First Landing on the Moon

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Those are the historic words spoken on July 20, 1969, by Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Apollo 11’s historic voyage began at 9:32 a.m., on July 16, when Apollo 11 departed from Cape Kennedy and left Earth. It carried Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr.

After about four days in space, Armstrong and Aldrin, the second man on the moon, entered a lunar module, separated from the main space shuttle, and touched down on the Moon.

The men spent nearly 22 hours exploring the Moon before returning to their space shuttle and returning to Earth, approaching our planet at a speed of about 25,000 mph before re-entering the atmosphere. The Apollo 11 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, after an eight-day mission.

Armstrong and Aldrin did not just take a stroll around the moon before leaving. They conducted a number of experiments and collected samples from the Moon. Their work helped NASA make a number of discoveries, including that the youngest Moon rocks are virtually as old as the oldest Earth rocks. The rock ages range from about 3.2 billion years to nearly 4.6 billion years old.

The astronauts’ research also revealed that the Moon is lifeless—it contains no living organisms or fossils. The extensive testing revealed no evidence of life, past or present, among the samples that Armstrong and Aldrin collected, according to NASA’s Web site.

The mission was an unforgettable historic event. Apollo 11 fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the 1960s, a goal he expressed in 1961 and NASA achieved only eight years later.