One Giant Leap   In the late evening hours of July 20, 1969,
hundreds of millions of people watched in rapt attention the
grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong as he exited
the lunar module Eagle and became the first man to set foot on
the moon. As he did, he uttered the now-famous line: “That’s one
small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  That step
culminated an eight-year project to fulfill President John F.
Kennedy’s goal of beating the Soviet Union to the moon. It took
more than 400,000 scientists, engineers and technicians and
about $100 billion in today’s currency to achieve.  Innovations
that developed as a result of space technology number in the
hundreds of thousands. Among these are cordless tools, memory
foam, medical imaging, material used in sports dome covers,
electronic devices and scratch-proof lenses.  For years it was
speculated that Apollo 11’s trip to the moon would result in the
establishment of a moon base and then interplanetary travel. But
NASA bogged down on the co