Left to right: Lovell, Anders, Borman 

The crew of Apollo 8: Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell.

Apollo 8 was the second crewed mission in the Apollo space program.  After the 
launch on December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 took three days to reach the Moon. It
orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which time the crew made a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, reading the first 10 verses from the Bibles Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. The successful mission of Apollo 8 paved the way for Apollo 11 and the fulfillment of President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end
of the 1960s.

The Apollo 17 command module, with astronauts Eugene A.Cernan, Ronald E. Evans
and Harrison H. Schmitt aboard,reentered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down
safely in the Pacific Ocean at 2:25 PM, 4 miles from the recovery ship, USS
Ticonderoga and about 350 nautical miles southeast of the Samoan Islands,
thus concluding the final lunar landing mission in the Apollo program.

Apollo 17 insignia

Apollo 17 crew from Left to right: Schmitt, Cernan (seated), Evans

 
Gemini 7 crew from left: James A. Lovell, Jr and Frank F. Borman

Gemini 7 (officially Gemini VII) was the 4th manned flight in NASA’s Gemini program,
the 12th manned American flight and the 20th spaceflight of all time. The crew of
Frank F. Borman, II and James A. Lovell, Jr (above) spent nearly 13 2/3 days in
space for a total of 206 orbits, and were joined on orbit by the Gemini-6A flight
which performed the first rendezvous maneuver of manned spacecraft.

Above picture taken during the rendezvous of Gemini 6 and 7

Pioneer 10  is a robotic space probe launched on March 2, 1972 by an Atlas rocket
from Cape Canaveral, Florida and reached it’s destination on Dec. 3, 1973. This was
the completion of the first interplanetary mission to Jupiter, and became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System. During the mission, the planets asteroid belt was studied by on-board instruments along with the environment around Jupiter, solar wind, cosmic rays were also studied by the probe. Communication has been lost since January 23, 2003 because of power constraints due to its distance from Earth.