The Courier in the Moon

An old dream came true on 21 July 1969, when the two American astronauts, Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, became the first men to set foot on the Moon. A cosmic symbol from time immemorial and the source of countless myths, legends and cults, the Earth's nearest neighbour in space at last, showed its true face. From Antiquity to modern times, the Moon has inspired manyfeats of imaginative writing. In the 17th century, the French author Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a novel of imaginary travel in which a small sailing boatflew to the Moon powered by evaporating dew, and in the 19th century, the heroes of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon orbited the Moon in a comfortably furnished ballistic shell. In the 1950s, the characters drawn by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Rémi, 1907-1983) made an eventful trip to the Moon which has already fascinated two generations of readers, many of whom find it hard not to think of Hergé's fictional hero Tintín as the first human being to walk on the Moon...

The UNESCO Courier published the conversation between Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston (USA), under the title "The first men on the Moon". Read this historic document in our April 1987 issue.

Read also other issues and articles on the exploration of the Moon and the Universe:

Enigmas of the universe, July - August 2009

Spin-off: the fruit of space research, March 1970

Man and space, a great international venture, May 1966