FIFTY YEARS AGO, on July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon. They were aboard Apollo 11’s lunar module
Eagle, a small spacecraft with soda-can thin aluminum walls designed by aerospace engineers to
land upright on spindly legs. My friend Joseph Taylor tells me that, as Eagle descended toward the
moon’s surface, an alarm flashed. The onboard computer had overloaded with data.
Back in Houston, Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director in charge of the lunar landing,
quickly consulted with his flight-control team and ordered the mission to continue. Margaret
Hamilton, who coined the term “software engineer” to describe her work, had programmed
the early model computer to complete its most important tasks first. Although alarms contin-
ued to flash intermittently as Eagle descended, the computer remained focused on the landing.
Approaching the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, Eagle’s designated landing area, Armstrong
noticed a massive crater bordered by a field of car-sized boulders. His eyes bulged. Although
fuel was running low, he took manual control of the lander, slowing its descent and steering
past this crater and another one beyond. He finally set Eagle down onto a mostly clear and
level spot with only twenty seconds of fuel remaining. The two astronauts exchanged grins
and clasped hands. “Houston, Tranquility Base here,” Neil radioed. “The Eagle has landed.”
In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy first called for the United States to reach the moon,
he had declared, “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon... it will be an
entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” And so they had.
Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the moon in the command module Columbia
while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the surface, was delighted by the reaction when they
returned to Earth. “I expected people in other countries to say, ‘Well, you Americans finally
did it,’ but instead they said ‘we,’” Mike recalled. “It was a nice feeling.” Today the first human
moon landing still stands as a triumph of humanity, a high point of exploration, and a testa-
ment to teamwork.48