For about fifteen years, two giant countries had a strange kind of contest. Not a war exactly, and not a game either — more like the world's most expensive game of "I bet I can go higher than you." The two players were the United States and the Soviet Union. The trophy? Space itself. People called it the Space Race.

The Soviet Union grabbed an early lead, and it was a doozy. In 1957 they launched Sputnik, a shiny metal ball about the size of a beach ball, and it went beep… beep… beep as it circled the Earth. It didn't do much. But the whole point was that it was up there at all — the first human-made object to orbit our planet. America heard that beeping and nearly spilled its coffee.

Then the Soviets did it again. In 1961 a pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the very first human in space, looping once around the Earth before coming home. Suddenly America felt very far behind. So the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, stood up and made an enormous promise: before the decade was over, America would land a person on the Moon and bring them safely back. Gulp. Nobody actually knew how to do that yet.

Reaching the Moon is hard for one stubborn reason: gravity really, really doesn't want to let you go. To break free of Earth's pull, a rocket has to fling itself upward at a speed faster than anything you've ever ridden. That takes a colossal amount of fuel — and fuel is heavy — which means you need more fuel just to lift the fuel. It's a wonderfully annoying puzzle.

The clever trick was to build the rocket in stages, like a set of nesting tubes. Each stage burns its fuel, then drops away once it's empty, so the rocket never has to drag around dead weight. The machine NASA built for the Moon was the Saturn V — taller than a thirty-story building and still the most powerful rocket ever flown. Imagine a skyscraper deciding to leave town.

Getting there took years of practice and a lot of brave careful people. Mathematicians figured out the exact paths. Engineers tested everything twice. Astronauts trained until they could do every task half asleep. Step by step, the missions went farther — circling Earth, then flying all the way around the Moon and back — each one learning something the next one would need.

Then came July 1969 and the mission called Apollo 11. Three astronauts rode the Saturn V up and coasted for three days across the emptiness to the Moon. There, a little spider-legged ship called the Lunar Module split off and drifted down toward the gray dusty surface, hunting for a safe flat spot to set down.

Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and pressed his boot into Moon dust no one had ever touched. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," he said. Back on Earth, hundreds of millions of people watched on fuzzy televisions, holding their breath together. Humans were standing on another world.

So who "won" the Space Race? America had reached the goal Kennedy promised. But honestly, the biggest winners were all of us. The race pushed people to invent and dream faster than they ever had, and it left behind something nobody can own: the picture of our whole planet, blue and small, seen from far away. After that, "the Moon" stopped being just a light in the sky.

The footprints those astronauts left are still up there right now. The Moon has no wind and no rain to sweep them away, so they'll sit in the dust for millions of years. So the next time you look up at that pale glowing circle, remember: people went there. We really, truly did.