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And we return to our American stories.

When Apollo 8 took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in 1968,

the Vietnam War was in full swing, and earlier that year in April, Martin Luther King Jr.

had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. This all wasn't lost on Apollo 8's three astronauts,

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders,

as they took off on their grand journey around the moon. Here to tell the story of what happened,

with that in mind is Steve Kates. Take it away, Steve.

Apollo Wade, NASA made a decision that they would send three astronauts on a journey around the moon for 10 lunar orbits in 1968 around Christmas time.

There was a lot of objections in some of the higher offices of NASA that this might not have been the right thing to do because we only tested Apollo 7 in Earth orbit.

And yet we haven't sent a Apollo spacecraft to the

moon yet. So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders did that most incredible feat.

Here's Jim Lovell, astronaut on Apollo 8 with more.

Well, my first sensation, of course, was not too far from the Earth, because when we

turned around, we could actually see the earth

start to shrink. Now the highest anybody had ever been, I think, had been either, I think it was Apollo

or Gemini 11 up about 800 miles or something like that and back down again. And all of a sudden,

you know, we're just going down. And it was, it reminds me of driving a car looking out the back window

going inside a tunnel and see in the tell entrance shrink as it gets as you go farther into

the tunnel it was uh quite a quite a sensation to think about you know and you had to pinch

yourself hey we're really going to the moon i mean you know this know, this is it. I was a navigator, and it turned

out that the navigation equipment was perfect. I mean, it was just you couldn't ask for a better

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