I was only eight years old on July 20th, 1969 and the day was 43 years ago now. It seems like yesterday. I remember my parents went to visit friends that evening. I remember as we were leaving everyone was standing out in the yard looking up at the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on that moon. It seemed incredible to everyone. We went home and waited for Armstrong and Aldrin to make the first moon walk.
Armstrong and Aldrin would spend 21 1/2 hours on the moon and they would spend 2 1/2 hours outside the spacecraft.
We had accomplished the goal that President Kennedy had set at the beginning of the decade ‘to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade” Greatest achievement in the history of mankind.
slicethelife 
i think this is the best part of that Rice University speech.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
No question in my mind that this is mans greatest achievement.
It is also an achievement i doubt we see topped in our lifetime… yes Kennedy’s greatest speech