Moon Dreams: 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Special Collections Reading Room Exhibit

From the Collections of the Salt Lake City Public Library

Exhibit runs from July 19–August 17

Moon Dreams: A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

From antiquity, people have been fascinated with the heavens, observing the stars, the motion of the planets, and especially, the surface and phases of our nearest celestial neighbor, the Moon.  This fascination inspired authors, artists, and musicians to create works that explored outer space when humans still lacked the ability to physically leave the boundaries of our atmosphere. Dreams became reality, nurtured by the Cold War competitive drive, when the Soviet Union launched Vostok 1 and Yuri Gagarin became the first person to reach outer space and circle the globe.  Not to be outdone, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States quickly ramped up its efforts and in less than a year, John Glenn orbited the earth three times. The space race was truly on and the goal was to be the first nation to successfully land a man on the moon, and bring him home again. It took only a little over seven years to accomplish this astonishing feat when on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin safely landed on the surface of the moon and took those historic steps for all mankind.

With books, ephemera, Legos, and artifacts from NASA, this exhibit celebrates the men and women who imagined, engineered, tested, re-tested, and finally succeeded in fulfilling a dream humans had cherished for millennia--to walk on the Moon.  

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