This Day in American History: Apollo 11 Launches
57 years ago today, three Americans strapped themselves to the most powerful machine humans had ever built and rode it toward the Moon.
At 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, a 363-foot Saturn V rocket thundered off Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 11 mission. It was America's answer to a promise President Kennedy had made eight years earlier: land a man on the Moon and bring him home safely before the decade was out.
Four days after launch, on July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin touched the lunar module Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility while Collins orbited overhead in the command module. Armstrong's first step onto the surface a few hours later became one of the most watched moments in human history, broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, collecting lunar samples and setting up scientific experiments before rejoining Collins and heading home. All three astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on July 24.
It remains the single greatest engineering and human achievement of the 20th century -- built on American ingenuity, American risk-taking, and an American refusal to lose a race it decided it was going to win.
Also on this day:
1779 -- Brigadier General "Mad" Anthony Wayne leads a daring midnight bayonet assault that captures the British fort at Stony Point, New York.
1790 -- Congress designates a site along the Potomac River as the permanent seat of the U.S. government, land that would become Washington, D.C.
1862 -- David G. Farragut becomes the first rear admiral in the history of the U.S. Navy.
1945 -- The U.S. detonates the world's first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, ushering in the atomic age.
1951 -- J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" is published.
One giant leap, made possible by a country that still believed it could do impossible things.
Source: NASA, HISTORY.com
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