The Cold War set off a race to control space and put the United States on a path to the moon. That outcome was not a given: On April 13, 1961, the Soviets announced that they had put the first man in space, sending the message that the United States was behind in the space race, and possibly the arms race as well.
President John F. Kennedy gave a strong response before Congress on May 25, 1961, announcing a goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth within a decade.
To many, this sounded like science fiction. The president’s initial cost estimate – $7 billion to $9 billion over the next five years – made the project seem like a fantasy.
The job of bringing the idea back to earth as a patriotic engineering challenge fell to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA oversaw development of the Apollo program and created a publicity machine to convince Americans that it was not a boondoggle but a necessary battle to win the Cold War.
To that end, NASA gave the news media unprecedented access to the space program, and surrounded each launch with a flood of background materials designed to attract interest and build an audience.
That approach made phrases like “lunar module” and “Tang” part of everyday conversation, and turned the Apollo astronauts into celebrity heroes, regularly featured on magazine covers.
So it wasn’t surprising that 94 percent of those watching television on July 20, 1969, were tuned in to watch astronaut Neil Armstrong as he became the first person to take “one small step for man” on the moon.