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As we approach the 50-year anniversary of Apollo 11 moon landing, we take a look back at some headlines from the 20-year mark of that historic event.

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Shuttle Columbia on pad as NASA marks moon shot

Cape Canaveral, Fla. – Space shuttle Columbia moved to the launch pad Saturday as workers got set to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the liftoff of another spaceship with the same name, the one that carried the first men to the moon.

The shuttle completed a seven-hour trip to launch pad 39B shortly before 5 a.m., and engineers and technicians began readying it for an early August flight with five astronauts who are to release a secret military spy satellite. Meanwhile, others made preparations for Sunday’s commemoration of the flight of the first Columbia. It was July 16, 1969, that an Apollo command module Columbia blasted away from the Kennedy Space Center here with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into the lunar landing vehicle Eagle and descended to the moon.

Footprints on the MoonWhat has moon’s “stark beauty” told us after 20 years? – When two explorers first set foot on the moon two decades ago, they found a lifeless world, baked by day and frozen by night in temperatures ranging from 230 degrees below zero to 270 degrees above. They found no wind, no storms, no clouds, no water, no magnetic field, the thinnest of atmo-spheres and gravity one-sixth the strength of the Earth’s.“It has a stark beauty all its own,” said Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin described it as “magnificent desolation.” Armstrong, Aldrin and 10 other Americans who followed them to the moon in the next 3 ½ years returned with 842 pounds of rocks and soil. They left behind sensors that sent data on moonquakes, meteors, radiation and the solar wind. Slowly,

almost grudgingly, this trove is yielding secrets about the moon and its place in the solar system. A picture is emerg-ing of a birth in searing heat, a brief, violent life of boiling lava and shattering collision, and geological death billion years ago when volcanic activity ceased. The moon’s surface has remained essentially unchanged since, except by impact from an occasional meteorite and almost imperceptible dustings from solar and cosmic radiations. This stability means much of the history of the solar system during those 3 billion years can be read by studying lunar rocks. But the revelations go back even further because samples dating to more than 4 billion years and fragments at 4.6 billion – back to the beginning – have been found in the Apollo samples.

Words echo through time: “That’s one small step…”“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”Twenty years have passed, nearly a generation, since Neil Armstrong called those momentous words down from the moon. Two decades since Earthlings watched those flickering television images, saw that tentative first step on the dusty surface and looked on in wonder as two Americans hopped about in weak gravity, planted and saluted their flag, picked up bits of lunar treasure and spoke with their president a quar-ter million miles away. Most people living then can tell you today where they were when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buss Aldrin took those first steps on the moon Sunday, July 20, 1969. They were realizing a goal that John F. Kennedy had set in frustration and desperation. He came into office in 1961 with a pledge to “get this country moving again.”The space chasm widened when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri

Gagarin blasted into orbit, the first man to fly into space. American prestige was rocked again five days later when a brigade of Cuban exiles stormed the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in an effort to overthrow Castro. His forces routed the ill-equipped exiles, leaving the United States and its young president in shame and disarray. Kennedy accepted the blame and decided bold action was needed to restore America’s honor. Space was the answer, he concluded. On April 29, the National Aeronautics and Space Council submitted a preliminary report to the president. “The moon is a good target for us,” it said.