Apollo 11 made history 42 years ago yesterday, having ferried two U.S. astronauts from Earth to the moon . On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronauts Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first men to walk on the surface of the moon. And Armstrong uttered the historic words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
It marked a significant achievement in the space race that had developed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The pair had been locked in a decade-long push to put a man on the moon.
Aldrin and Armstrong’s moon walk was witnessed by more than a billion people worldwide, watching on television or listening to the radio, according to the Washington Post. Apollo 11 began its journey to the moon July 16, 1969. According to Time magazine, the Eagle Lunar Module landed on the moon on the afternoon of July 20, four days later. That night, a little before 11 p.m. Eastern time, Armstrong first set foot on lunar soil. The astronauts’ walk lasted a little more than two hours. During that time, they received a call from President Richard M. Nixon directly from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C.
The space shuttle Atlantis’s landed in Florida today and ends the last of 135 missions over 30 years that delivered the Hubble telescope into orbit and helped build the International Space Station.
The four astronauts, led by Commander Chris Ferguson touched down at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 5:56 a.m. after a 13-day mission.