On December 21, 1968, 50 years ago today, the crew of Apollo 8 launched atop a Saturn V rocket on the first mission to fly to the moon. The crew never landed, but their Earthrise photo became iconic, their Christmas Eve dispatches from the moon captivated millions of people listening across the globe, and, a few short months later, humanity would land on the lunar surface.
As the first flight to the moon and back, Apollo 8 lead humanity on a great journey of exploration. But as ambitious as the Apollo program was, the idea of flying to the moon didn't come in a vacuum, and the dream of visiting the moon significantly predates President John F. Kennedy's speech at Rice University, in which he proclaimed, “we choose to go to the moon.”
One of the first lunar travel stories came in 79 AD from Lucian's True History, in which a whirlwind takes a group of travelers to the moon, dropping them into the midst of an interplanetary war. By 1657, Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire Comique de La Lune envisioned travel by multi-stage rocket to the moon.
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