On 20 July, 1969, exactly 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made mankind’s first footprints on another world. In the excitement of that history-making moment, it is understandable that Neil muffed his lines a little bit, when he planned to say “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Moreover he was dead right. It was our first big step beyond the cradle.

The Apollo 11 landing on the moon was a landmark in history.  However, the dream and the achievement have roots extending a long way back in time. There were the Apollo test flights, including the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, during the Christmas of 1968. The Christmas message sent to us by the three astronauts still gets broadcast. Before that was the Gemini program, which emphasized long stays in space, rendezvousing with other spacecraft and astronauts going outside. On one of those trips, astronaut Ed White was having such a great experience hanging out in his space suit he didn’t want to get back into the cramped spacecraft. Sadly, Ed died, along with Roger Chaffee and pioneer astronaut Gus Grissom in a fire in the Apollo 1 spacecraft during ground tests. Before Gemini there was the Mercury Program. Alan Shepherd was the first U.S. astronaut, who was lobbed into space on a Redstone rocket, followed by a repeat flight with Gus Grissom. Then there was John Glenn, who went into space on the larger Atlas rocket and was the first westerner to orbit the Earth.

It’s likely that none of this would have happened, or if it did it would have taken longer without the space efforts made by the Soviet Union. On Oct. 4, 1957 the Soviet Union put the satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit, an event often taken to mark the beginning of the Space Age. The first man in space was Yuri Gargarin, who orbited the Earth well before Alan Shepherd was lobbed into space for a few minutes. It was Alexei Leonov who put on his space suit and made the first “space walk”. Actually his early space suit was so stiff he could hardly move, and for a while it looked as though he would not be able to get back into the spacecraft.

Starting between the wars Werner von Braun dedicated his life to rocketry, dreaming of sending people in to space and exploring the universe.  Then there was Robert Goddard, who built the first liquid-fuelled rocket, the ancestor of the Redstone, Atlas, Saturn 5 and the Space Shuttle. In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkowsky wrote about the exploration of space using liquid fuelled rockets.

Even before the technology became available, there were dreams of going to the moon and other planets, which were set out as fiction by writers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. That “small step” was the result of an enormous leg up, but a wonderful and historical event none the less.

On that day I was at a radio observatory in southwest England, and I remember going outside to look at the then-inhabited moon, and hoping the equipment on Apollo 11 continued to work better than our experiment was doing.

Jupiter and Neptune still lie close together, rising around 10 p.m.; Saturn lies low in the west after sunset. Mars and Venus rise in the early hours. The moon will be new on July 21.

Ken Tapping is an astronomer with the National Research Council's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and is based at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton.