40 years ago, July 20, 1969, the humanity made real one of his most marvelous exploits, that of going out of our planet and coming to the Moon. With this prowess, as there was said in that opportunity, began “the conquest of the stars”.

This day, million men and women of all the ages saw astonished and enraptured – for the television still black and white of that epoch - the image of Neil Armstrong with his uniform of the NASA, in the historical moment in which it was descending from his ship and was treading on the Moon, leaving a trace that really symbolizes the potential of the human race. Armstrong landed on the moon together with another two astronauts of the mission Apollo 11, which turned also into a symbol of the possibilities of the United States.

The events that took the man to the Moon 40 years ago were the fruit of an adventurousness never seen till then. It demanded rockets of propulsion that did not exist when the president John F. Kennedy raised the challenge of sending a man to the Moon in 1961. Advances needed in computing that had not taken place yet. The NASA had to learn to connect two ships, to teach him to the astronauts to be traveled and to live in the space. All tasks so difficult that many experts considered to be impossible. But in the end, the nation in his set managed to conquer the challenge thrown by Kennedy, later that the United States had been thrashed by the powerful Soviet Union of that time, which the first man had just placed in the space, the Russian Yuri Gagarin.

It is good to remember the moments of tremendous failure that they were lived during the moon landing, when the capsule Eagle was approaching the sector of the Moon where it had to descend. Armstrong observed that there were too many rocks and craters, therefore it kept on flying horizontally, to approximately 100 feet of the lunar surface in search of a flat sector. Almost it remains without fuel. The alarms sounded and the controlers began to worry. But when only it was remaining combustible for 17 seconds the operators of the NASA listened to Armstrong to say: "Calm Houston. Eagle landed on the moon”. Two hours later, the human beings were walking along another planet. And further on, Armstrong pronounced these famous words: "We have given a small step, but a giant jump for the humanity”.

Now there arises a new challenge, like it three astronauts confirmed this week protagonists of the exploit: the conquest of Mars, our nearby planet. But this is already another history.