The day before Christmas, 1968. The astronauts of Apollo 8 read from Genesis as they orbited the moon for the first time, crossing the dark side and into the brilliant light of the sun. The reading, broadcast to the world, not only expressed the wonder experienced by the astronauts and marked the historic moment: the first time humans had flown to the moon and looked back at Earth. Subsequently, an atheist group sued. The action that went nowhere, but on later missions astronauts were a little more circumspect about expressing purely Christian themes and readings.
