 Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon . It orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours , during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast where they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis . At the time , the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever . Apollo 8 's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy 's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s . The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27 , 1968 , when their spacecraft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean . The crew was named Time magazine 's " Men of the Year " for 1968 upon their return . 
