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
Journey of Apollo 15 to the Moon so that there was even heat distribution. Nearly 15 hours after launch, the crew switched off the lights in the cabin and went to sleep. The second day of Apollo 15 centered around the second planned midcourse correction and a preliminary check of the Lunar Module, "Falcon". Mission Control first got the crew to perform a 0.7 second burn of the SPS engine before the planned second course correction. This was designed to isolate the location of the short in the Delta-V Thrust switch. The burn allowed Mission Control to confirm that the SPS would only be ignited accidentally if