At 50,000 miles from Earth, Collins maneuvered the command module, called Columbia, so that it was facing away from the fragile lunar module known as Eagle, or L-M- for short. "As soon as Columbia and Eagle hooked up with each other, Saturn's third stage was jettisoned. On Thursday, the second day of the voyage, they fired Columbia's engines, putting them into an orbit that would put them within sixty-nine miles of the back of the moon on Saturday. On Friday afternoon, Cape Kennedy time, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed through the tube between the two vehicles and entered the lunar module Eagle, and at dusk that day the astronauts entered the moon's gravity field. By this time they were less than 44,000 miles from the Moon and gaining speed.
On Saturday afternoon, they reduced their speed to 3,736 miles per hour and entered orbit around the Moon. The flight control console (the radio transmitter they used to communicate with Nasa's Spacecraft Center in Houston) woke them up at 7:02 a.m. on Sunday, July 20, the day they were scheduled to land on the Moon. In the Eagle module, Armstrong and Aldrin stretched out the four unsightly legs of the lunar module for landing. The flight control told them, "You're all set to leave the dock." The lunar module was separated from Columbia, and Armstrong said, "The Eagle has wings!" At 3:08 p.m., he started the spacecraft's engines, and they headed for the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
They entered a low orbit nine point eight miles above the surface of the moon, flying over a terrifying lunar wilderness full of mountains and volcanic craters. At this point, one of Houston's computers began flashing on their dashboard, alerting them. Now so close to their destination, of course, they couldn't turn back, so they flew forward on the instructions of a young commanding officer in Houston, with Armstrong at the controls, and "buzzing" Aldrin constantly reading aloud the speed and altitude of their voyage as shown on the instruments. They ran into some trouble in the final moments of their descent. Less than 500 feet separated the Eagle module from the moon when Armstrong realized that they were going to land in the vast, inaccessible West Crater (so called because it was four miles west of their target). He headed out of the crater, but the unplanned extension of his journey meant that he was running out of fuel; he had to make an immediate decision to either turn that way or risk crashing. At that very moment, two white lights glowed on the instrument panel in front of him, revealing the words Contact Moon. "The Eagle module had landed.
He said, "Houston, this is Quiet Base, the Eagle module has landed." It was Sunday, July 20, 1969, 4:17:42 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time. After checking the instruments over for three hours, the two astronauts asked Houston if they could skip the scheduled four-hour break and get off now. Houston replied, "We support you in this endeavor." They donned three hundred thousand dollar space suits to reduce the pressure inside the lunar module. Then, with his back facing outward, Armstrong began to slowly descend the nine rungs of the ladder. On the second rung he pulled a rope and turned on the lens of a television camera so that half a billion people could see his careful descent to the desolate lunar manifestation.
His Nine-and-a-half-B boot touched the lunar surface, and he said, "It's a small step for a man, but it's a giant leap for mankind." This was at 10:56:20 PM. He shuffled his feet across the floor. He said, "The surface of the moon was slim and powdery, and it stuck to the soles and uppers of my shoes in layers like charcoal dust. I stepped down less than an inch deep, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I could make out my footprints on the fine sand-like surface."
Armstrong put some of that fine powder in the pants pocket of his spacesuit. Then, nineteen minutes after he got out of the capsule, Aldrin came up to him and said, "Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent bleak view." Armstrong drove a stake into the ground and set up a television camera on it. The spider-like Eagle capsule is sixty feet away from the camera, right in the center of the TV image, behind it the eternal night of outer space. The gravity here is one-sixth of a G, only 16.6 percent of the gravity on Earth. Television viewers saw these two men hopping around like gazelles and heard Aldrin say, "When I was about to lose my balance, I found it very natural and very easy to regain it." He had erected an American flag three feet long by five feet wide, which was bound to the pole with wire; Aldrin saluted it. They also deposited a container containing telegrams taken by the leaders of seventy-six nations and a stainless-steel trim plate bearing the following inscription, "Men from Planet Earth first set foot on the Moon here in July, Era 1969. We are here in peace on behalf of all mankind."
Meanwhile, the world was paying attention to the Moon. From Australia to Norway, from Kansas to Warsaw, people pressed their ears to their radios or tuned in to major events on television. The television audience was estimated at about 600 million people, one-fifth of the total population of the planet, and even in countries unfriendly to the United States, news of the mission to the Moon was reported by radio stations with admiration, or at least with impartiality.