NASA believes future looks bright

The end of the Apollo missions led to growing collaboration with other countries, even the Soviet Union

They finally made it.

On July 24, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins safely splashed down into the Pacific Ocean — showing once and for all what America was capable of.

President John F. Kennedy had given NASA less than a decade to achieve his moonshot goal. And the fledgling space agency had achieved it in less than eight years.

It was a win for the country, but also for the world as a whole. Even as NASA continued to send men to the moon — 12 in all, over the course of four years — it began working with other countries to achieve space-related goals.

By 1970, NASA already had collaborated with researchers in 70 different countries.

U.S. officials even began working with the Soviet Union on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1972.

That collaboration ended in a 1975 historic handshake in space and the first successful docking of two spacecrafts in orbit.

Fifty years later, NASA has continued to lean on international partners for support, the most famous example being the International Space Station, which launched in 1998 and involves more than a dozen different countries.

NASA now has more than 700 international agreements to further the understanding of the universe with nations that include Japan, France, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom.

And as NASA looks toward the future, to the next 50 years, those collaborations will only continue to grow, especially with the addition of commercial companies to the list of partners.

Space travel, NASA officials say, is no longer about conquering an area or winning a race. It is about working together to achieve a goal, to make scientific discoveries and to improve humankind.

Much more can be achieved together, they say, than apart.