USS Hornet (CV-12) 27 March 1967. She reached Japan exactly a month later and departed the Sasebo base on 19 May for the war zone. She operated in Vietnamese waters throughout the first half of 1967. "Hornet" recovered the astronauts from the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11, on 24 July 1969. President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard "Hornet" prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. The first steps on Earth of returning moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, are marked
Human spaceflight orbit on March 18, 1965. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) Dec 21–27, 1968, when the Apollo 8 mission took them to 10 orbits around the Moon and back. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space on July 25, 1984. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Eileen Collins was the first female shuttle pilot, and with shuttle mission STS-93 in 1999 she