This year we celebrate what may be the greatest achievement in human exploration.
We walked on another world on the moon.
I was 13, just like you hear, I was on my knees. I really was.
Watching a General Electric black-and-white television, and I remember the smell.
The smell of hot electronics. And although we had
the Vietnam War, we had this
Violence associated with civil rights, guys getting assassinated, they were getting shot in the streets, tear gas,
the suppression of people trying to just get the right to vote and so on. So there were a lot of problems. Even
with all that going on. There was this overall
optimism. People in the US, people all over the world were optimistic.
The concern about these guys landing on the moon was really for the adults.
I was a kid and I just knew these guys were gonna pull it off.
I knew NASA would pull it off because of this optimism and the sacrifices that had been made.
And after or as these guys walked on the moon I thought, "Man, I want to be an aerospace engineer."
I became an aerospace engineer and now I'm the CEO of the Planetary Society and that was not a path that I chose
It was a path that
just opened for me because of this extraordinary achievement on the Moon.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
So that's just my story but hundreds of millions of people around the world watched it and so if you want to read more stories
Please go to planetary.org/apollo50 and people from all over the world have contributed their story of
what the Apollo 11 landing meant to them.
