Apollo 11's Launch

Thirty-eight years ago today, on an otherwise quiet Florida day, a thunderous event occurred. Thunderous in decibels, and thunderous in historical significance. For the first time in the history of the world, and possibly for the first time in the history of the universe, natives of one world were going to try to physically touch another.

Of course, they succeeded. The United States had gone literallly from nowhere in space to launching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins into a kind of immortality in just about eight years. That ranks with the greatest achievements of all time. It was accomplished in the climate of the Cold War. The U. S. under John Kennedy and the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev had tacitly agreed to compete in space to prove which system was strongest, in an attempt to avoid meeting on the battlefield. Something worked. Both leaders who started the Space Race were long gone by the launch of Apollo 11-- Kennedy dead, and Khrushchev deposed-- but the chain of events they started was about to reach a climax.