July 20: The Impossible Keeps Trying
There are dates that reach. July 20 has, on at least three occasions across the twentieth century, been the date on which human beings attempted something they were not certain they could survive — and found out, in very different ways, what certainty was worth.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing a kilogram of plastic explosive under a table in the Wolf’s Lair, Adolf Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia. He then excused himself from the room. The bomb detonated. Hitler was alive. A heavy oak table leg had absorbed part of the blast. Someone had moved the briefcase. The margin between success and failure was, depending on how you measure it, a few centimeters and a piece of furniture.
The conspirators, centered in the German military’s reserve command in Berlin, had designed an elaborate follow-up plan called Operation Valkyrie, intended to seize control of the German state within hours of the assassination. When confirmation of Hitler’s death failed to arrive, the plan hesitated. That hesitation was fatal. By evening, SS units had regained control. Stauffenberg was shot in a courtyard just after midnight. Nearly 5,000 people were eventually executed in the purge that followed. The July 20 plot was, in retrospect, the closest the German resistance came — and the closest the war came to ending from within.
Twenty-five years later, almost to the hour, Neil Armstrong descended a nine-rung ladder from the lunar module Eagle and set foot on the Sea of Tranquility. It was July 20, 1969, 10:56 PM Eastern time. The sentence he said — “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — was slightly garbled in transmission. He had meant to say “one small step for a man.” The article was lost in static. It barely mattered. 600 million people were watching on television. The surface was described as fine and powdery. The footprints, Armstrong later noted, would likely last a million years in the absence of wind.
The Apollo 11 mission was the direct product of a political decision made eight years earlier, under a president who wanted to win a race against a country that had launched the first satellite and the first human into orbit. The science was real. The engineering was extraordinary. The geopolitics were the engine. That combination — genuine achievement driven by competitive terror — is the twentieth century in miniature.
Seven years after Apollo 11, on July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars — the first spacecraft to successfully land on another planet and remain operational. Its instruments searched, inconclusively, for signs of biological activity in the Martian soil. The results remain debated. The photographs it sent back showed a rust-colored desert under a salmon sky. They were the first images ever taken on the surface of Mars, and they looked, in some unsettling way, like somewhere a person might eventually stand.
Three July 20ths. A bomb that should have worked. A ladder descended on a world that had never known footsteps. A photograph of somewhere else, arriving from 140 million miles away.
The common thread is not success. It is the decision to attempt — and the peculiar way the calendar keeps handing that decision back.