Letters from an American - July 19, 2025

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

Music July 19, 2025. On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Lunar Module Eagle to the% of the population, were watching on live television as Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. Television showed Armstrong stepping out of the lunar module onto the moon

just before 11 o'clock p.m. Eastern time. My siblings and I were among those watching. Our parents had taken us across the harbor to our aunt and uncle's house where there was a TV. I remember being groggy from being rousted out of bed and unimpressed by the fuzzy little black and white screen the adults were crowded around and kept trying to get us to look at. At six I had no idea that it was an unusual thing for people to walk on the moon, and was much more impressed that my aunt had a big fishing net with colorful glass weights

in it hanging as a decoration near her fieldstone fireplace. My older sister says that unlike me, she was indeed impressed that night, but not with the moon landing. Our older cousin Jeff was playing an album by the doors and she says she remembers being blown away both by their music, which she was hearing for the first time, and by the weighty realization that we had the coolest cousin in the world. Clearly it was a night to remember, even if we didn't quite understand why. And at a time in which our.S. government put its power behind enabling the American people to achieve something epic, leading a scientific triumph for people

around the world. So here is the story of Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the surface of the moon. When Armstrong left the module, he became the first person to step onto the surface of the moon. Aldrin was the second. The roots of the Apollo 11 mission had been planted a dozen years before, in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, Earth's first artificial satellite. Crossing the atmosphere above the United States,

it challenged the technological superiority the US had claimed since World War II. The space race was on. To demonstrate that democracy remained more powerful than communism, the U.S. immediately organized the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and just six days later began Project Mercury with the goal of putting a man into orbit and returning him safely to Earth. Project Mercury's six-man flights spanned two years,

making astronauts like Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn famous. Then, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind. Kennedy established the Apollo program for a moon landing, but when it became clear that NASA would first need to know more about spaceflight, it designed Project Gemini to bridge the knowledge

gap between Mercury and Apollo. The following year, speaking at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Kennedy told the American people, we choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others too. The public was not convinced. The program was expensive, pouring money into jobs and scientific research in space while people on earth were hungry and unhoused and the world's oceans remained largely unexplored. Then a fire on the launch pad of the first Apollo mission killed the crew. Although the next seven missions succeeded, Americans continued to wonder why their tax dollars

were going into space exploration. Apollo 11 changed those attitudes. After a four day journey, as more than 500 million people in countries around the globe watched on live television from almost a quarter of a million miles away, the eagle landed. In the U.S., 125 million people, 63 percent of the population, tuned in to see the culmination of the project NASA had been careful to portray as a triumph not just for the United States, but for all of humanity. Armstrong and Aldrin planted

an American flag on the moon, but also left a plaque showing the Earth's continents without national boundaries, bearing the caption, here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, and stating that they came in peace. As Armstrong said, when his foot touched the moon's surface, that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

for mankind. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.