47 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Landed On the Moon (foxnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: At this point 47 years ago we had begun our orbit around the Moon," writes Buzz Aldrin in a tweet. Today, Wednesday, July 20th, 2016, marks the 47th anniversary of when NASA astronauts landed on the moon for the very first time. Fox News reports: "Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off from Earth on a massive Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969. Four days later, the Eagle module landed on the surface with Aldrin and Armstrong inside; Collins stayed behind in the orbiting Columbia craft. Millions of people back on Earth watched, captivated, as Armstrong was the first down the ladder, then uttered his now-famous line: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' The astronauts eventually returned to Earth, splashing down four days later in the Pacific. On the moon, an American flag and a plaque that read, in part, 'We came in peace for all mankind,' remained." To this day, only 12 people have ever walked on the moon. Hopefully, that number will increase within the next decade. NASA is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1 lander's arrival on Mars. Viking 1 was the first American craft to land on the red planet on July 20, 1976.

Comments

Re:The computer was slower than an Arduino and

[Oxygen99]

And you can read the source on github.

Re:Who gives a shit?

[TheRaven64]

Or you could have just used the ISO standard format, which also has the nice property that it's easy to sort: yyyy-mm-dd. ISO dates are big endian. UK dates are little endian. US dates are VAX byte order.

The Russian Moon Program [Re: The Finest Day....]

[Geoffrey.landis]

No, the great achievement really was putting people on the moon, and the enormous technical, industrial, and organizational effort that took....
At least one major power other tried and failed. It wasn't a given.

Tried and failed ?? Who was that ?

The Soviets once tried to work with the US on manned space missions to the moon but gave up.

A significant difference between the Soviet and the American space programs is that the American program was done in public, with failures as well as successes in the public eye, while the Soviet program was done in secret, with missions not announced until they succeeded.

After the Apollo successes, the Soviets let it be assumed that they didn't have a moon program at all; they never tried to beat the Americans. It was only years later that the Soviet society started to embrace openness ("glasnost", in Russian), and the full history of the Soviet manned moon program was slowly revealed.

They did have a manned moon program, and a big one.

* http://www.wired.com/2010/10/r...

* http://fas.org/spp/eprint/lind...

* http://www.popularmechanics.co...

The Soviets could have sent a man there but they realised it was too expensive for the result

As it turns out, no, they could not. They tried, but failed.
Ultimately, they gave up after their large booster, the N-1, failed for the third time. It was a key element in their lunar program, but they never got it to launch successfully. (By this time the Americans had already landed on the moon, so at best they would have come in second in a race with two competitors.

so they put their money into robotic exploration...

Or, more specifically, they made the announcement that this is what they were after all along. But it wasn't.