It was the finale to a decade of turbulence and upheaval, but this time it was an event through which a nation could put aside its differences and stand together to marvel at the achievement. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had pledged that before the sixties were over, an American would walk on the moon.
The enormity of the mission aside, one question remained, how to get a television signal 240,000 miles from the lunar surface onto televisions in living rooms around the globe. Robert Wussler, Walter Cronkite’s producer, called it “the world’s greatest single broadcast” in television history.