Moon Landing History

The early 1960’s saw the United States in a cold war with Russia. This was a politically volatile time where everything was a race between the US and Russia. In 1957 the Russians launched the satellite Sputnik and put the US in a position of playing catch-up to the Russian space program. Delivering yet another blow to the US space program the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth in 1961. In May of 1961 President John F. Kennedy petitioned congress for $7 billion to $9 billion dollars for the space race and to successfully send a man to the moon and bring him safely home. In roughly eight years, NASA was able to produce the desired results when on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”
Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, there were numerous programs that came before and even many missions in that specific program that were not slated for a lunar landing. Consequently, each mission previous to Apollo 11 provided engineers, doctors, machinists, and businessmen with more raw data to make new decisions, designs and understand limits than ever before. The significance of putting a man on the moon is astounding. The knowledge, the daring, the risk, all of it had to come together perfectly to be