Apollo 11- 50 years on

This post has been scheduled to be published at 8:56 PM UTC- fifty years to the exact moment that American Astronaut Niel Armstrong opened the hatch of the Apollo 11 landing module and became the first living thing to set foot on the surface of the moon.
Fifty years... kind of a strange spot to where it can feel both like ancient history and a recent memory.
It certainly was a moment worthy of Armstrong's subtle-yet-profound words. The phrase "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" is something we don't remember as often as we should. Yes, Niel Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were all American citizens, and they left a prominent American flag up there (fun fact- they had to sew the flag to a support rod for it to properly display at its iconic right angle) and, yes, politicians at the time heavily advertised it as propaganda against the Soviet Union's space agency. But in the end, those words should remind us what making it to the moon was all really about.
In spite of all the times we have ever felt alone, or even if we feel like all the world seems too big for us, we all are humans- the same species from the same piece of rock orbiting the same star. We were all able to get together for a mere cosmic twinkling to come out of our communal tribes to build a civilization that could cover a distance so fast that light itself takes a significant amount of time to cross it. "Mankind" never only meant American or Soviet- this was a matter of pride in our planet.
I hope that we can look past all of our differences and prejudices when we see this moment. Time is too fleeting to not be inspired to rise beyond our boundaries.

Rendered in Photoshop
Images sourced from NASA's media library