Today In History

One Giant Step for Mankind The Luner Module “Eagle” landed on the Moon at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969 at 4:18 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong realized that they were heading into a field of boulders on the northeast shoulder of a crater the size of a football field. Drama was the last thing that any one had wanted. A warning light was telling him he had less than 60 seconds of fuel left, but they were close now and it was just a matter of easing themselves down. Forty seconds had passed since the sixty-second warning, and Armstrong proclaimed "The Eagle Has Landed." For the astronauts, the landing had been the big moment of the mission. But, for the waiting world, the big moment was still to come - the first footstep. Armstrong stood on the pad for a moment or two, testing the soil with the tip of his boot before he made the epochal "small step" proclaiming "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." With only a short time at their disposal, he and Aldrin raised an American Flag, gathered forty-seven pounds of samples, and took about one hundred color photographs. Finally they got themselves back into the spacecraft for a safe return to earth.