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On July 20, 1969 millions of television screens captured a new image in the iconography of American history. To the familar icons that stirred patriotic sentiment - the fiercely protective American eagle, the elegantly scripted parchment of the Declaration of Independence, the solemn countenance of George Washington, and a majestically waving Stars and Stripes lofted over outstretched hands on the island of Iwo Jima - a generation of Americans added a truly new world image: a speckled black and white television picture of a man clothed in flexible tubes of white, with a reflective sphere over his head, springing over the alien, gray surface of our nearest planetary neighbor, thereon to plant a small, vacuum-stilled American flag. As with all icons, what brought this image into being was somewhat less than the associated rhetoric claimed for it. The rhetoric with which John F. Kennedy introduced his challenge to the nation - "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth" - is unmistakable in the meaning intended for the event: the United States was "engaged in a world-wide struggle in which we bear a heavy burden to preserve and promote the ideals that we share with all mankind, or have alien ideals forced upon them." However, for the ordinary engineers who toiled for two decades so that Neil Armstrong could one day step onto the Moon - the culmination of the nation's Apollo program - the event turned out to mean something different than rhetoric promised it would be