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
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