One Small Step: Armstrong Walks on the Moon

Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder and pressed his boot into the lunar dust at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Time on July 20, 1969, becoming the first human being to stand on another world. Six hundred million people watched the grainy television transmission live, the largest audience for any single event in history up to that point. Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center four days earlier atop a Saturn V rocket, the most powerful machine ever built. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins rode 363 feet of controlled explosion into Earth orbit, then fired toward the Moon at 25,000 miles per hour. Collins remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface in the lunar module Eagle. The final minutes of descent nearly ended in disaster. Armstrong realized the computer was guiding Eagle toward a boulder-strewn crater and took manual control, skimming over the hazard while fuel ran critically low. Mission Control fell silent as the fuel gauge dropped below sixty seconds of hover time. When Aldrin called out "Contact light," indicating the landing probes had touched the surface, controllers erupted. Armstrong's first transmission from the Moon was characteristically understated: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Armstrong and Aldrin spent roughly two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, planting an American flag, collecting 47.5 pounds of rock and soil samples, and deploying scientific instruments. They spoke by telephone with President Nixon, took photographs that became defining images of the twentieth century, and bounded across the surface in the one-sixth gravity. Collins, orbiting alone above them, later described himself as "not the least bit lonely" despite being the most isolated human in existence. The crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 and spent three weeks in quarantine. Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy's 1961 challenge to land a man on the Moon before the decade ended, and it did so with five months to spare.