First, it took the acceptance of risk for NASA to fly into space—and to return to flight after three astronauts died. Then, it took guts to send astronauts on a round trip into lunar orbit and back. But in 1969, after years of increasingly frenetic activity, the efforts of nearly half a million men and women were finally rewarded with the ultimate trip: a safe lunar landing and return, before the end of the decade.

Apollo 11 is special—not just to the history of NASA or the United States of America, but for the entire world and all who live on her. On a plain summer day in July of 1969, just past three o'clock in the afternoon Houston time, two humans landed a fragile spacecraft with paper-thin walls on another world. It was to be the first time humans walked on a celestial body other than our home—and, for a few hours, we as a species were more than Americans and Soviets and Chinese and Britains and so on. Those two people boldly making footprints where no one had gone before showed us that we truly were, as Apollo 8's Frank Borman put it, all people of "the good Earth."

Our celebration of fifty years of Apollo continues next week with "Triumph," the story of the landing of Apollo 11.