In late 1968, NASA gambles on a mission nobody had planned a year earlier: sending three men not into orbit but all the way to the moon, without first testing the lunar module. The decision comes after the Apollo 1 fire killed its entire crew and a string of unmanned flights suffered mechanical failures, leaving mission manager George Low to argue for a bolder flight plan to keep the program on schedule against the Soviets. Interviews with Apollo 8 crew members, including chief pilot James Lovell, sit alongside accounts from their wives, mission control engineers, and journalist Walter Cronkite, who covered the six-day flight for a national audience. Archival footage follows the December 1968 launch, the 230,000-mile trip outward, and the crew's Christmas Eve reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon, broadcast live back to Earth. Joe Morton narrates. The film treats the mission as both an engineering gamble and a morale play for a country in the middle of 1968's upheavals, closing on the safe splashdown that made the later Apollo 11 landing possible.