The Apollo Eagle lunar module had landed the night before, and Armstrong had become the first man to step foot on the moon at 10:56 p.m. July 20. Twenty minutes later, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin stepped out onto the moon’s surface and delivered his own thoughts: “Beautiful! Beautiful! Magnificent desolation.”

The space race between the United States and Soviet Russia was over, and the headline hailed the beginning of the “Space Age.”

The front page was filled with six articles, five photos and a comic strip, all relating to the moon landing. At the bottom of the page was a small blurb explaining that “Today’s Page One is reserved exclusively for the moon epic.” The rest of the day’s news started on the inside, and a “Second Page One” was printed on the back page.

Photos on page 1 showed from the surface of the moon, President Richard Nixon calling the astronauts and headshots of the three Apollo 11 astronauts.

Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin looks at the Stars and Stripes as he becomes the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. (Photo provided — NASA via UPI news service)

The lead story, from the Associated Press’ Howard Benedict, was a dense piece describing Armstrong and Aldrin leaving the moon after 21 hours and 36 minutes to meet up with Michael Collins, who was piloting the Columbia.

That article and two others captured the tremendous excitement that captured the entire world. Reindeer herders from Norway, families in Japan and children in America listened to the transmissions over the radio and watched Armstrong’s first step trough the “magic of television.”

“The picture was black and white and somewhat jerky, but it recorded history,” Benedict wrote in his article.

Not everyone was happy about the moon landing, though. One Yugoslavian teenager “sounded a dissent.”

“They have stolen the romance out of the moon, and it will never be the same again,” he said. “Now the moon is real, and lovers won’t have it for themselves alone anymore.”

Also, a man called his local paper in Meriden, Connecticut, to complain that he couldn’t find a single game of baseball on television.

One-quarter of the world’s population did not hear or see the broadcasts of the landing, though. China, North Vietnam and North Korea did not broadcast any news about the historic event.

Next to all the stories of U.S. moon success, a smaller, but prominently placed news flash told of an unmanned Soviet craft that landed on the moon’s surface in the Sea of Crises, 500 miles away, on the same day.

In the Soviet Union’s leading newspaper, Pravda, the stories were flipped, with the Luna 15 landing taking precedence over the Apollo mission landing.

Not all the coverage was so serious, either.

One article titled “Moon Fall Barely Averted” detailed a near accident Armstrong had when his foot became tangled in a television camera cable. The article said that Armstrong, “the first to test man’s ability to walk on the moon, almost made an unplanned test of man’s ability to fall on the moon.”

Aldrin warned him before he fell.

“Neil. Neil. You’re on the cable,” Aldrin said over the radio. “Pick up your right foot. Your toe is still hooked in it.”

An article listing the almost $1 million worth of cameras, tools and breathing equipment left behind on the moon called it “one of the most expensive junk yards in the universe.”

An “Eek and Meek” comic strip on the bottom of the page pictured two mice excitedly claiming that the moon is made of cheese — American cheese.

A nightclub owner in Beirut was reported to have stopped a striptease act to tell the audience, “We’ve made it.”

And a London man who made a $24 bet five years before that a man would set foot on the moon by 1971 received a $24,000 check as the lander touched down, before Armstrong even took his first step.

Armstrong and Aldrin raised a stainless steel flag and left behind a disc with messages from the leaders of 76 nations as well as a plaque reading, “Here men from planet earth first set foot upon the moon. July, 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”