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
NASA space-flown Gemini and Apollo medallions also struck, in very small numbers, in 14k gold. These medallions were generally ordered by the mission crew as a personal memento of their flight and were often taken to the lunar surface in the Landing Module. For the duration of the Apollo program, Robbins medallions (3–7 gold and 80–450 silver per mission) were flown into space. Despite the NASA prohibition on commercializing the medallions, since 1995 there have been over 500 internet or live auction appearances of Apollo mission Robbins medallions. Two auction companies account for a majority of the sales: Heritage Auctions (over 200 since 2007) and RR