"Man on the Moon!"

On July 20, 1969 the normal flow of news in the United States was interrupted as people stopped what they were doing and went to the nearest television they could find. This was the day that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin were to fulfill President John Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade and thus bring a dramatic end to the Space Race.

The Space Race had begun twelve years before in October 1957, when the Soviet Union had shocked the world by announcing that it had successfully sent the first satellite, named Sputnik, into orbit. Immediately afterwards, the Eisenhower administration scrambled to respond to this unexpected challenge. Many ordinary Americans and politicians feared that the moment represented a new and dangerous phase in the ongoing Cold War. As author Tom Wolfe later wrote some, including Speaker of the House John McCormack honestly believed, "The Soviets would set up space platforms from which they could drop nuclear weapons at will, like rocks from a highway overpass. ” For the next few years the United States and Soviet Union engaged in a game of one-upmanship, first with satellites then with sending men into orbit.

In his famous speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1962, President John Kennedy dramatically sharpened the goal of the race when he announced that he wanted a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He stated “The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time; and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind.” He added “In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation” Finally, he compared the moon to a new ocean. “… and only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new ocean of war.”

Kennedy saw to it that NASA’s budget was dramatically increased. He also helped create the Apollo Program in 1963. According to historian Paul Johnson, NASA ultimately spent $5 billion on Apollo. The sudden death of Kennedy in November of that year gave NASA even more reason to get to the moon. For the next four years, they launched ever bolder missions that went deeper into space than ever before. A one point they were doing a new mission every month. In December, 1968, Apollo 8 NASA astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell (who would later become famous as the commander of Apollo 13) gave NASA its biggest success up to that time when they orbited the moon and returned to earth. This helped set the stage for the moon landing seven months later. Ironically, both Armstrong and Aldrin were backup pilots for the mission and Mike Collins, who would be the third person on Apollo 11, had been chosen to be among those who would be on Apollo 8 but had to drop out because of surgery.

Armstrong and Aldrin sat in the Lunar Lander “The Eagle” on July 20, 1969, carefully hovering only a few thousand feet from the surface of the moon. Back on earth, news anchors Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley watched breathlessly as they heard the lowering altitude levels being read off. In Central Park, thousands of people braved rainy conditions to sit around a specially constructed screen. Thousands more watched in Disneyland, and in the vast JFK Airport thousands of people literally stopped what they were doing to watch the news reports on every available TV screen. Scenes likes these were repeated across the country and across the world. Later, it would be estimated that a record 500 million people watched the landing. In the Soviet Union and China, reaction was muted as all transmissions of the landing were blocked.

Even some Americans would not receive word of the landing for years. Bob Jones who was a P.O.W in North Vietnam in 1972. When during Communist radio broadcast to the prison about the evils of America, the speaker asked how the United States could continue bombings when "they had placed a plaque on the moon that said they came in peace for all mankind?" Jones recalled the reaction of the other men around him “Everyone said ‘On the moon?!’ and that was the first we knew about our moon landing, and their were cheers all the way through the camp” He added “After that, we’d point to the guards and the guards would come up and we would point to the moon say ‘U.S, U.S!’”

As the lander touched down, Armstrong uttered, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Engle has landed”. Houston responded “Roger Tranquility we copy on the ground. You gotta a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” The usually impartial Cronkite yelled out, “Man on the moon!” Overwhelmed, he took his glasses off and showing his own excitement could only say “A jeez, oh boy!” He then turned to veteran astronaut next to him and added “You outta say something because I’m speechless.” Few outside of Houston and Cape Kennedy realized how close the landing had come to failure.

During that famous descent, Armstrong had made so many course corrections that it nearly overloaded the small radar system, which NASA officials ordered be turned off. Fuel for the landing also began to run critically short, and at the last possible second Armstrong decided that he did not like the original landing site and to fly a little further than planned. Despite all of this, the landing was still a success. Flight Director Gene Kranz would later admit that by the time they landed there was only seventeen seconds of fuel left. In the White House, President Richard Nixon made an interstellar phone call to the astronauts when they walked on the moon a few hours later and congratulated them on the mission.

While Armstrong surely realized the historical significance when he stepped on the Moon a few hours later, he also must have felt lucky to be there. In his first ever space flight on Gemini 8 in 1966, one of the thrusters had misfired during the flight, sending the capsule in to a violent spin which only stopped when Armstrong shut down many of the vessal’s systems. In May, 1969, just weeks before Apollo 11 took off, Armstrong was almost killed when he was flying a Lunar Lander Research Vehicle which was designed to practice a moon landing. In mid-flight it malfunctioned, forcing Armstrong to eject.

Armstrong and Aldrin ultimately spent twenty-one hours on the moon before safely taking off and re-docking with Collins, who had been orbiting above in the command module Columbia, the part of the ship that would return them home. The three splashed down in the Pacific four days later and were picked up by the USS Hornet with Nixon on-board waiting to greet them.

Apollo 11 proved to be NASA’s high water mark, both in terms of public interest and in the sheer daring of the mission. While people continued to be sent to the moon and make new scientific discoveries, the glamor and novelty of the1969 trip was no longer there, and missions increasingly looked routine. Finally, in 1972, NASA officials announced that due to budget cutbacks Apollo 17 would be the last moon landing. The Russia space program suffered a similar fate as Soviet leaders were forced to eventually admit that they had been beaten to the moon and ordered their space program’s energies be redirected. In the coming years, both countries began working more on space stations and satellites such as Mir, Skylab, and the international space station, as well as the Hubble Telescope. But while the limits of manned flight appear to have been reached, no one who witnessed that first moon landing will ever forget the sense of pride and wonder they felt, and how it transcended the political and cultural divisions of the time, and for one brief moment united the world.