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
HMS Apollo (1794) January, and "Apollo" was turned to give chase. The pursuit was hampered by thick fog, and at 7am on the following morning "Apollo" ran aground on the Haak Sandbank adjacent to Texel. Halkett ordered that the ship's stores and guns be thrown overboard in order to lighten her and float her free, but despite these efforts she remained stuck fast in the sands. In the late afternoon, a Prussian galliot was sighted and hailed by "Apollo"s crew. After some negotiation, the Prussian captain agreed to jettison the bulk of his cargo of wines and take 250 of "Apollo"s crew back