One Small Step

At 10:56 PM Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong placed his left boot onto the surface of the Moon. The print it left in the lunar dust is still there -- no wind, no rain, no erosion. It will remain for millions of years. That footprint is the most permanent thing any human has ever made.

Four days earlier, Apollo 11 had launched from Cape Kennedy. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins rode controlled combustion into orbit, then fired engines to escape Earth's gravity. The descent did not go smoothly. The lunar module's computer aimed for boulders. Alarms sounded. Armstrong took manual control, flying sideways, searching for flat ground. With less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining, he found a clear patch. Aldrin radioed Houston: "The Eagle has landed."

Armstrong opened the hatch and backed down the ladder. Six hundred million people watched on television. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." He meant to say "a man." Either way, the sentence became canonical. Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later. Together they spent two and a half hours on the surface, collecting 47 pounds of rock samples. Aldrin called the landscape "magnificent desolation."

bootprint on the moon, apollo 11 mission. source: wikimedia commons

Twelve people have walked on the Moon. All went between 1969 and 1972. No one has been back. The program ended not because the technology failed but because the funding did. Armstrong left NASA in 1971, avoided the spotlight, and never capitalized on his fame. When he died in 2012, his family suggested people honor him by looking at the Moon and giving it a wink. The footprint remains. We went there once. The question is whether we decide it matters enough to go again.