Astronauts Celebrate Holiday Among the StarsMuch like the shepherds and wise men during the first Christmas,
people around the world had their attention turned toward the heavens on Dec. 24, 1968, when the Apollo 8 crew delivered its famous Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit.Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders became the first humans to orbit the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968. They were also the first
astronauts to spend Christmas in space. To mark the occasion, they sent Christmas greetings and live images back to their home planet and read from the Book of Genesis. It is estimated that as many as one billion people watched the historic broadcast or listened on the radio.Apollo 8 launched from Earth on Dec. 21 and entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. The Apollo 8 crewmembers ended their history-making journey when they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 27. Eight more Apollo missions would visit the Moon, with six of them landing on its surface
The Skylab 4 crew was the next set of astronauts to spend Christmas in space, in 1973. To give Skylab a touch of the
holiday season, Commander Gerald Carr, Pilot William Pogue and Scientist Edward Gibson made a Christmas tree with food cans.It would be 22 years before another American would spend Christmas outside Earth's atmosphere. Astronaut John Blaha celebrated the holiday in orbit aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1996. His crewmates were Russian Cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Alexander Kaleri, who will spend his second Christmas in space this year as a member of the Expedition 8 crew aboard the International Space Station. Kaleri's Expedition 8 crewmate is Astronaut Michael Foale, who will also spend his second Christmas in space. In 1999, Foale was a member of STS-103, the first and only Space Shuttle mission to fly during the holiday.