Astronauts Anders, Borman and Lovell: 1968
As its 1968 Men of the Year, TIME chose the three Apollo 8 astronauts, who had just completed man's first lunar flight, a 590,000-mile voyage to the moon and back. Colonel Frank Borman, a fighter pilot in the Air Force and later a test pilot in aerospace research, had previous experience in space exploration, having commanded Gemini 7 in a two-week flight orbiting the Earth in 1965. He went on to become president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Eastern Air Lines.
Captain James A. Lovell, Jr., a Navy man, was a veteran of two previous space missions. He had accompanied Borman on the Gemini 7 flight and had made a second Earth-orbital flight in 1966. Air Force Major William A. Anders was promoted to the rank of colonel by President Lyndon Johnson while still en route to Houston via Hawaii at the end of the flight. He served as systems engineer on the lunar flight and was the first of the scientifically oriented astronauts.
Researched by Joan Levinstein, the Time Inc. Research Center