The following is an excerpt from Seth Borenstein | August 25, 2012 | msnbc.com |
WASHINGTON — When man first harnessed fire, no one recorded it. When the Wright Brothers showed man could fly, only a handful of people witnessed it. But when Neil Armstrong took that first small step on the moon in July 1969, an entire globe watched in grainy black-and-white from a quarter million miles away
We saw it. We were part of it. He took that “giant leap for mankind” for us.
Although more than half of the world’s population wasn’t alive then, it was an event that changed and expanded the globe.
“It’s a human achievement that will be remembered forever,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University.
Those first steps were beamed to nearly every country around the world, thanks to a recently launched satellite. It was truly the first global mass media event, Logsdon said. An estimated 600 million people — one out of every five on the planet — watched.
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