Moon Landing - July 20th, 1969
Sean Davis
Sending astronauts to the moon origins started in an appeal President Kennedy made to the Congress on May 25th, 1961: "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." At the time, the US was trailing the Soviet Union in space developments, making JFK's proposal welcome. In 1966, NASA conducted their first unmanned Apollo mission, by testing the structural integrity of the proposed launch vehicle and spacecraft combination. Later on January 27th, 2967, a manned launch pad test of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket was set to flames when a fire broke out killing three astronauts. The next manned Apollo mission (7) was in 1968, when NASA sent orbited Earth and successfully tested many of the systems needed for a moon journey, later in the same year, Apollo 8 took three astronauts to the dark side of the moon and back. In 1969, Apollo 9 and 10 were tested preparing for a scheduled moon landing in July.
On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 took off from the Kennedy Space Center with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins aboard. After 76 hours of traveling over 240,000 miles, Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module and made his way down, a television camera attached to the craft recorded his progress and beamed the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of millions watched in great anticipation. When Armstrong stepped off the lander and planted his foot on the surface of the moon, he claimed to say "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Later, Aldrin joined him as the planted down a US flag and ran scientific tests.
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| Moon Landing - Apollo 11 |
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