Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, from NASA at nasa.gov.

Today marks the anniversary of humankind’s first steps on the moon. On July 20, 1969, the world held its collective breath as Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface. Television had just gone global a few days earlier when COMSAT achieved world coverage via Intelsat on July 1. More than 500 million people witnessed Armstrong making history as he spoke these famous words: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” With advances in aerospace including Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies (www.spacex.com) and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic (www.virgingalactic.com), the future is seemingly boundless. To what purposes should space exploration be dedicated? To read the original New York times report of the NASA’s success, please see:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0720.html#article

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.