 I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. 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. The date was May 25, 1961. Brust into a race for international space supremacy, President John F. Kennedy passed the torch to a young national aeronautics and space administration. Plex sophisticated space shuttle of today, with its ability to routinely carry six or more people into space, began as a tiny capsule where even one person fell cramped. The seven flights of project Mercury prove that humans could survive in space. The next step was Gemini, expanding our reach. The two unmanned and 10 man flights of project Gemini subjected man and equipment to flights of up to two weeks in duration. America thrilled to the first spacewalk, a 20 minute extra vehicular exercise. The cumulative experience of these early man flights gave NASA a foundation of confidence for its next project, Apollo, a national effort that fulfilled a dream of oldest humanity, a human on the moon. From Mercury to Apollo, the space program depended on the Goddard Space Flight Center for its link to Earth. For Goddard was the home of the manned space flight network, the central control for 29 ground tracking stations, 4 tracking ships, and 8 specially modified tracking planes. These were scattered around the world to keep in constant communication with the astronauts in their vehicle. For a manned mission to the moon, project Apollo would need a monster rocket called Saturn V. Saturn V was just one item on NASA's long shopping list. Years of testing and designing went into preparing astronauts, rockets, and equipment for the first lunar landing. Cape Canaveral, soon to be named Cape Kennedy, needed a building 525 feet tall, where the Saturn V, the Apollo spacecraft, and the moon landing ship could be put together atop a track carrier as big as a baseball diamond. Before humans could land on the moon, it was necessary to learn about the conditions there. In those days, we were not at all sure about what the space environment was, and we were very concerned about the various radiations from the sun and from outer space, and what effect they would have on the men who were in this capsule. Picture-taking ranger spacecraft sent back thousands of lunar photographs before a crash landing into the lunar surface. As the time grew closer to the historic moon landing, Goddard crews checked and rechecked every circuit, every antenna, every console to assure that nothing would go wrong during this landmark mission. And we had the responsibility of testing these facilities from an operation standpoint and utilizing the facilities of NASCOM. And we supported 24 hours a day for a lengthy period of time during a program called, we used to call it AGNOP, but it's Apollo, GOSS Qualification Navigation Program, where we used to track lunar orbiter with the 30-foot antennas, parabolic antennas, which we called USB antennas, that were located at the manned space flight stations around the world. As far as preparation for the mission and troubleshooting circuits when they would fail, I like to think of it, and I used to call it, then, the Great DB Witch Hunt, because we had made promises to the network that we could exchange test tones between our center and the remote tracking stations and get those test tones back, plus or minus 3 dB, which was a pretty stringent requirement for the air-to-ground astronaut voice relay circuits. The man destined to put the first footprint on the moon was Commander Neil A. Armstrong, a former NASA test pilot who had experience in space during Project Gemini. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., known as Buzz, who would be the second man on the moon, had a Doctor of Science degree in Astronautics. Michael Collins, with a Bachelor of Science degree, was to fly the Apollo command ship in parking orbit around the moon while his fellow crewmen explored below. The day arrived, and NASA was ready. Armstrong went aboard at 6.54 a.m. and took position in the Apollo's left-wing couch, five minutes to lift off and still counting. In 15 seconds, guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9. Ignition sequence starts. 6. Perhaps a million Americans came to Cape Kennedy to see the astronauts off. So did 3,000 newsmen from 56 countries, half of the U.S. Congress and the Vice President of the United States. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson, an avid space program supporter and Mrs. Johnson, were among those who followed the Apollo 11 lift-off. Millions more watched the launch on worldwide television. Immediately following launch, the 30-foot antennas at Goddard's Merritt Island tracking station picked up communications with the spacecraft, then handed the circuits off to the ground station at Grand Bahama Island, then Bermuda, followed by the tracking ship Vanguard in the Atlantic Ocean and so on around the world. Goddard was the control center for all the ground stations that were around the world that were going to be supporting and that were supporting the manned flight program. NASCOM is the central hub of the NASA communications network and still is to this day, which means all of the signals coming in from the remote tracking stations reach Goddard before we hand them off to other facilities. But during Apollo, everything came into Goddard first. So anything that was said is an example. The astronaut voices would be in a digital format from the spacecraft, but when they reached the tracking stations, they were put into an analog form and traveled that way into Goddard, where we conferenced all of the voice circuits together and handed them off to JSC, to Houston. Views of their home from the Apollo spacecraft reminded Earthlings the world over of how fragile their planet is and of the need to preserve and protect its resources. The pictures they saw and the video coverage we have today would look like nothing more than gobbledygook without the special camera and processing techniques developed by a team of Goddard engineers. Not only did they have a couple modes of operation, which were simply, let's try this if this doesn't work, but we also had a very limited bandwidth and the ground equipment had to reconstruct the picture so that it would be usable. The picture as transmitted would not be able to be telecast on a home receiver. As viewed, it would be a very flickering picture that would not be too usable except for possibly an engineering evaluation. When the camera on the lunar lander began to transmit pictures as it approached the moon, the Goddard team received the signal at a special processing facility set up in Sydney, Australia. All particularly the Australian people were just so excited and they actually set up television monitors in the, I believe it was called Peace Cross, the main square in Sydney, where thousands of people came out to witness this. The first word may have been Houston, but the first people to hear it were Goddard's voice controllers. The primary package was a seismic package to detail moonquakes and a laser retro reflector package, which was quite small, but it had 64 cube reflectors in it so they could use lasers from the Earth and fine tune additions between the Earth and the moon. Those small retro reflectors are still used today. By bouncing lasers off these lunar-based reflectors, Goddard scientists continue to learn about the movement of the Earth's crustal plates with the same accuracy as when they were first placed on the moon. Not long after noon the next day, the 21st, the astronauts fired the ascent engine and launched Eagle on the first leg of what was to be a triumphant return to Earth. Apollo 11 splashed down at 12.50 p.m. Eastern daylight time on July 24, 1969, about 900 miles southwest of Hawaii. Two Goddard satellites, ATS-1 and 3, were used to relay television coverage of the recovery operations to an anxious world. The big thing that we did, and I think, well, because it was spectacular because everybody saw it, was the television through our microwave system on the ATS spacecraft. At one time we planted a little 12, 15-foot antenna on the flight deck of the carrier and actually transmitted live television from the carrier, from what was going on on the deck of the carrier via the ATS satellite back to the network. It was the only possible live television to the whole world could see what was going on and of course included in that was the actual recovery. Apollo did more than reach for the future. It refreshed our spirits and heightened our awareness of the human potential. For the United States, Apollo provided renewed confidence that given the resolve, resources and commitment of a free people, the U.S. can lead mankind in the great adventure of space exploration. We lived through an era and part of that era was the time that John Kennedy said, I challenge this nation to put a man in orbit and return him safely within this decade. Pursuant to that, I don't think any of us will ever forget that famous day in Dallas and then to put the man on the moon and bring him back safely was quite a monument and memorial and I think all of us felt very, very strongly about that. We were a pretty young organization. I think I was in my 20s and I think just about all of the voice controllers and the contractor workforce were people in their 20s and possibly early 30s and it was just a very exciting time for us. I mean we would put hours and hours and hours of work in and we were proud to do it because we did see our peace in the puzzle and what our own personal accomplishments might be. We felt quite proud that we were a part of bringing that data back to them because that was the whole purpose to get science data and that's what we did. I think the biggest satisfaction was that it enabled everybody in the world to see something that was a one-shot, one-time affair which was the first step and that's basically what we worked on and as other speakers that I've heard speak said that we worked a lot of long hours and strenuous days and I think everybody that worked on that program probably agrees that they didn't notice it. It was just too exciting to be concerned about the hours you spent. It was a unique project and we haven't been back in a long time and it was something that we were really proud to be a part of and every country we went to they were all proud to be participants. Well, it was a great thing for the United States. It was a great thing for NASA and I have to think it was a great thing for Goddard Space Flight Center.