On December 24, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders – became the first people to orbit the Moon. This was an important step along the way to actually landing on the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission, seven months later.

Orbiting the Moon was one of only several historic accomplishments by the Apollo 8 astronauts. They were the first to leave Earth's gravity, to see the Earth as an entire planet from space, and to see Earth rise over the horizon of another celestial body.

Apollo 8 had not originally been planned as a lunar mission. The original plan was to test the Lunar Module – the piece of the spacecraft that would actually land on the Moon – in low Earth orbit. But delays in the production of the Lunar Module led to a change in plans; Apollo 8 would now test the Command Module's capabilities by going to the Moon and back. That meant that the crew had a shorter time than expected to train and prepare for the mission.

The Saturn V rocket was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 21, and the Command Module took three days to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times in twenty hours. During that time, they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast to Earth, in which they described what they had seen, and read brief passages from the Biblical creation story in Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched television program ever.

Apollo 8 returned to Earth and splashed down in the north Pacific Ocean on December 27. The mission was a success, with only a few minor technical problems along the way. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were named "Men of the Year" by Time magazine.

Jeffrey Kluger's Apollo 8 (e-book, e-audio, print) and Robert Zimmerman's Genesis (e-book, print) tell the story of the Apollo 8 mission. Documentaries The Time of Apollo and Apollo 8: Christmas at the Moon are available for streaming. In Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (e-audio, print), Neil M. Maher considers the broader cultural significance of the Apollo program during the turbulent 1960s.

Also This Week

• December 22, 1808: Ludwig van Beethoven presented a four-hour concert at Vienna's Theater an Der Wien, which included the first performances of four of his major works: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Choral Fantasy. Beethoven was the piano soloist in the concerto and the Choral Fantasy. It was his final performance of a piano concerto, because he could no longer hear well enough to perform.
• December 21, 1879: Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (e-book, e-audio of Los Angeles Theatre Works production, print) was premiered in Copenhagen. In the play, a married woman finds that she cannot be content with the limited roles allowed to proper wives, and decides to leave her husband. At the time, this was a shocking choice, and the play was quite controversial. The 1973 film version, starring Jane Fonda, is available for streaming at Kanopy. (By coincidence, Fonda was born on the same date as the play's premiere – December 21, 1937.)
• December 23, 1929: Chet Baker was born. Baker was a jazz trumpet player, singer, and occasional actor who became a critical favorite in the 1950s. His drug addiction derailed his career in the 1960s, when he was frequently in jail for various offenses. By the mid-1970s, he had returned to regular performing, and spent most of his final decade living and playing in Europe. A large variety of Baker's music is available for streaming at Freegal and Hoopla. The documentary Let's Get Lost is available streaming and on DVD; James Gavin's biography, Lost in a Dream, is available in e-book and in print.
• December 21 is National Hamburger Day. There's a recipe for a cooked patty of ground meat in the Apicius cookbook, from 4th-century Rome. The city of Hamburg, Germany was the source of the popular "Hamburg steak" (similar to what we would now call a Salisbury steak) in the mid-19th century. But the thing that transformed the Hamburg steak into a hamburger – putting it on a bun – appears to have been an American invention of the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The cheeseburger first appears in the 1920s, as does the first American fast-food chain, White Castle, which was based on the hamburger. OverDrive offers a variety of burger-themed cookbooks in e-book format, so whether you're looking for Ultimate Burgers, Wicked Good Burgers, Craft Burgers, or The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet, we've got you covered.