Moon Landing

The Moon landing was the first time humans walked on the surface of the Moon. It happened on July 20, 1969. Two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, stepped out of their spacecraft and onto the dusty gray ground. A third astronaut, Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the Moon. The mission was called Apollo 11, and it was run by the American space agency NASA.

The trip was part of a larger contest called the Space Race. For years, the United States and the Soviet Union had been racing to do big things in space. The Soviets had launched the first satellite and sent the first person into orbit. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that the United States should land a person on the Moon before the end of the decade. Almost nobody knew how to do it yet. Apollo 11 met that goal with five months to spare.

The spacecraft launched from Florida on July 16, 1969, on top of a huge rocket called the Saturn V. That rocket was 363 feet tall, taller than a 30-story building. It burned millions of pounds of fuel in a few minutes to push the astronauts away from Earth. The trip to the Moon took about three days. The Moon is roughly 239,000 miles from Earth, far enough that you could line up nearly 30 Earths between them.

Landing was the scary part. Armstrong had to fly the lander by hand in the last minute because the computer was steering toward a field of boulders. He set it down with only seconds of fuel left. When he stepped onto the surface, he said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." About 600 million people watched on television, the biggest live audience the world had ever seen.

Armstrong and Aldrin spent about 21 hours on the Moon. They collected 47 pounds of rocks, planted an American flag, and set up science experiments. One experiment, a mirror that bounces laser beams back to Earth, is still being used by scientists today.

NASA sent five more successful Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. Twelve people in total have walked on the Moon, all of them American men. No human has been back since Apollo 17 in December 1972. NASA is now working on a program called Artemis to return astronauts to the Moon, this time including women and people of color. The footprints left by the Apollo astronauts are still up there, undisturbed, because the Moon has no wind or rain to erase them.