The 40th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing

Notice something different about the YouTube logo on the homepage today? It's been made over to honor the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's small step into the history books, with Apollo 11's landing on the moon. Four decades ago today, millions of people crowded around flickering black and white television sets -- or listened in via radio -- nervously waiting to see and hear the crew of Apollo 11 make good on President Kennedy's pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, which he made on May 25, 1961. To coincide with this event, key moments from those live TV images have been partially restored by NASA and can now be seen online by billions of people around the world. And if those iconic glimpses of Apollo 11's lunar landing give you goosebumps, you'll find this classic long-form NASA documentary from the U.S. National Archives to be a real treat; experience the story of this historic mission through the eyes of the people who made it happen:

Space fans have more opportunities than ever to keep tabs on footage from the archives and present-day missions via YouTube channels like NASAtelevision, Houston's ReelNASA, and NASAexplorer out of Goddard, Maryland. If you want to get even closer to the lunar surface, take a trip with Moon in Google Earth and explore Apollo 11's landing site on the Sea of Tranquility with the same ease with which you might have used Google Earth to take a tour of your own neighborhood. (For more about Moon in Google Earth, click here for the launch announcement in the Google LatLong blog or here for the official Google blog's post.) While today's space fans impatiently await the next era of space exploration, at least we're spoiled for choice when it comes to revisiting the giant leaps that took place 40 years ago.

Posted by Mark Day, YouTube Science & Technology