Excerpts from "The Eagle Has Landed," in Apollo Expeditions to the Moon

Published in 1975; available at NASA (Web site)

On July 16, 1969, the spacecraft Apollo 11 took off from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida, sending three American astronauts into space. Three days later, two of the astronauts, Neil Armstrong (1930–) and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. (1930–), became the first men to walk on the surface of the moon. Project Apollo—which had been born out of the Mercury Project that successfully sent manned capsules into orbit—proved to be one of the most successful endeavors in the history of the National...