Apollo 11 launched at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969

Apollo 11 launched at 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, when a 363-foot Saturn V rocket lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin toward the first Moon landing.

More than a million spectators lined the Florida coast to watch, according to the Smithsonian, among them Vice President Spiro Agnew and former President Lyndon Johnson. The launch capped months of preparation, and the flight moved fast once it began:

• February 20: the giant first stage reaches Kennedy.
• May 20: the stacked rocket rolls out to Pad 39A.
• June 26: a full countdown rehearsal runs.
• July 16: liftoff, and within hours Apollo 11 is on its way to the Moon.
• July 17: a three-second main-engine burn makes the second of four scheduled course corrections.
• July 20: Armstrong and Aldrin land Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility while Collins orbits overhead.

What most retellings skip is how quickly launch day turned into lunar flight. Minutes after liftoff, the Saturn V placed Apollo 11 in an Earth orbit roughly 114 by 116 miles high. At 2 hours 44 minutes, after one and a half laps of Earth, the third stage reignited for a 5-minute, 48-second burn that threw the spacecraft toward the Moon. The command module Columbia then separated, turned around and docked with the lunar module Eagle, pulling it free of the rocket, and at 4 hours 40 minutes the spent third stage was sent away into orbit around the Sun.

The ascent was so accurate that after that three-second burn on July 17, NASA found the other three course corrections unnecessary. The whole mission lasted just over 8 days, ending with splashdown in the Pacific on July 24.