One Small Step: Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon

At 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969, a spindly four-legged craft named Eagle settled onto the basalt plain of the Sea of Tranquility, and for the first time a machine built by humans rested on the surface of another world. Six and a half hours later, at 02:56 UTC on 21 July, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and pressed his boot into the lunar regolith, calling it “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” [1]

The race that put a man on the Moon

Apollo 11 was the culmination of a national project announced eight years earlier. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out — a goal set against the backdrop of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, which had already orbited the first satellite and the first human. [2] The Apollo program absorbed the work of some 400,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians and consumed a budget that, at its peak, exceeded four percent of the federal outlay.

Three men, two who walked

The crew were all veterans of the earlier Gemini program: commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface, Collins remained alone in the command module Columbia, orbiting the Moon and passing repeatedly behind it, out of radio contact with Earth and with his crewmates. [1]

Twenty-one hours on the surface

Armstrong and Aldrin spent about 21.5 hours on the lunar surface, of which roughly two and a half hours were spent outside the module. They planted an American flag, collected about 21.5 kilograms of lunar rock and soil for return to Earth, deployed scientific instruments, and spoke by radio with President Richard Nixon. [2] A plaque left on the descent stage read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

What it meant

An estimated 600 million people — a fifth of the world’s population at the time — watched or listened to the landing, making it one of the most widely shared events in human history. [3] Apollo 11 fulfilled Kennedy’s pledge with months to spare and stands as the moment a centuries-old human aspiration, to set foot on the Moon, passed from myth into accomplished fact.