December 18, 2020
Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency relaxes on board the International Space Station on December 25, 2014.
NASA
On December 25, 1968, the staff of mission control at NASA received confirmation of a long-rumored and hotly debated phenomenon. Over the crackle of a transmission coming from space on Christmas morning, astronaut Jim Lovell disclosed what must have been one of the most closely-kept space secrets of the entire program:
“Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
Misers may doubt the veracity of Lovell’s eyewitness account of a corpulent bearer of space gifts, but the message was a fitting one. The voyage of Apollo 8 to circle the moon marked the first time astronauts had spent the holiday outside the confines of Earth. That milestone was due in large part to the efforts of John F. Kennedy, the late president who had vowed that America would be the first country to land on the moon—and that we'd do it before the end of the decade. As the 1960s drew to a close, NASA was still struggling with the Apollo lunar module that would allow astronauts to touch down on the moon’s surface. They opted to send the crew of the Apollo 8—Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders—to orbit the moon instead.