Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Frank Reynolds at ABC Space Headquarters in New York.

It is July 16, 1969. And we are all about to witness the fulfillment of that promise that President Kennedy made at Rice University Stadium in Texas on September 12,

1962.

The moon that still has not set in some parts of our world has only a few more days of

which you might call untrampled history.

These three men are about to embark on certainly one of history's most glorious adventures.

Commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and command module pilot Mike Collins.

Hello and welcome.

This is Michael Aniston.

You're listening to episode 213 of the Space Rocket History

Podcast. And now, Apollo 11, the launch. On July 16th, 1969, nearly a million people crowded the

Florida highways, byways, and beaches to watch man's departure from the earth to walk on the moon.

Twenty thousand guests looked on from special vantage points.

One person leading a poor people's protest march against the expense of sending man to the moon

was so awed that he forgot for a moment what he came to talk about.

3,500 representatives of the news media from most of the Western countries and much of the

eastern hemisphere, 118 from Japan alone, were there to record the mission in newsprint for readers and to describe the scene for television and radio audiences, numbering as many as one billion viewers.

Terminal countdown started at 28 hours before launch at 2100 GMT on July 14, 1969.

The evening before launch, inside the launch control center, hundreds of system specialists hovered

over their consoles, feeding data up the information pyramid to the controllers in the firing room.

Each of these men was intimately familiar with one particular facet of the machine,

and in some cases the man at the helm might be the system designer himself.

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