July 16, 1969 Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Ed Aldrin, and Michael Collins launched from the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft on this date. Apollo 11 was the fifth manned mission of the Apollo program, and its target was to land a man on the moon, thus fulfilling a promise made to the world by President Kennedy nearly a decade earlier. The Saturn V SA-506 rocket left Launch Complex 39A at 9:32 a.m. (EDT), and the lunar module landed on the moon’s surface on July 20. After less than a day on the moon, the astronauts flew back to earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24.
~Florida Historical Society
