“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” With these immortal words, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon on this day in 1969.
I remember watching the telecast along with half a billion people around the globe. My parents were especially emotional. They were born in the 1920s, an era when travel to the moon was the stuff of science fiction novels. To watch an American actually step onto the lunar surface was nearly overwhelming for them.
Armstrong and astronaut Buzz Aldrin explored the moon for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photos. They left behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of the landing module’s legs.
It reads: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Neil Armstrong will always be known as the “first man” on the moon, but he knew that the credit was not his alone. In an interview, he praised the “hundreds of thousands” of people behind the Apollo 11 project. “Every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault,’” he said.
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Armstrong’s statements are true of every significant endeavor. Our celebrity-obsessed culture glamorizes movie and television stars, but it’s the hundreds of names on the credits at the end of the show that make their work possible. When a…
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