History of spaceflight out by NASA. The programs goal was to orbit and land manned vehicles on the moon. The program ran from 1969 to 1972. Apollo 8 was the first manned spaceflight to leave earth orbit and orbit the Earth's moon on December 21, 1968. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. The Skylab programs goal was to create the first space station of NASA. The program marked the last launch of the Saturn V rocket on May 19, 1973. Many experiments were performed on
Exploration of the Moon first observations using it. NASA's Apollo program was the first, and to date only, mission to successfully land humans on the Moon, which it did six times. The first landing took place in 1969, when astronauts placed scientific instruments and returned lunar samples to Earth. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (d. 428 BC) reasoned that the Sun and Moon were both giant spherical rocks, and that the latter reflected the light of the former. His non-religious view of the heavens was one cause for his imprisonment and eventual exile. In his little book "On the Face in the Moon's Orb",