Do you remember? It was late afternoon on July 20, 1969. Many Baby Boomers had just come home from school to find their mothers staring at the TV, transfixed. Grainy black-and-white photos flickered across the matte screen, accompanied by snatches of speech and a lot of static noise. And Mom called out ecstatically, “Look, honey! We’re landing on the moon!”

Some 600 million people are estimated to have been watching live in living rooms around the world that day, when Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission left the lunar module Eagle, followed by Buzz Aldrin, for the first-ever walk on the moon. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said as his feet sank into the dust on the moon’s surface – not knowing that this sentence would go on to be as famous as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.”

The astronauts spent just under 22 hours in Mare Tranquillitatis, the “Sea of Tranquility,” a crater 835 kilometers wide. Meanwhile, the third man, Michael Collins, held down the fort in orbit on the command module, Columbia. When the mission was completed the next day, with a picture-perfect landing in the Pacific, the three men had achieved the task that John F. Kennedy had set for his nation in 1961: sending a person to the moon and safely back home to Earth before the decade was out. Read more here