Apollo 8 which they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first ten 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 members were named "Time" magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their
Apollo 15 be selected as a prime or backup crew member for an Apollo flight; from Group 4 he was the only astronaut to make it to the Moon, with the last Apollo mission at the end of 1972. All three members of the support crew were scientist-astronauts, selected in 1967, as the prime crew felt they needed more assistance with the science than with the piloting. None of the support crew would fly during the Apollo Program, waiting until the Space Shuttle program for the chance to go into space. The three Apollo 15 astronauts had served as the backup crew