Saturday, July 20, marks the 50th anniversary of man landing on the moon. Those five decades have allowed historians to realize the impact Apollo 11 has had not just on the U.S., but on mankind.
"We choose to go to the moon," President Kennedy famously said in 1962.
At the time of Kennedy's speech, the U.S. didn't know how to get to the moon and didn't have a big enough rocket to reach it. The project ended up costing $25 billion dollars -- a controversial expense throughout the 1960s. "Somewhere deep in the American DNA is this belief in pioneer spirit, frontier spirit, like cowboys and explorers, like Lewis and Clark, and space fulfilled that romanticization of the American ideal," Brinkley said."These were space cowboys."
For Brinkley, Apollo 11's mission was an"epic moment in civilization," but he recalls an"empty" feeling after it was complete.The U.S. did not become a space-faring nation, but the technology that took us to the moon is now pocket-sized. Those innovations were all fueled by the program that brought man to the moon.
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