From “The Heron and the Astronaut,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s lyrical 1969 Life account of the Apollo 8 mission:

“At midnight, we decide to go out to the Cape to see the rocket lit up with searchlights for its final servicing. Already the roads approaching the Cape are full, the sides lined with cars, tents and trailers full of people spending the night on the beach to be in place for the early morning spectacle.

Even before we reach the Cape we see Apollo 8 miles away across the water, blazing like a star on the horizon. We journey toward it until we are only a mile or two distant. As we approach, it gets larger and brighter until it dominates the dark landscape, an incandescent tube, a giant torch with searchlights, focused on it and and beaming beyond over the heavens. The whole sky is arched with rainbows of light.

We climb out of the car and stand in the night wind, facing the source of light. Even at this distance we can see the rocket clearly, poised on its pad and gleaming white. The service structure, one half of its protective sheath, has been pulled away. Only the mobile launcher (the umbilical tower), that dark, bulky cranelike structure, stands beside it, dimmed by brilliance.

For the first time the rocket is alone, whole and free. It is no longer in sections, dwarfed by the mammoth assembly building or obscured by scaffolding. The thousands of details we witnessed this morning have been unified into a single shape. We cannot see, except as a dazzling whiteness, the glaze of frost that coats it due to the extreme cold of the liquid fuels it holds. There is just a wisp of vapor curling from one side like a white plume of breath in the darkness. All is simplified by distance and night into the sheer pure shape of flight, into beauty.”

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The Apollo 8 mission: