"Rocket Men" (Random House), by Robert Kurson

The first astronauts to orbit the moon ended their 1968 Christmas Eve television broadcast with a personal message for the people of Earth.

No one knew what the three Apollo 8 astronauts would say — not their worried wives 240,000 miles away nor the buttoned-down NASA engineers who meticulously planned every moment of the high-stakes mission to reach the moon before the Soviets.