

Hundreds of millions tuned in to radios or watched the grainy black-and-white images on TV as Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 , in one of humanity’s most glorious technological achievements. Police around the world reported crime came to a near halt that midsummer Sunday night.

Astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon alone in the mother ship while Armstrong proclaimed for the ages, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” was struck by the banding together of Earth’s inhabitants.

“How often can you get people around our globe to agree on anything? Hardly ever,” Collins, now 88, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “And yet briefly at the time of the first landing on the moon, people were united. They felt they were participants.”

Nearly 50 years after Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, part of the storied Apollo program, NASA officials announce they’re going back to the moon, permanently. (July 11)



“Think of how many times you hear people say, ‘Well, if we could land a man on the moon, we could certainly do blah, blah, blah,’” said NASA chief historian Bill Barry, who like many other children of the 1960s was drawn to math and science by Apollo. “It really, I think, has become a throwaway phrase because it gets used so often. It gets used so often because I think it had an impact.”





A vast majority of Earth’s 7.7 billion inhabitants were born after Apollo ended, including NASA’s current administrator, 44-year-old Jim Bridenstine, who is overseeing the effort to send humans back to the moon by 2024.

Back in 1961, NASA had barely 15 minutes of human suborbital flight under its belt — Alan Shepard’s history-making flight — when President John F. Kennedy issued the Cold War-era challenge of landing a man on the moon by decade’s end and returning him safely.


JFK’s challenge struck John Tribe, one of Cape Canaveral’s original rocket scientists, as impossible.

“I was used to facing up to impossible things. We were in the rocket business, so we were doing some weird and wonderful things back in those days. But, yes, it was an unbelievable announcement at that time,” he said. “It took a lot of guts.”


Cape Canaveral’s Bill Waldron remembers working “seven days a week, 12 hours a day, six months at a clip” on the lunar modules.

“You know how we got to the moon as fast as we did is because we burned people out,” said Homer Hickam, a retired NASA engineer whose autobiography, “Rocket Boys,” became the 1999 movie “October Sky.”

“Come to Huntsville, go to the cemetery, look at all those young men who are dead down there. They worked themselves to death,” Hickam said. “Or better yet, go to the courthouse and look at all the divorce records. They abandoned their families.”


