They sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961, the first person to ever physically leave Earth. In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik I, the first satellite. The achievements of the rival American and Soviet space programs in such short increments would've seemed impossible even a decade prior. Since the dawn of time, man had looked up and wondered what that giant white orb in his nighttime sky was all about.Īfter millions of years of wonder, the few years of the Space Race took mankind's mere curiosity and accelerated this orbital age of discovery to unforeseen speed. Safe to say that setting foot on the Moon ticks all of those boxes. Since records are meant to be broken, awarding someone as the "first" to accomplish any type of achievement would render the whole system pointless.īut Guinness World Records makes occasional exceptions for the most exemplary, most iconic, most revolutionary achievements to deem them worthy of immortality and unbreakability. Now, one of the core principles of Guinness World Records achievements is that "firsts" are not acceptable. That's because, garbled speech transmission or not, Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin made the most indelible kind of history that night, setting a record as the first humans on the Moon. Whether you think that statement makes no sense or believe he was misheard or misquoted, no one can deny the iconography now associated with Neil Armstrong's famous first words as he stepped foot on the moon the night of July 20, 1969. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."