One-sixth of all humanity watched two humans step onto another world.

One Small Step: Humanity Touches Another World

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, watched by 530 million people — one-sixth of all humanity.

At 4:17 PM EDT on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong reported four words to Mission Control in Houston: "The Eagle has landed." After 102 hours and 45 minutes of flight, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle had touched down in the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had just piloted to a manual landing while the guidance computer fired alarms — they were overloaded with data — and they had 30 seconds of landing fuel to spare when the engine cut out.

Six hours later, Armstrong descended the ladder of the Eagle and set his left boot on the lunar surface at 10:56 PM EDT. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" — he intended to say "one small step for a man" but dropped the article in the excitement of the moment, a fact he regretted for the rest of his life.

Buzz Aldrin joined him twenty minutes later, describing the landscape as "magnificent desolation." They spent 2 hours and 31 minutes on the surface, collecting 47.5 pounds of lunar rock and soil, deploying a solar wind collector, a laser ranging retroreflector, and a seismic experiment package.

Nearly 530 million people — at the time one-sixth of all humans alive — watched on television. In Times Square, st…

💡 Buzz Aldrin secretly took Communion on the lunar surface — the furthest from Earth any religious ceremony has ever been performed. NASA asked him not to publicize it.