About six and a half hours after Eagle landed, its hatch opened and the Apollo 11 commander backed slowly out to its little porch. On the ladder he paused, pulled a lanyard, and thus deployed the MESA, or modularized equipment stowage assembly, just to the left of the ladder. As the MESA lowered into position with its load of equipment for lunar prospecting, a seven-pound Westinghouse TV camera mounted atop the load began shooting black-and-white pictures. Fuzzy and scored with lines, the pictures nonetheless held earthlings spellbound.
No one who sat that July night welded to his TV screen will ever forget the sight of that ghostly foot groping slowly past the ladder to Eagle’s footpad, and then stepping tentatively onto the virgin soil. Man had made his first footprint on the moon.
Neil Armstrong spoke into his microphone. And in less than two seconds the message that will live in the annals of exploration flew with the wings of radio to the huge telescope dish at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, Australia, thence to the Comsat satellite over the Pacific, then to the switching center at the Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D. C., and finally to Houston and the rest of the world: ”That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”