Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

by Robert Kurson

it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was.

Earthrise was the most beautiful sight Borman had ever seen, the only color visible in all the cosmos. The planet just hung there, a jewel on black velvet, and it struck him that everything he loved—Susan, the boys, his parents, his friends, his country—was on that tiny sphere, a brilliant blue and white interruption in a never-ending darkness, the only place he or anyone else had to call home.

As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon and readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this way to discover the Moon, and yet here they had discovered the Earth.