 It was called the greatest mobilization of men and resources ever undertaken for a peaceful project of science and exploration. On the morning of July 16, 1969, the collective work of 400,000 people, 24 billion dollars of investment, the hopes of a nation, and the lives of three men, sat in a tiny spacecraft to top 6 million pounds of rocket at Kennedy Space Center. Four days later, a quarter million miles away, humans stepped onto the surface of the moon for the first time. A remarkable achievement, and far from accidental. A combination of imagination, political will, and personal courage played tremendous roles in the success of the Apollo Space Program. But without space systems engineering bringing everything together, Apollo 11 would have never even gotten off the ground.