This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

And to share your stories with us, send them to our American Stories.com.

We love hearing them and we love playing them.

Up next, a story of perhaps our greatest adventure as a country,

conquering the final frontier and not only getting a man on the moon,

but returning him safely to Earth. Here to tell the story is Steve Kates, aka Dr. Sky. And we're

telling this story because on this day in history, in 2012, Neil Armstrong died.

During this period of time in the 1950s, as many people who were old enough to know,

there was great tension between Russia and the United States and something that was eventually

described as the Cold War.

Any attack upon Cuba will be regarded as an attack upon the Soviet Union be responded to by all the weapons

of their command.

There is before all people is a precious chance to turn the black tide of a victory.

If we fail to strive to seize this chance, the judgment of future ages will be harsh.

And sad to say, the entire United States military and the Russian military, or Soviet military at the time,

was hell-bent on developing and continuing to build many nuclear weapons.

But the real changer in the game, the game changer that I like to describe here, is what

happened when the Soviet Union launched the very first artificial satellite known as Sputnik 1.

That, of course, changed everything.

It was a small sphere, maybe 24 inches in diameter, and it had three antennas and weighed about 185 pounds.

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