The Eagle has landed.
20 July 1969 · Sea of Tranquility, Moon
The next six hours
Armstrong and Aldrin ran through post-landing checklists, ate, and — against the flight plan — decided not to sleep. At 02:56 UTC on 21 July, Armstrong stepped onto the surface.
The 17 seconds of fuel
Post-flight analysis showed Eagle touched down with roughly 17–20 seconds of usable hover-fuel remaining before mandatory abort.
Long shadow
The landing ended the Space Race as a Cold War contest and pushed remote-computing, integrated-circuit and telemetry industries forward by a decade.
Armstrong flubbed his 'one small step' line.
He always insisted he said 'a man.' Audio analysis is inconclusive — the 'a' may be lost in transmission.
The 1202 alarm nearly aborted the landing.
Steve Bales, a 26-year-old guidance officer, called 'GO' on the alarm within seconds — he'd rehearsed the exact failure in sim two weeks earlier.