Today is the day of the moon. Here’s what you need to know about it

They call it “the day of the moon.” It’s an easy explanation why today, July 20, was the day humans first set foot on the moon.

While today we can say that people have lived in space, continuously, since the year 2000, that was not the case in 1969. We would have been to space. We have tested the systems.

We have not set foot on the moon.

It is easy today to lose sight of the scale of this deal. KCRA had 3 station IDs. Those 5-second interstitials that were shown before the program went back on air with the Apollo 11 launch and Eagle’s lunar landing.

Millions of people – not only in the United States but all over the world – watched with anticipation as Neil Armstrong was about to set foot – live – on the planet’s only satellite. During the launch of Sputnik, it returned to Earth long before the lunar missions were sent.

But looking at the lunar missions, it’s important to see what they did to try to get to the moon itself.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced in a speech that we would land a man on the moon and return before the decade was out. It was a grandiose advertisement given the fact that the Russians launched Sputnik – the world’s first artificial satellite – and also the first man in space. The United States has not yet had a program to compete with them on this scale.

Get past that even as you look at the fact that in 1961 – up to the point of planning moon missions – scientists didn’t know what would happen if we did. Earth on the moon. They launched spy satellites on the moon to study it and find a suitable landing site for the Apollo missions. They had concerns. One concern was that the moon could be hypersensitive, meaning a spacecraft landing on it could cause it to break apart. What was the roof made of? If they land, will the lunar module sink into the sand, killing all the astronauts? Even before the first Apollo missions were launched, scientists working with Boeing created self-developing film (think Polaroid) that would process on the satellite itself. Then they would send the images back to Earth, where the satellites would show up on the Kinescope and make new movies of the images, blow them up and take pictures of the moon.

Then Apollo came. It began tragically—a fire in the Apollo 1 command module killed Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee before it crashed to Earth. It will create the safety standards they have followed for the following tasks.

By the time I got to Apollo 11, it was worth noting what the astronauts faced. It may be an apocryphal story, but at one time astronauts were said to have said that going into space was like flying in a tin can built by the lowest bidder.

In fact, the Saturn V rocket was huge. On July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin had to climb to the top of a 281-foot rocket. The largest one ever built at that time. It weighed 6.2 million pounds and produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust. It was enough power, according to the National Archives, to power New York City for an hour and a half.

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As we remember the launch and landing, getting to the moon was grueling and difficult, and the lunar probe had to abort on the way down.

Armstrong himself thought long and hard about what he wanted to say as he set foot on the surface of the moon. What we remember is, “That’s one small step for man… one giant leap for mankind.” He was quoted as saying he wanted, or said, “One small step for A Man…a giant leap for mankind.”

As the United States prepares for another mission to the Moon, the first since the end of the Apollo mission—Apollo 17 in 1972—it’s worth remembering the people who got there first. Not just the three in the command module, but the scientists, the “steel-eyed rocket men” as they are called, who have brought the astronauts there.

It was an amazing undertaking using computers with less power than the phone you may be reading this very article in. Now, the technology is made possible by the scientific advances that put people on the moon for the first time on July 20, 1969.