USA Weekend

July 20, 1969: What a day for America —and the world. With one step on a powdery chunk of lunar surface, we achieved the unachievable: Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Few events have had the same impact on our times, according to these five distinguished Americans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Afterward, anything seemed possible.

I watched the moon landing when I was 10 years old with a friend, on a 12-inch black-and-white TV—with a coat hanger for an antenna ear. Then, the next year, that same friend handed me a pair of binoculars, and I looked at the moon, seemingly for the first time in my life. It no longer was a distant object. I had never noticed before how full of valleys and hills it was.

The Apollo missions were great adventures; every one went a bit farther than the one before. With Apollo 7, we circled the Earth. With Apollo 8, we flew around the moon and saw some of our very first images of the Earth. What a picture! We saw our planet as all land and water and clouds—not color-coded countries and states. After Apollo 11, anything seemed possible. A mission to Mars by 1980? Why not?!

But that didn't happen. The missions ended with Apollo 17 in 1972. So did the sense of adventure. Today, we celebrate this era because, frankly, it's dead and on display at a museum near you. By now, I had hoped we'd be celebrating all of the bigger and better explorations we might have achieved after the day we landed on the moon.

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Mars. Rogue asteroids. It's exciting stuff. And this time around, it's not just NASA. Here are four trips to keep your eye on.

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