Space

Astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module pilot, is photographed during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the moon. He has just deployed the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package. In the foreground is the Passive Seismic Experiment Package; beyond it is the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector; in the center background is the U.S. flag; in the left background is the black-and-white lunar surface television camera; and in the far right background is the Lunar Module “Eagle.” Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, took this photograph with a 70-millimeter lunar surface camera.

Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Many of these early triumphs went the Soviets’s way. They launched Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower, though confident of American missile superiority and unimpressed by space gadgetry, faced pressure to support the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the following year. Although NASA is a civilian agency, it maintained strong ties with the military; all the astronauts who journeyed into space until 1972 served with the U.S. armed forces. Eisenhower’s more aggressive successor, John F. Kennedy, declared in May 1961 that the United States would land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. The pledge materialized in the wake of the embarrassing debacle at the Bay of Pigs [Page 1295]in Cuba and the first successful space flight of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.