The Apollo 8 mission was equal parts fearless and reckless, ingenious and impulsive. The risks were substantial: The astronauts were flying a spacecraft that had killed a three-man crew in a launchpad fire just a year earlier; their rocket was unproven and had failed its most recent test flight; and they were facing an abbreviated training period for the unprecedented journey. . Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: In just 16 weeks, the United States would launch humankind’s first flight to the moon and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders signed on immediately.

Apollo 8 was the groundbreaking mission that produced the iconic earthrise photo that is credited with jump-starting the climate change movement; the mission that made all of the other moon missions possible, including the Apollo 11 moon landing; and the mission that climaxed most poignantly on Christmas Eve, when the astronauts pointed their camera out the small window of their spacecraft and beamed images of the lunar horizon crawling below and the Earth hanging in the distance to 3.5 billion people, forever changing the way we view our planet.

Blast off into a world of wonders that demands to be rediscovered. With the help of extensive interviews with the three astronauts and many other principals involved in the mission, as well as oral histories, NASA documents, and the mission audio archive, Jeffrey Kluger, co-author of Apollo 13 and veteran science reporter,  re-creates the drama suspense and triumph of this historic event in the must-read Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon  (Henry Holt and Co., $30).

The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Kluger—Jim Lovell’s co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13—can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet.