Apollo program an address to Congress on May 25, 1961. It was the third US human spaceflight program to fly, preceded by the two-man Project Gemini conceived in 1961 to extend spaceflight capability in support of Apollo. Kennedy's goal was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their lunar module (LM) on July 20, 1969, and walked on the lunar surface, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command and service module (CSM), and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon,
The First Men in the Moon he acknowledged "The First Men in The Moon" to be "the best of the sort [of science fiction] I have read..." (from a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green). The influence of Wells's book is especially visible in "Out of the Silent Planet", the first book of Lewis's "Space Trilogy". There, too, a central role in the story line is played by a partnership between a worldly businessman interested in the material gains from space travel (and specifically, in importing extraterrestrial gold to Earth) and a scientist with wider cosmic theories. Also in Lewis's book, the two quietly build themselves a