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 1 the prime crew for a second Block I CSM flight, AS-205. NASA planned to follow this with an unmanned test flight of the LM (AS-206), then the third manned mission would be a dual flight designated AS-278 (or AS-207/208), in which AS-207 would launch the first manned Block II CSM, which would then rendezvous and dock with the LM launched unmanned on AS-208. In March, NASA was studying the possibility of flying the first Apollo mission as a joint space rendezvous with the final Project Gemini mission, Gemini 12 in November 1966. But by May, delays in making Apollo ready