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For some, the decade of the sixties will be remembered for anti-war protests, flower children, love beads, and Woodstock, along with all of their accompanying societal debauchery. Among others however, a far more glorious aspect of that tumultuous time will always remain preeminent.

In the midst of the unraveling of the national fabric, an enormous contingent of inspired and dedicated Americans had committed themselves to doing the impossible. And at 4:53 pm on Sunday, July 20 1969, the words of Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong crackled back from the surface of the moon across a quarter of a million miles of space to Houston Texas, proclaiming to all the world that "The Eagle has landed," and the impossible had been achieved.

Only a dozen years earlier, the post World War II optimism of America and the rest of the free world had been completely shattered by news of the successful Soviet effort to orbit Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Gliding silently across the night sky with a menacing serenity, it alerted the West of a serious technology deficiency that many feared was a harbinger of eventual Soviet dominance, not only in space, but on earth as well.

Of course the Soviets zealously exploited their accomplishment, shortly following it with the spectacular launch of Sputnik 2, a much larger satellite in which rode "Laika" the dog. Weeks later, an American attempt to orbit its own artificial satellite ended with the humiliating explosion of Vanguard One. With each passing day, the grim possibility of Soviet hegemony in space and on the ground increased.

America scrambled to keep apace, finally getting Explorer 1 into orbit in January of 1958. Nevertheless, early efforts to narrow the technology gap appeared futile. On April 12, 1961, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became history's first man in space, making a single orbit of the earth before safely landing deep inside Russia. It seemed that the Soviet Union was destined to dominate the high frontier.

Yet in retrospect, the United States was only warming up to the challenge. On May 5, less than a month after Gagarin's journey, Alan Shepard completed the successful suborbital flight of Freedom 7. And, in a bold move coming on the heels of that comparatively minor venture, President Kennedy presented his famous challenge to America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. The space race was on.

Very quickly, it became apparent that once the America of that era set itself upon such a course, little could stop it. By the middle of the decade, American space technology had far surpassed the Soviets. Worse still for them, a series of major catastrophes rendered a manned Soviet moon mission, clearly their early intent, to be an impossibility. So they changed the rules of the game.

On one front, they made a frenzied effort to return a sample of lunar soil, via an automated probe, to earth prior to the Americans, stridently promoting the notion that an unmanned mission would be technologically superior and less costly. Their desperation became glaringly obvious in 1969 as they frantically made two failed launch attempts of their "Luna" moon probe, one on June 14, and the other on July 13. Either of which, had they been successful, might conceivably have given their propaganda minions sufficient political ammunition to make claims that the mantle of Soviet superiority remained within the Iron Curtain.

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