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On July 16, 1969, the United States launched a rocket into space, completing a massive national commitment to beat the Soviet Union by landing a manned vessel on the moon.
Almost every major aspect of the space flight was witnessed via television by hundreds of millions of people in nearly every part of the globe.
Its name and crew are forever cemented as legends in the minds of the people of Earth.
This spacecraft’s name was:
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The pulse of humanity rose with the giant Saturn V launch vehicle as it made its flawless flight from Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Florida, before hundreds of thousands of spectators. So accurate was the translunar insertion that three of the en-route trajectory corrections planned were not necessary. Aboard Apollo 11 were Armstrong, Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins. Their enthusiasm was evident from the beginning, as Armstrong exclaimed;
This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.…It was beautiful!
The third stage of the Saturn then fired to start the crew on their 376,400-km journey to the Moon. The three astronauts conducted their transposition and docking manoeuvres, first turning the command module, Columbia, and its attached service module around and then extracting the lunar module from its resting place above the Saturn’s third stage. On their arrival, the astronauts slowed the spacecraft so that it would go into lunar orbit. Apollo 11 entered first an elliptical orbit before slowing to a nearly circular orbit above the surface of the Moon.
111-metre- (363-foot-) high, 3,038,500-kg (6,698,700-pound)
376,400-km (234,000-mile)
114 by 313 km (71 by 194 miles) 100 and 122 km (62 and 76 miles)
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