A moon landing ‘for all mankind’

On July 20, 1969, hundreds of millions of people around the world turned on televisions or gathered in public spaces to watch as U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon.

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong famously declared as he set foot on the moon. Yet it’s hard to imagine that even the Apollo 11 commander knew how much the mission was unifying people back on Earth.

“On every single continent, people stopped what they were doing to follow the flight,” said Teasel Muir-Harmony, a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator and author of Operation Moonglow. “It was not just sending people to the moon, it also was bringing people together on the Earth.”

 

A global event

President John F. Kennedy proposed landing a man on the moon a mere eight years before the July 16–24 Apollo 11 mission made the dream a reality. Fifty-five years later, the moon landing stands among the most significant events of the 20th century for the way it united the world in a celebration of human achievement.

Worldwide, an estimated 650 million people watched the moon landing, including 94% of U.S. households with television sets.

• In the Netherlands, gas stations distributed “moon maps” showing where on the moon the astronauts would land.
• In Laos, the moon landing aired as the country’s first live broadcast of a global news event.
• Chile and Venezuela made July 20 a national holiday so people could watch the moon landing on TV.

It was a “priceless moment in the history of man,” President Richard Nixon said at the time, adding that “all people on this Earth are truly one.”

“Just launching someone into space was incredibly wild,” NASA Chief Historian Brian Odom says. “But to see those images and those videos from the moon had to just turn the world upside down, not just for America but the international community. It was that kind of ‘for all mankind’ type of moment.”

 

Early collaboration

Delivering astronauts to the moon was an extraordinary feat of American engineering, made possible by hundreds of thousands of people. They used 1960s technology, including early navigation computers Odom described as “nothing like what you have in your phone.”

Though primarily engineered by NASA, the Apollo 11 mission — and its global reception — benefited from international support. Switzerland supplied astronaut watches that worked in zero gravity. Sweden designed a camera to capture history, and Australia supplied receiving technology needed to broadcast the moon landing live around the world. In a show of solidarity, astronauts left on the moon a disk inscribed with messages from world leaders.

 

After the mission, NASA shared lunar samples with world leaders as a gift of global unity. NASA also shared lunar samples from Apollo 11 and later missions with scientists in the U.S. and other countries. Study of the samples has informed scientific understanding of our moon and solar system.

After Apollo 11, “whatever data the astronauts would get back to Earth” was shared with the scientific community, Odom said, adding, “It was a unique opportunity, really, to collaborate.”

 

Next steps

The collaboration featured in early moon missions has become a foundation of space exploration today. NASA works with international and commercial partners on the Artemis program, which aims to establish the first long-term presence on the moon in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars.

Over 40 nations, including the United States, have signed the Artemis Accords, a series of guiding principles to ensure future space exploration is peaceful, sustainable and beneficial to all.

In November 2022, NASA launched Artemis I, an uncrewed flight test of the Orion spacecraft, with support from the European Space Agency. And NASA is working with the U.S. private sector and Japan to advance vehicles that will allow astronauts to explore the moon’s rugged south pole.

As NASA and its partners embark on these and other future space missions, Apollo astronauts’ first steps on the moon decades ago stand as inspiration. It was “something that was greater than a country,” Muir-Harmony said. “It was really about what humanity can accomplish when it comes together.”