Four days later, Armstrong and astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin stepped onto the moon's dusty surface for hours of exploration and rock collecting, leaving behind a plaque that read: "Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon July 1969 A.D. We Came In Peace For All Mankind."
Joining Armstrong and Aldrin at the Florida spaceport are Apollo 7 astronauts Wally Schirra and Walter Cunningham, Apollo 16's John Young and Charlie Duke, and Gene Cernan, the Apollo 17 commander who was the last man to walk on the moon.
"I think it was probably the greatest single human endeavor, certainly in modern times, maybe in the history of all mankind," Cernan, 65, said of the Apollo program.
In Titusville, Florida, just north of the Kennedy Space Center, Cernan and Schirra helped dedicate a monument to the Apollo program, breaking ground for the foundation in a waterfront park as a replay of the Apollo 11 launch countdown played over loudspeakers.
The astronauts and other pioneers of the space program plunged their shovels into the dirt at 9:32 a.m. EDT (1332 GMT), the moment that the Saturn 5 rocket carrying the lunar lander lifted off the launch pad 30 years ago.
"I had goosebumps," Cernan said of the countdown. "That was real."
About 200 people, many former and current employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and space contractors who worked on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects witnessed the groundbreaking and reminisced about the challenge U.S. President John Kennedy issued in 1961, to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
"The impact of it will not be realized for a hundred years," said Bill Horner, a security chief at the space center during the Apollo days. "They'll be looking back at it then as we look back at Balboa and Columbus."
Aldrin remembered the moon landing's influence on the people of Earth, rather than the technology, as the greatest achievement of the Apollo program.
"It certainly was a major impact on millions of people throughout the world," he said at the space center today.
NASA and civic groups on Florida's Space Coast have four days of festivities planned leading up to Tuesday, when the space agency will launch the shuttle Columbia on the anniversary of Armstrong's moonwalk. The five-day mission to deploy an X-ray telescope will be led by Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle.
The Apollo monument, scheduled for dedication in July 2000, is a bronze depiction of the various stages of the Apollo program surrounding a bust of Kennedy, lauded by the astronauts as the political visionary who ordered America into the space race and wrote a blank check to pay for the voyage to the moon.
Organizers said they were collecting names of some 400,000 people who worked on the U.S. space program and hoped to etch them on granite blocks at the monument.
Schirra and Cernan remembered the pioneers of Apollo, including Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who died in a launch pad fire during testing for the Apollo 1 mission, and Pete Conrad, the Apollo 12 astronaut who died last week in California. They lamented the failure of the U.S. space program to reach further into the galaxy in the last 30 years.
"Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon," Cernan said. "And that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.
"I know somewhere out there is a young boy or young girl with the indomitable will and courage to take that particular honor away from me. And those are the cherished hopes that we have for the future."
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