Hungerford Arcade – Unit 46
Hungerford Arcade send our congratulations to Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and everyone at NASA on the 50th anniversary of not just landing on the moon, but actually walking on the moon. I remember it well with everyone excitedly glued to the television screens watching this unique event live, as it happened. That also was a remarkable feat as it was beamed live around the world.
After being sent to the Moon by the Saturn V’s third stage, the astronauts separated the spacecraft from it and travelled for three days until they entered lunar orbit. Armstrong and Aldrin then moved into Eagle and landed in the Sea of Tranquility. The astronauts used Eagle‘s ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Mike Collins in the command module. They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled the ship out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits on a trajectory back to Earth. They returned to Earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 after more than eight days in space.
Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface was broadcast on live TV to a worldwide audience. He described the event as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
NASA/Apollo 11 [Public domain]
Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
