WASHINGTON (AP) - When man first harnessed fire, no one recorded it. When the Wright Brothers showed man could fly, only a handful of people witnessed it. But when Neil Armstrong took that first small step on the moon in July 1969, an entire globe watched in grainy black-and-white from a quarter million miles away
We saw it. We were part of it. He took that "giant leap for mankind" for us.
Although more than half of the world's population wasn't alive then, it was an event that changed and expanded the globe.
"It's a human achievement that will be remembered forever," said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University.
Those first steps were beamed to nearly every country around the world, thanks to a recently launched satellite. It was truly the first global mass media event, Logsdon said. An estimated 600 million people - 1 out of every 5 on the planet - watched.
The two historical events likely to be long remembered from the 20th Century are the moon landing and the first atomic bomb, said Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius.
"There is no way to overestimate that significance in human history and he is forever linked to that," Launius said of Armstrong, who died Saturday at age 82.