`That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon. He and fellow US astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins spent three days travelling 240,000 miles after Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy.
On July 21st, 1969, six-and-a-half hours after their lunar module (the Eagle) landed in the Sea of Tranquillity, Armstrong and Aldrin were finally able to make their momentous foray. The prints of their boots showed up clearly in the powdery surface of the Moon (Armstrong compared it to a desert). Some 600 million people watched the live broadcast, breathless as history was made.
Perhaps the only positive outcome of the Cold War was the space race, and the US and USSR spent the 1960s vying with each other for "firsts". At the start of the decade the USSR was the champion, sending the first man into space on April 12th, 1961. Yuri Gagarin (27) orbited the Earth at a height of 327 kilometres in a Vostok spacecraft, weighing 4.7 tonnes.
In 1957, Laika the dog had been sent into orbit by the Soviets. Laika, who became the first living creature in space, left Earth on November 3rd. After surviving in space with no ill-effects from acceleration or weightlessness, she died when oxygen in Sputnik 2 ran out (her journey was designed as a one-way ticket - today's animal rights activists would have had something to say about that). The US was not slow to follow. Nine months after Gagarin's journey, John Glenn became the first American in orbit. But the Soviets got in ahead of them again in 1963 when the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, went into orbit. American feminists complained that the Soviet Union was demonstrating a more enlightened attitude to women than the US.
The Soviets were still ahead in 1965 when Alexei Leonov became the first man to walk in space. Three months later, Edward H. White became the first American to do so. NASA suffered a disaster in 1967: White and two others were killed inside their spaceship when it exploded during ground testing. On Christmas morning in 1968 American cosmonauts read from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the Moon in Apollo 8.
President Kennedy's determination that the US should be the first to plant its flag on the Moon before the end of the decade was realised at a cost of $24 billion dollars.
As a result of the space explorations of the 1960s, the way we view the Earth underwent a fundamental shift. Suddenly it could be seen in its entirety: a finite orb that exists in relation to many other planets in a vast system. Photographs of the Earth seen from space created a mixed reaction of vulnerability and detachment; a sense that technology had reduced Earth's mystery to something all too commonplace and familiar. From this perspective, it seems no accident that the notion of the global village was first mooted in the 1960s.
