Photos: The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing

For millennia, we could only gaze upon the Moon in wonder. Mysterious, symbiotic and tantalisingly close, the idea of humans setting foot upon another world was fantastical.

Then, in May 1961, in the heat of the geopolitical rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, President John Kennedy declared that we would be going there after all: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."

This photo, from earlier that May, shows Kennedy (centre, foreground) watching a television broadcast of a space flight by astronaut Alan Shepard, accompanied by others including Vice President Lyndon Johnson (left, foreground) and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (right).

Photo credit: Cecil Stoughton in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.