On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong spoke his historic words to a crowd of quite nearly everyone within view of a television. 50 years ago today, after a 4-day trip, Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon.
Humans have done some amazing things throughout history; far too many things to even try to list. But the one achievement that I think stands far above them all, was sending a manned rocket in the direction of our nearest satellite 240K miles away, depositing two of its passengers on the surface of that object and then bringing them all home. The accomplishment itself was not only impressive, but it also massively inspired pretty much the entire world.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins were incredibly brave to do something that we didn't even know could be done. They strapped into the 11th iteration of the Apollo launch, with some very hard lessons learned in the previous 10 launches. The three of them, and everyone else that worked on the Apollo program, are true heroes. They showed all of us that, if we put our minds to it, we can turn science fiction into science fact.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -JFK (Sept 12, 1962)
It took just under that decade, and Kennedy wasn't there to see it come to pass, but we did it! It truly was a giant leap for all of mankind. And it was all done with less computing power than a RaspberryPi has.
