"Men have landed and walked on the moon."

Even today, 40 years on, that opening paragraph from The New York Times story of July 21, 1969, brings shivers to the spine of anyone who watched what had unfolded the muggy evening before.

The sentiment of Penny Pitou of Gilford, quoted in this past Sunday's Citizen, illustrates the thrill that so many of us experienced at the time.

"I don't think I will ever see something like that again unless we land someone on Mars," she said.

That historic moment, seen as a flickering black-and-white television image — just 12 years after the Soviets launched Sputnik — the Americans had done it.

Neil Armstrong, the soft-spoken astronaut with nerves of steel (he manually navigated the lunar module past the original boulder-strewn landing site at the last minute), and his first mate, Buzz Aldrin, bounded onto the moon's dusty surface. They left bootprints and an American flag. They brought back rock samples and a soaring sense of accomplishment — not only for America but for all humankind.

A year and a half later, New Hampshire native Alan Shepard, the only one of the seven original NASA astronauts to reach the moon, would walk on the lunar surface as the commander of the Apollo 14 mission. In his moon walk, Shepard famously hit two golf balls with a makeshift club he had brought from Earth.

The exploration of space, far less valued today, gave the nation a sense of mission and provided the spark for technologies that led to human advancement. But the legacy of the Apollo missions also had something to do with perspective.

The Americans had won the space race, but what did that mean? And what would come next? The questions still aren't fully answered all these years later, as budgets creak and space exploration sinks on the priority list.

But then, during that summer of 1969, after all the turmoil and chaos of the preceding year, there was a palpable sense of shared adventure.

Phyllis Machesky of Laconia, in a story published in Sunday's Citizen, recalled that when Apollo 11 landed, she and a man she was dating were on a sailboat in Boston Harbor. "We were looking up at the moon and he was saying, 'imagine, there are people walking up there right now.'"

Michael Collins, who piloted the command module for the Apollo 11 flight, recalled that everywhere he, Armstrong and Aldrin went after that flight, they heard the same thing.

"Instead of saying, 'Well, you Americans did it,' everywhere they said: 'We did it!' We, humankind, we, the human race, we, people did it!"

A fitting legacy and one worth remembering.