"A splendid telling of an exciting tale... beautiful to behold."  - The Los Angeles TimesOn Christmas Eve 1968, one of the largest audiences in television history tuned in to an extraordinary sight: a live telecast of the Moon's surface as seen from Apollo 8, the first manned space flight to travel out to the moon. The Historic Journey captivated people around the world.  Many welcomed a technological triumph in space after a year marked by assasinations, riots, and war, but the mission's success was far from assured. The Apollo 8 astronauts had just four months to prepare for the risky lunar orbit, and catastrophic failure would have brought a halt to America's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. This definitive account of mankind's first journey away from earth's gravitational hold recounts the flight many consider to be NASA's most daring and important.   Interviews  with  Apollo 8 astronauts, their wives, mission control staff, and journalists take viewers inside the high-stakes space race of the late 1960s, with rare footage and audio. In this expanded  director's cut, the film reveals how a bold decision by NASA administrators put a struggling Apollo program back on track, and changed the way the earth was viewed forever.This film is an extended Director's Cut of "RACE TO THE MOON," originally broadcast as part of the PBS American Experience series in 2005, and re-released on public television as "EARTHRISE" for the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2013.  Reviewing its initial release, the Oregonian called it, "A skillful documentary... every bit as tense as Hanks and Howard's APOLLO 13."This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.