Apollo 11 launched on its way to the Moon
On this day · 16 July 1969
On a July morning in 1969, a 363-foot rocket lifted three astronauts toward humanity's first landing on another world.
At 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, a 363-foot Saturn V rocket thundered off Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard sat three men: commander Neil Armstrong, command module pilot Michael Collins, and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin.
The launch was nearly flawless. Engineers logged only two minor, correctable glitches before the rocket cleared the tower and arced out over the Atlantic, beginning a four-day coast toward the Moon.
The payoff came on July 20, when Armstrong and Aldrin set the lunar module Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility while Collins orbited overhead aboard Columbia. It was the first time humans had reached the surface of another world.
Eight years after the United States first put a man in space, three of its citizens were on their way to the Moon.
Apollo 11 turned a national goal, set by President Kennedy in 1961, into a fact of history.
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