Today in History: July 20 1969

Fifty-six years ago today, while Woodstock was still a month away and the Vietnam War dominated headlines, humanity achieved something that would have seemed impossible to our grandparents: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

1969 was already quite a year. Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated as president, promising

to end the Vietnam conflict that had torn the country apart. The Beatles were about to record their final album together. Sesame Street was preparing to debut. And in a muddy field in upstate New York, half a million young people would soon gather for three days of peace, love, and music.

But on this July evening, an estimated 650 million people—nearly one-fifth of the world’s population—crowded around television sets to watch grainy black-and-white footage of Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface. For a brief moment, the divisions of the turbulent 1960s seemed to fade as the world united in wonder.

The mission represented the culmination of President Kennedy’s bold 1961 promise to land Americans on the moon before the decade’s end. It was the height of the Space Race with the Soviet Union, a competition that had driven both superpowers to extraordinary technological achievements. The entire Apollo program employed over 400,000 people and consumed 4% of the federal budget at its peak.

What makes the achievement even more remarkable is that it was accomplished with a guidance computer that had just 4KB of memory and processed information at 0.043 MHz—less computing power than a modern digital watch. Somehow, this primitive machine helped navigate a quarter-million miles through space with pinpoint accuracy.

As Armstrong famously said, it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—and in that chaotic, transformative year of 1969, it was exactly the kind of leap our country needed to take together.

This post was outlined by our co-volunteer Claude AI while we lounged about.