July 16 · This Day in America
At 9:32 in the morning, from Launch Complex 39A at the Florida cape, a 363-foot Saturn V — the most powerful machine humans have ever built — ignites and does not fall back. A million people line the beaches and causeways; a fifth of the planet is watching somewhere. Atop the rocket sit three men: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin. Twelve minutes later they are in orbit; soon after, an engine burn flings them out of the only world anyone has ever known and toward another. Four days from now two of them will walk on it. Stand at the edge of what people thought was possible, and on this morning it moved. The whole arc of human curiosity — every map, every telescope, every campfire question about those lights — left the ground in a column of flame.
Source: science.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1945
At 5:29 a.m. in the Jornada del Muerto, the Manhattan Project detonates the first nuclear weapon. The steel tower vaporizes; the sand fuses to green glass for hundreds of yards. The flash is seen for miles. Watching it, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The atomic age began here, in New Mexico, weeks before Hiroshima — the moment American ingenuity crossed into something it would never be able to put back.
Source: ahf.nuclearmuseum.org
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”J. Robert Oppenheimer, recalling the Trinity test, 1945