Historical context
This film, produced in 1969, tells the story of Apollo 11.
NASA’s Saturn V rocket with the Apollo 11 space capsule and the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 16 July 1969.
Apollo 11 reached the moon on 20 July 1969. While Collins remained in lunar orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the surface of the Earth’s satellite in the lunar module “Eagle”. On 21 July, at 2:56 UTC, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon and spoke the famous words: “One small step for a man, but one giant leap for mankind.”
During their approximately two-and-a-half-hour stay on the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin conducted experiments, collected samples and installed scientific instruments. After successfully completing their mission, they returned to the Apollo command module and safely returned to Earth, where they landed in the Pacific Ocean on 24 July 1969.
The Apollo 11 mission marked a historic moment for mankind, as it showed that humans were capable of exploring space. The almost unbelievable technological challenge of flying to the moon, which President Kennedy had called for in 1962 in front of a sceptical audience in Houston Texas “by the end of the decade”, was successfully completed.