Was Apollo 8 supposed to land on the moon or was it just scheduled to orbit it?
Just orbit it. For me, Apollo 8 was the most spestacular of all the Apollo missions including the ones that landed on the Moon.Apollo 8 was the first mission to take humans to the Moon and back. An important prelude to actually landing on the Moon was testing the flight trajectory and operations for getting there and back. Apollo 8 did this and acheived many other firsts including the first manned mission launched on the Saturn V, first manned launch from NASA’s new Moonport, first pictures taken by humans of the Earth from deep space, and first live TV coverage of the lunar surface. Apollo 8 was the first manned voyage to a celestial body. Its three-man crew of Mission Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon. The mission also involved the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket, and was the second manned mission of the Apollo Program. Originally planned as a low-earth orbi
