It was NASA's first dangerous space mission. The chances of success were fifty-fifty.And three men would dare to fly farther and faster than ever before. The year was 1968. Guided by a computer less powerful than today's handheld calculators, NASA sent the three astronauts of Apollo 8 on the most ambitious space flight in history. Here is the dramatic account of the mission that forever broke human beings' bond to earth... of the first time that a manned spacecraft would escape earth's orbit and travel to the moon... of the engineering triumph that sent the Apollo 8 capsule 240,000 miles from earth. From Washington to Vietnam, Robert Zimmerman captures the political, social, and personal forces that pushed Commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders to the forefront of space exploration, and made Apollo 8 a true turning point in the history of planet earth.
