The Apollo 11 mission captivated audiences across the globe. Blastoff was a major televised event, and live broadcast of the arrival four days later, on July 20, 1969, was viewed by more than 500 million people. The source of some of the most indelible images of the twentieth century, the lunar footage was shot with a special television camera made to withstand the extreme forces of the launch and temperature fluctuations, and designed to transmit information across the long distance from the Moon to the Earth.