Whereas, on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade; Whereas, on July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong took the historic first steps on the Moon and declared, That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind ; Whereas NASA built upon knowledge gleaned from the Mercury and Gemini programs that included sending astronauts into orbit from Cape Canaveral and most of them splashing down off the coast of Florida; Whereas the first 4 crewed Apollo flights tested the equipment used in the Apollo program, with the first flight in 1968 and the last in 1972; Whereas the first Apollo crew, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, lost their lives in the line of service as they conducted a simulation on the launch pad in Florida, a flash fire broke out in their spacecraft; Whereas a total of 11 crewed Apollo missions were conducted from Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 6 lunar modules making a landing on the Moon and a total of 12 astronauts walking on the Moon; Whereas women and minorities were instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 mission; Whereas Margaret Hamilton, the head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, the first software engineer, led the development of Apollo flight software; Whereas Katherine Johnson, a pioneering African-American mathematician and the first woman to work in Langley Research Center’s Flight Research Division to receive credit as author of a research report, did the pioneering work to enable the rendezvous in lunar orbit that made Apollo 11 possible; Whereas Susan Finley began her career as a computer programmer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and wrote software for the Deep Space Network that enabled the transmission of Armstrong’s famous words: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind