Celebrate 50 years of Apollo with us as our new series blasts off

Our short series teaser. Click here for transcript. (video link)

For a few brief years between 1968 and 1972, humans left the Earth and visited the Moon. The flights took the combined efforts of nearly half a million people working across the world and cost about $160 billion in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars. The result of that work and money were the Apollo landings-six successful lunar touchdowns, each of which gave us a vast amount of scientific knowledge and a priceless trove of samples. Twelve people walked on our nearest heavenly neighbor, leaving 12 sets of footprints that will linger in the regolith for millions of years-possibly outlasting humankind itself.

Apollo occupies a unique place in human history-a flashbulb moment when economics and technology suddenly aligned with world politics in a way that likely will never happen again. The program was a monumental achievement-arguably the greatest engineering achievement in human history-but the story of Apollo is the combined story of each of the thousands of men and women who worked to make those flights happen.

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