Having sent astronauts into lunar orbit and back to Earth, NASA faced even more daunting hurdles to achieve Kennedy's challenge for a Moon landing before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 9 in March 1969 tested the entire Apollo spacecraft, including the lunar module, in Earth orbit. In May 1969, Apollo 10 carried out a dress rehearsal of the landing mission, with the command and service modules and lunar module in lunar orbit. With these crucial milestones accomplished, the way was clear to attempt the lunar landing itself. On July 16, 1969, the crew of Apollo 11—Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin—headed for the Moon to attempt the lunar landing.
On July 20, while in lunar orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin passed through a connecting tunnel from the command module, Columbia, to the attached lunar module, named Eagle. They then undocked, leaving Collins in orbit, alone in Columbia, 111 km (69 mi) above the Moon. After shifting the low point of their orbit to 15,000 m (50,000 ft), Armstrong and Aldrin fired Eagle's descent rocket to slow the craft into its final descent to the Moon's Mare Tranquilatis (Sea of Tranquillity). An overloaded onboard computer threatened to abort the landing, but swift action by experts in mission control allowed the men to continue. Armstrong was forced to take over manual control when he realized that Eagle was heading for a football-field-size crater ringed with boulders. He brought Eagle to a safe touchdown with less than a minute’s worth of fuel remaining before a mandatory abort. "Houston," Armstrong radioed, "Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."
Hours later, Armstrong and Aldrin were sealed inside their space suits, ready to begin history's first moonwalk. At 10:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Armstrong stood on Eagle's footpad and placed his left boot on the powdery lunar surface—the first human footstep on another world. Armstrong’s famous first words on the Moon were, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." (He had intended to say “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” and that is how the quote is worded in many accounts of the event.) Aldrin followed Armstrong to the surface 40 minutes later. During the moonwalk, which lasted about two and a half hours, the men collected rocks, took photographs, planted the American flag, and deployed a pair of scientific experiments. Their landing site, a cratered plain strewn with rocks, proved to have "a stark beauty all its own," in Armstrong's words. Aldrin called the appearance of the lunar surface "magnificent desolation."

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