July 24 · This Day in America
Eight years earlier a president had told Congress the nation would land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade was out. The hard word in that sentence was always return. This morning the command module Columbia, scorched from reentry, swings under three orange parachutes and drops into the Pacific southwest of Hawaii, thirteen miles from the carrier Hornet. Frogmen seal Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins into isolation suits in case they have brought something back from another world, and the men who walked on the Moon climb into a life raft on a rocking ocean and wait, like sailors, to be picked up. The decade had eighteen weeks left. A country that had told itself a near-impossible thing had gone and done it, and then made it back.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1847
After seventeen months and thirteen hundred miles fleeing persecution, an ailing Brigham Young is carried in a wagon to the mouth of a canyon and looks out over a dry, treeless basin most travelers would have called worthless. By tradition he says, "This is the right place. Drive on." Within days the pioneers are damming a creek and breaking the hard ground. Salt Lake City rises from that valley, and Utah still keeps the day as a holiday.
Source: www.loc.gov
“This is the right place. Drive on.”Brigham Young, July 24, 1847 (as recalled by Wilford Woodruff)