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
Canceled Apollo missions 1963, and replaced them with two manned Saturn IB missions, designated AS-204 and AS-205. These would be followed by the first unmanned flight of the Lunar Module (LM) on AS-206, then the third manned mission, designated AS-207/208, would use AS-207 to launch the crew in an improved Block II CSM, which would rendezvous and dock with the LM launched unmanned on AS-208. The crew selected on March 21, 1966, for AS-204 consisted of Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger Chaffee, who named their mission Apollo 1. AS-205 was to be named Apollo 2, and