On July 20, 2019, it will have been 50 years since Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

If you want to relive that moment in great detail, you really need to watch Apollo 11, a new doccie by director Todd Douglas Miller and archivist Stephen Slater.

It can be slow-moving at times, but some of the archival footage, complete with digital touch-ups, are staggering.

If Hollywood and Ryan Gosling is more your thing, there’s also First Man.

Leading up to the commemoration of this landmark event in human history, Armstrong’s sons, Mark and Rick, recently spoke with Fortune, about their dad and what his pioneering space mission meant to their family.

Mark was only six years old when his father was preparing to leave earth, whilst his brother Rick was 12:

The brothers remember a dining room discussion with their parents, in which they talked about their dad’s upcoming moon trip, and the risks. Then there was the launch, and watching their father on television. Still, to the two young boys, it all seemed very normal.

“We lived in a neighborhood where a lot of people worked at NASA and where that was kind of the norm,” says Mark. “We didn’t understand the risks, the greater historical context.”

They would only realise the gravity of the moment years later. Almost 650 million people around the world watched their father set foot on the moon and deliver the now famous phrase: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

To them, he was just an average dad.

“You could get advice from him, talk to him about a lot of things, and he provided information for you to figure out what you want to do,” Rick says of his father, who was 82 years old when he passed away in 2012.

“He didn’t push in any direction in particular. He didn’t give us instructions on how to handle a problem. He was just a support network. He was great at that.”

Both Rick and Mark are excited to see what comes next for space exploration, including the possibility that a woman will walk in their father’s footsteps.

NASA has a plan to put the first woman on the moon in 2024. In June, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine estimated this would cost between $20 billion and $30 billion.

“Going back to the moon is a great plan; it’s the right plan,” Mark says. “We can learn a lot … from the moon. We go back there, set up camp, learn everything that we can, and then we can apply those learnings to Mars and beyond,” he adds.

The space race looks very different now than it did 50 years ago as tech billionaires compete to launch space tourism.

Elon Musk announced last year that his first paying lunar passenger, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, had put down a “significant deposit” on a lunar trip.

Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson also have plans to send tourists into space.

Whatever happens, Armstrong will always be the first to step onto the moon, and his sons can be pretty proud of their old man.

[source:fortune]