The Apollo program was an American space initiative in the 1960s and early 1970s led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to land humans on the moon.
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Despite the US starting the Space Race behind the Soviet Union, which had put a cosmonaut into space in 1961, the successful landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969 was seen as a defining victory for America.
Beyond landing humans on the moon for the first time, Apollo served to advance rocket engineering and guidance systems through crewed and uncrewed missions. By Apollo 15, the Lunar Roving Vehicle was developed and driven on the moon.
After a fire killed three astronauts on the launchpad of Apollo 1, the public became ambivalent about funding the multibillion-dollar program until the successful moon landing in 1969. The landers alone cost $388M, while each spacesuit cost $100,000.
Its launch accelerated US investment in the Space Race amid fears the Soviet Union had the technology to launch intercontinental nuclear warheads. It would be followed by Sputnik 2, which carried the first living being—a dog named Laika—to orbit.
In 1961, aboard Vostok 1, the pilot orbited the Earth once for 108 minutes. On his return, he parachuted out of his capsule and landed in a field near present-day Space Conquerors Park, south of Moscow.
On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy set forth this argument for the effort to land humans on the moon’s surface, casting the Apollo mission in terms of historic human ambitions.
During a launch rehearsal test on Jan. 27, 1967, the fire took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The tragedy led to improvements to CM construction and the development of a single-piece hatch for escapes.
Created by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, this collection includes detailed biographies of astronauts and scientists who worked on the program and interactive features on the technologies that made it possible.
On the night of July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped down the lunar module's ladder onto the moon's surface. The broadcast was watched by an estimated 650 million people—about a fifth of the then global population.
The 1970 mission—intended to be the third lunar landing—forced astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to focus solely on their survival. They engineered a makeshift filter to handle the carbon dioxide they produced, which exceeded the lunar module's capacity.
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