Apollo 11 Heroes Return: NYC Ticker Tape Parade

Three weeks of quarantine in a converted Airstream trailer ended on August 13, 1969, and Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins stepped out to discover they had become the most famous human beings on Earth. New York City threw them the largest ticker tape parade since the end of World War II, with an estimated four million people lining the streets of lower Manhattan to cheer the men who had walked on the Moon less than a month earlier. The quarantine had been NASA's precaution against the possibility, however remote, that the astronauts had brought back lunar pathogens. The three men spent their isolation in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, undergoing medical tests, debriefings, and the tedious work of documenting every detail of their mission. Scientists monitored moon rock samples for signs of biological activity. None was found, and on August 10, the astronauts were released. The celebration that followed was deliberately spectacular. President Richard Nixon hosted a state dinner in Los Angeles on the evening of the parade, where he presented each astronaut with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The dinner was attended by members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, governors from all 50 states, and ambassadors from 83 countries. Nixon, keenly aware of the propaganda value of the achievement, used the occasion to frame the Moon landing as a triumph for all humanity, even as the Space Race had been driven by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The parade and its surrounding events marked the high-water mark of public enthusiasm for the Apollo program. Within three years, NASA's budget would be slashed, three planned lunar missions would be canceled, and the final Moon landing would take place in December 1972. Armstrong, famously private, largely retreated from public life. But on that August day, the streets of New York belonged to three men who had done what no human beings had ever done before.