This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the trip that changed the world: the Apollo 11 moon landing. Texas Monthly has written about Texas’s role in the space program for decades, and our July collector’s issue combines the best of our archives with new perspectives on the final frontier.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history as the first humans to set foot on the surface of the moon. Forty years later, the researchers, astronauts, engineers, scientists, and NASA officials who made the voyage possible remember the day the Eagle landed.
“My whole life is divided before July 20, 1969, and after July 20, 1969. When I hear a date, my first thought is, ‘Okay, was that before or after we landed on the moon?’”
—Jerry Bostick, chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch of NASA's Manned Space Center
The lovesick antics of diapered astronaut Lisa Nowak are some combination of funny and sad but seemingly not revealing of anything larger, until you realize that her tragic, tabloidy breakdown says everything you need to know about NASA’s many troubles.
Tom Markusic, the founder and CEO of Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace, explains how the next generation of rocketry companies is different from NASA—and from SpaceX and Blue Origin too.
The West Texas border town of Presidio is one of the poorest places in the state. So why does it have one of the best high school rocketry clubs in the country?
