the.com/moon landing

means The 1969 Apollo 11 mission in which humans first set foot on the Moon — the moment a species that started by throwing rocks managed to throw itself clear off the planet and stick the landing.

from Straightforward compound: 'moon,' from Old English 'mōna' (tracing back to an ancient root shared with 'month,' since the Moon was humanity's first calendar), plus 'landing,' from 'land,' the Old English word for solid ground. The phrase itself is 20th-century — coined once rocketry made the idea literal rather than poetic. NASA's own program name, Apollo, was the vivid part: borrowed from the Greek god of light and reason, chosen to sound suitably mythic for a very unmythic feat of engineering.