Apollo 40
Forty years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. While Michael Collins watched from orbit in the command module, Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the surface, becoming the first of twelve people to date to walk on the surface of another world. However you look at it, it was an incredible feat of engineering. Wish I'd been there to see it.
Some people still refuse to acknowledge that this really happened of course. Many, many people have spent considerable time debunking the "it was all shot in a lot in Nevada" myth, notably Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer), but there are still a noisy crowd of people who refuse to see the facts, still believe it was all a set up. Finally, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken pictures of the Apollo landing sites and they were released this week to coincide with the 40th anniversary. Check them out, they're pretty spectacular.
Apollo 14 landing site as seen by the LRO CREDIT: LRO/NASA
While we're on the subject of Apollo, if you happen to have a lunar module lying around in your garage that you just can't fix, don't bother taking it down the garage as you can now fix it yourself with this handy Haynes manual. Awesome.
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