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“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These famous words were uttered by Neil Armstrong as he made history as the first man to walk on the moon.

The year was 1969 and the United States was determined to be the first nation to successfully land on and explore the moon’s surface. An estimated 600 million viewers were glued to their television sets to witness Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins make this historical journey. On July 16, 1969, these three courageous astronauts blasted off in the spacecraft Apollo 11. They traveled through space for four days before they neared the surface of the moon.

When they finally reached the moon’s gravitational field, Armstrong and Aldrin strapped themselves into the lunar module named Eagle that was to transport them from their Spacecraft onto the surface of the moon. The two astronauts then launched Eagle from Apollo 11 and headed towards the surface of the moon. Suddenly, the two astronauts realized that Eagle was not going to land on the predicted landing spot. They soon discovered that they were above a field of large boulders on the surface of the moon. They were running out of fuel and had to land soon!

Armstrong took control and successfully landed Eagle in a smooth patch among the boulders with only 17 seconds of fuel to spare. At that moment, the world rejoiced that the “The eagle has landed”. On July 20, 1969 at 10:56 PM EDT, Armstrong took the first steps onto the dusty surface of the moon. With only a little over 2 hours of exploration time on the moon they quickly began to observe the surface and radio their findings back to the scientists at NASA. They first noticed that the gravitational pull on the moon was much more pleasant than it is on earth. On the moon, the gravitational pull is only 1/6 of the gravitational pull that exists on Earth. This allowed them to take big leaps into the air and caused their heavy 360 pound backpacks (earth weight) to weigh only 60 pounds on the moon! They also reported that when they kicked dust with their boots every grain of dust landed at almost the exact same distance away. The two astronauts then placed an American flag on the surface of the moon and continued to collect moon dust and rocks to bring back to earth.

After about two hours of exploring the surface of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin rejoined with Collins in Apollo 11 and released the Eagle module which crashed down onto the surface of the moon. The three astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on July 24. The three astronauts then spent 18 days in quarantine in case they had been contaminated by any lunar microbes. When they were released from quarantine they became aware of the mass media coverage of their journey. Shocked by the attention and extreme media coverage of their trip to the moon, Aldrin whispered to Armstrong, “Neil, we missed the whole thing.”