NASA / WILLIAM ANDERS

All of You on the Good Earth, Apollo 8 Rising Earth from the Moon, December 24, 1968

While orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, the astronauts broadcast directly to the people on Earth; it was the largest television audience in history (to that point), estimated at half a billion people. The three former pilots gave some impressions from the greatest test flight of their lives. Just before Lovell offered his wistful thoughts about Earth, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman remarked on the rocky satellite right below him: “The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of us—each one carries his own impression of what he’s seen today. I know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely forbidding type existence, great expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone, and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work.” “We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice,” Borman said in a 2008 Apollo anniversary event. “And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate.”