Expanding on what had been learned - and achieved - by the Mercury-Atlas flights, NASA needed more powerful rockets. Astronauts needed bigger space capsules so they could take longer flights. (It still was unclear how long a person could stay in space and not sustain physical/psychological damage.) And what if the space capsule needed repairs while in orbit? Could an American do what Aleksei Leonov had done: walk in space? Project Gemini, with its two-man space capsules, was established to answer some of those questions.

Ed White and James McDivitt left earth on a 4-day mission beginning June 3, 1965. Launched by a Titan-II rocket, they orbited the earth 62 times. Using a hand-held jet thruster (a kind of personal equivalent of a rocket thruster) Ed White achieved another American first: He walked in space for about 20 minutes. He took a camera with him and snapped incredible photographs, including a magnificent one of himself. Reluctant to come back into the space capsule, the world heard him sigh and say, "It's the saddest moment of my life."

The saddest moment in the life of Ed's family happened less than two years later. During an Apollo 1 training mission, Ed and his two crewmembers, Gus Grissom (one of the original Mercury 7) and Roger Chaffee, were killed in a terrible fire in their command module. NASA's photographs depict what the interior of the capsule (with the men in it) looked like before the fire, and what it looked like after. (Follow this link to view the exterior damage.) Just when it seemed America was on the cusp of true space achievement, the country realized there was still much to learn before NASA could send a crew to the moon.

One major triumph brought a moon flight much closer to reality. The United States developed and successfully launched the mighty Saturn V. Taller than a 36-story building, it was the largest and most powerful three-stage rocket ever built. With 3 million parts, it was a giant just waiting for the time when it could send a crew to the moon. Not one was ever lost.

Several Apollo missions were flown to lessen anxieties about a safe lunar landing and return. The crew of Apollo 8 was the first people to see an "earthrise" as their spacecraft made the first loop around the moon. Five months later, Apollo 10 was the first to go into lunar orbit. Partially descending to the moon, the crew tested the lunar module that would be critical to a safe moon landing.

The Soviets, meanwhile, were also rushing ahead with plans for a moon landing. They even had their lunar suits ready. They had an insurmountable problem, however. They did not have a rocket equivalent to the American Saturn V. Prior rockets that sent cosmonauts into space did not have enough power for a moon launch.

The N-1, Russia's best effort to successfully build a moon-launch rocket, was a failure. During the first launch attempt in February, 1969 an engine fire caused the rocket to shut down and crash one minute after take-off. In July, 1969 the test rocket shut down seconds after lift-off, falling onto the launch pad where it exploded. When the launch site was destroyed, so were all Soviet hopes that their crew could reach the moon before the crew of Apollo 11. (Follow the link to a U.S. Corona reconnaissance satellite photo of the destroyed launch site.)

In a final attempt to at least retrieve lunar surface materials before the Americans, the Soviet Union sent an unmanned robot to the moon. It crash-landed on the moon's surface shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first human beings to step foot on the moon.