1960s the Apollo 8 crew (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders) being the first manned mission to orbit another celestial body (the moon) during Christmas of 1968. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11, the first human spaceflight landed on the Moon. Launched on 16 July 1969, it carried mission Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and the Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin. Apollo 11 fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961: "I
The First Men in the Moon direction. Nigel Kneale co-adapted the screenplay (with Jan Read) for the 1964 film version; it is reasonable to assume that Kneale's familiarity with the work may have inspired the idea of the Martian hives which feature so significantly in "Quatermass and the Pit", one of Kneale's most-admired creations. "The First Men in the Moon" has been adapted to film four times, and once prior to that as a mash-up Verne-Wells film: Soon after the publication of "The First Men in the Moon", Wells was accused by the Irish writer Robert Cromie of having stolen from his novel "A Plunge into