What do you think?
Rate this book
Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: The First Manned Mission to Another World
It was Christmas Eve 1968. And the astronauts of Apollo 8 - Commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders - were participants in a mission that took them faster (24,000 mph) and farther from the Earth (240,000 miles) than any human had ever traveled. Apollo 8 was the mission that broke humanity's absolute bond to the it was the first manned vehicle to leave the Earth's orbit.
Confined within a tiny spaceship, the astronauts were aided in their journey by a computer less powerful than one of today's handheld calculators. Their mission was not only a triumph of engineering, but also an enduring moment in history. The words these three men spoke from lunar orbit reverberated through American society, changing our culture in ways no one predicted.
Confined within a tiny spaceship, the astronauts were aided in their journey by a computer less powerful than one of today's handheld calculators. Their mission was not only a triumph of engineering, but also an enduring moment in history. The words these three men spoke from lunar orbit reverberated through American society, changing our culture in ways no one predicted.
343 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2024
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 16, 2026
"They were no longer in earth orbit. Apollo 8 had become the first manned vehicle to break the bonds of earth."
Robert Zimmerman's book tells the story of this phenomenal human endeavor, when three astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, "broke the bonds of earth" and successfully performed the "lunar orbit insertion." On Christmas Eve 1968, their spacecraft entered the lunar orbit, orbited the Moon 10 times, and returned to Earth on December 27th. The success of the Apollo 8 flight made it possible for the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the Moon just half a year later. The title of the book comes from the television broadcast on December 24, during which the astronauts, already in the Moon's orbit, read aloud the first few verses of the Book of Genesis.
The story of the Apollo 8 flight is shown on the backdrop of political events and social movements of the tumultuous late 1960s. The Soviet Union, having achieved the first artificial satellite flight on 10/4/1957 (Sputnik 1) and the first human flight to outer space on 4/12/1961 (Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1), wanted to cement its domination of space by being the first country to send their cosmonauts to the Moon. In his famous speech on the 25th of May, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the challenge and promised, before a special joint session of Congress, that the United States would safely put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The United States kept this promise by landing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon on July 20th, 1969 and successfully returning to Earth.
Explaining the political context of the U.S. space efforts and the portrayal of the late 1960s are, to me, the best features of the book, along with the technological and human behavior-related details of the Apollo 8 flight. The worst aspect, to me, is the excessive emphasis that the author puts on the astronauts' families and their activities.
Let's also mention an interesting tidbit. The computer that helped the astronauts navigate the Apollo 8 trajectory had barely 4 kilobytes of memory. Today's personal computers typically come with 16 gigabytes of memory, which is four million times more. Unfortunately, many people don't believe that a 4-kilobyte computer could do anything practical. Well, in the 1970s, I programmed on a PDP 11/04 computer with barely 32 kilobytes of memory and managed to run pretty big and advanced programs on it.
Robert Zimmerman's book tells the story of this phenomenal human endeavor, when three astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, "broke the bonds of earth" and successfully performed the "lunar orbit insertion." On Christmas Eve 1968, their spacecraft entered the lunar orbit, orbited the Moon 10 times, and returned to Earth on December 27th. The success of the Apollo 8 flight made it possible for the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the Moon just half a year later. The title of the book comes from the television broadcast on December 24, during which the astronauts, already in the Moon's orbit, read aloud the first few verses of the Book of Genesis.
The story of the Apollo 8 flight is shown on the backdrop of political events and social movements of the tumultuous late 1960s. The Soviet Union, having achieved the first artificial satellite flight on 10/4/1957 (Sputnik 1) and the first human flight to outer space on 4/12/1961 (Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1), wanted to cement its domination of space by being the first country to send their cosmonauts to the Moon. In his famous speech on the 25th of May, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the challenge and promised, before a special joint session of Congress, that the United States would safely put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The United States kept this promise by landing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon on July 20th, 1969 and successfully returning to Earth.
Explaining the political context of the U.S. space efforts and the portrayal of the late 1960s are, to me, the best features of the book, along with the technological and human behavior-related details of the Apollo 8 flight. The worst aspect, to me, is the excessive emphasis that the author puts on the astronauts' families and their activities.
Let's also mention an interesting tidbit. The computer that helped the astronauts navigate the Apollo 8 trajectory had barely 4 kilobytes of memory. Today's personal computers typically come with 16 gigabytes of memory, which is four million times more. Unfortunately, many people don't believe that a 4-kilobyte computer could do anything practical. Well, in the 1970s, I programmed on a PDP 11/04 computer with barely 32 kilobytes of memory and managed to run pretty big and advanced programs on it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review