21 July 1969: the first human to walk on the moon
At 2:56 AM GMT on this day in 1969, six and a half hours after landing the ‘Eagle’ lunar module, Neil Armstrong took his first small step on the moon’s surface.

At 2:56 AM GMT on this day in 1969, six and a half hours after landing the Eagle' lunar module, Neil Armstrong took his first small step on the moon's surface.
Armstrong's footfall was the culmination of efforts that started eight years earlier with President John F Kennedy's pledge that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It signalled a US victory in the space race' with the Soviet Union.
The cost of sending a man to the moon was initially estimated at $7bn. This proved to be wildly optimistic. In 1973, the final cost of the Apollo programme was reported to the US Congress as being $25.4bn.
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The programme brought back 2,415 samples of rock to earth, weighing 382kg, which helped gain an understanding of the moon's composition and origins.
In 2002, four students were arrested for stealing a safe full of moon rocks from Nasa. In the subsequent court case, the rocks were valued at $50,800 per gramme (in 1973 dollars), based on how much it cost to bring them back to earth.
270 lumps of goodwill moon rock' were given away by America's Nixon administration to the various nations of the world, and a further 100 to US states. 160 of them are believed to be missing.
In 2011, a rock missing for 30 years and valued at £10m was found in files belonging to Bill Clinton. The rock given to Honduras was offered for sale on the black market for $5m. And Ireland's rock was apparently thrown away after a fire at Dublin's Dunsink Observatory.
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Ben studied modern languages at London University's Queen Mary College. After dabbling unhappily in local government finance for a while, he went to work for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh. The launch of the paper's website, scotsman.com, in the early years of the dotcom craze, saw Ben move online to manage the Business and Motors channels before becoming deputy editor with responsibility for all aspects of online production for The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News websites, along with the papers' Edinburgh Festivals website.
Ben joined MoneyWeek as website editor in 2008, just as the Great Financial Crisis was brewing. He has written extensively for the website and magazine, with a particular emphasis on alternative finance and fintech, including blockchain and bitcoin.
As an early adopter of bitcoin, Ben bought when the price was under $200, but went on to spend it all on foolish fripperies.
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