Forty years ago, on July 20, 1969, a spacecraft from Earth, just one small part of a large rocket that had lifted off from Florida four days earlier, touched down on the moon in a region called the Sea of Tranquity. Officially designated the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM, and knicknamed the Eagle, the craft had separated from the Command Module, called Columbia, and then carried two American astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface. The mission was Apollo 11, the culmination of eight years of effort by numerous Americans, with the goal of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth, as envisioned in a speech by President John F. Kennedy. Only it was not one man, but two (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin), with a third (Michael Collins) remaining aboard the Command Module in lunar orbit.

Around 8:00 that evening, in a town in western NY, a small boy sat in front of his family’s TV, intently watching this:


Yes, that small boy was yours truly. During the previous year, I had watched the TV coverage of the Apollo launches, usually the broadcasts anchored by the now-recently-deceased Walter Cronkite. I even vaguely remembered one or two of the earlier Gemini missions. But this was the most important mission of all, the one that would put two men on the moon.

As you would expect for a small boy, 8:00 PM was pretty close to my bedtime. Within an hour of watching the Eagle land, I was asleep. But later, my dad woke me up, along with my brother, with whom I shared the bedroom. It seemed like 10:30 or 11:00 PM. We all went back downstairs to the TV and watched Armstrong take those first steps. My brother and I were fortunate that our dad wanted us to witness history.

Armstrong’s first words standing on the lunar surface, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, sounded somewhat confusing. The word “man”, without an article, and the word “mankind” have the same basic meaning, the human race as a whole. How could something be both a “small step” and a “giant leap” for all humanity? It would make more sense if the article “a” were included before “man”. As it later turned out, he did say “a man”, but the “a” was spoken so softly as to be barely audible, if at all. Thus, his statement as intended was profound. It was a small step for a man to step off the LEM and directly onto lunar soil, but a giant leap of achievement for the human race, whom he represented.

Sometime during the 1990’s a friend told me a story about Armstrong and someone who asked him, after the Apollo 11 mission was over, what he had been thinking about up there on the moon. Armstrong’s answer, according to my friend’s story, was “Go, Ziggy, Go!” Armstrong then explained that Ziggy had been his high school classmate. Ziggy was a very successful athlete, and quite popular. But there was one girl he had asked out several times without success. After having enough of Ziggy’s advances, she told him, “I’ll go out with you when a man walks on the moon.” Whether Armstrong’s walk on the moon got Ziggy his date with this girl, my friend did not say. If anyone knows more about this story, or if even if it’s true or instead an urban legend, please feel free to let us know.

UPDATE: The Big Picture at Boston.com remembers Apollo 11.