Apollo 8 In Photographs: The Apollo Photo Archive

An unprecedented photographic study of the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to escape Earth's gravity and orbit the moon. 

The Apollo Photo Archive series comprises the most comprehensive pictorial record of America’s moon-landing program ever published.

The series continues with the Apollo 8 launch in December 1968. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders achieved several historic firsts on this flight. Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to escape Earth’s gravity, and the first to orbit another celestial body (the moon). Launched by the Saturn V rocket, the crew of Apollo 8 reached 24,593 mph, setting both manned speed and distance-from-Earth records.

The Apollo Photo Archive features images of spacecraft and rocket assembly, crew selection and training, preflight activities, mission countdown, launch, the flight itself, splashdown, and subsequent crew appearances and related activities. This particular volume includes more than 800 images.

J. L. Pickering, who has amassed the world's largest private archive of US human space flight images, has been conducting historical photo research on the US space program for nearly 50 years. This includes assembling, studying, and organizing a personal collection of more than 250,000 prints, transparencies, and digital files. Today he serves as a resource for authors, museums, astronauts, and others. He lives in Illinois. 

John Bisney is an author, journalist, and retired network news correspondent who covered the space program for more than 30 years for CNN, the Discovery Science Channel, RKO, and SiriusXM Radio. He witnessed more than 60 space shuttle launches and was one of the few broadcasters at the 1986 Challenger disaster. He holds a master of arts degree in journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He lives in the Tampa Bay, Florida, area.