The Moon landing

The story

Kennedy's promise

On 25 May 1961, in front of the American Congress, President John Kennedy made a promise that seemed almost impossible: “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. A few months earlier, Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space, and the United States felt it was behind the Soviet Union. At that moment, America had not yet sent anyone on a complete orbit around the Earth.

To keep the promise, the Apollo programme was born. It was a gigantic undertaking: about 400,000 people worked on it, engineers, technicians, workers and mathematicians, all over the country. They had to invent an enormous rocket, the Saturn V, taller than a thirty-storey building, and a vehicle able to land on the Moon and take off again. There were tragedies too: in 1967 a fire during a ground test killed three Apollo 1 astronauts. But the programme went on.

Three men, three seats

The crew of Apollo 11 was made up of three men: the commander Neil Armstrong, a former navy pilot and test pilot, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins. On 16 July 1969, from Florida, the Saturn V sent them into space with enormous power. After about three days they reached the Moon and went into orbit around it.

The spacecraft was divided into two parts. The command module, “Columbia”, would stay in orbit with Collins. The lunar module, “Eagle”, took Armstrong and Aldrin down to the surface. Collins stayed alone for twenty-one hours, 100 kilometres from the Moon, passing round the far side, where no radio signal could reach him: he was the most isolated man in history.

20 July 1969

The descent was full of problems. As the Eagle came down, the on-board computer, tiny compared with a phone today, kept sounding alarms because it was overloaded. Luckily, the engineers in Houston recognised the signal and told them to carry on. Then Armstrong saw that the planned landing spot was full of big boulders, and took the controls by hand to look for a smoother place. When he touched down, in the Sea of Tranquility, the dark plain that can be seen from Earth, there were only a few dozen seconds of fuel left in the tanks. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” he said.

A few hours later, Armstrong climbed down the ladder and put his foot on the lunar soil. It was 2:56 on 21 July, Greenwich time. He said: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” About twenty minutes later he was joined by Aldrin, who described the landscape as “magnificent desolation”. The two walked for about two and a half hours: they collected 21 kilograms of rocks, planted the American flag, set up scientific instruments and a mirror for measuring the distance to the Moon with a laser. They also left a plaque: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

Around the world, according to estimates, about six hundred million people followed the live broadcast on television: in Italy viewers stayed up all night, with the famous studio commentary by Tito Stagno and Ruggero Orlando. On 24 July the capsule with the three astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, near an American ship. As a precaution, the astronauts were kept in quarantine for three weeks, in case they had brought home lunar germs.

The other steps

After Apollo 11 there were five more missions that landed on the Moon, up to Apollo 17 in December 1972. In all, twelve men have walked on the Moon; nobody has landed there since, though in April 2026 the Artemis II mission flew around it with four astronauts.