On its second full day of flight, Apollo 11's crew, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, conducted a television broadcast from their spacecraft and performed a mid-course correction burn. The mission was on track for a lunar landing just two days later, and hundreds of millions of people around the world were following the journey via radio and television.
Inside the cramped command module Columbia, the astronauts floated through checklists while cameras beamed grainy black-and-white footage back to a rapt Earth audience. Armstrong showed viewers how food was prepared in zero gravity, while Collins, who would orbit the Moon alone during the landing, joked about the tourist appeal of space travel.
The spacecraft was now deep in the gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and Moon, having crossed the point where lunar gravity began to dominate. Mission controllers in Houston monitored trajectory data continuously, ready to fire correction burns to keep the ship on its precise path toward Mare Tranquillitatis.
Back on Earth, newspapers ran hour-by-hour countdowns, and an estimated one-fifth of the world's population would eventually watch or listen to some part of the mission. The tension was less about mechanical failure, NASA had drilled the sequence relentlessly, than about the sheer audacity of the goal: landing human beings on another world for the first time in history.
Key people: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins