The 50th Anniversary Of The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Fifty years ago on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." At a distance of 240,000 miles away back down on Earth, more than a billion people listened in wonder as Armstrong and his colleague Buzz Aldrin performed this amazing feat for humankind.

Astronaut Edwin
NASA/Liaison
NASA/Liaison

America's efforts to land a man on the moon started during the Cold War. A defining moment of this era was the Space Race, in which the United States and the Soviet Union were in hot competition to achieve firsts in space developments. On May 25, 1961, then-President John F. Kennedy declared to a joint session of Congress: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration employed an international team of scientists and engineers, who worked tirelessly for five years before conducting the first unmanned Apollo mission in 1966. The following year, NASA experienced a setback when a fire broke out during a manned launch-pad test that took the lives of three astronauts.

Still, NASA forged on with their mission and conducted Apollo 7 in 1968, the first successful orbit around Earth that also tested the sophisticated systems necessary to conduct a moon landing. By May 1969, three astronauts of Apollo 10 took the spacecraft around the moon for a dry run to prepare for the official landing mission.

The following July, Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center, manned by Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr., and Michael Collins. It took them 76 hours to travel the 240,000 miles to the lunar orbit on July 19. The next day, the lunar module Eagle dislodged from the command module with Armstrong and Aldrin inside. Within two hours, Armstrong radioed mission control in Houston saying, "The Eagle has landed," as they touched down on the surface of the moon.

Armstrong was the first to set foot on the moon and Aldrin joined him around 15 minutes later. They took photographs of the terrain, conducted simple scientific tests, and planted an American flag as well as a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon–July 1969 A.D.–We came in peace for all mankind." Apollo 11 returned home safely four days later.