 1973 Christmas with this tree made from used space-food tubes:
And this Christmas, lest we forget, there are still men in space. Yesterday in the International Space Station, astronauts Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio were busy making repairs to their craft during a seven-hour space walk.
Retired Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell–the one who couldn’t find the camera–commemorated the first Christmas in space by repeating the words he beamed back to Earth in 1968:
“We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas — and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”