Bold, adventurous, unwavering, brave - it was July 20, 1969 when across the world people stopped what they were doing and fixed their attention on heroic astronauts Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin as they became the first humans to land on the Moon.

The events of that epic day became etched in our memories for all time.  The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961.   The spirit of human ingenuity nearly 10 years in the making was on full display that fateful day the Eagle landed – a sense of accomplishment like no other in the history of the world.

In total, there were six trips to the Moon that resulted in a lunar landing, each one just as courageous and spirited as any of the others.

And then the strangest of things happened - the world decided events 225,000 miles away just were not all that impressive or interesting.  After all, it really isn’t all that exciting watching someone drive around in a buggy making tracks in some cosmic dust.

Flash forward 40 years: trips to the Moon are an afterthought in most minds, space travel became more interesting in a video game or on the big screen, and the only time “NASA” comes into the discussion is during a catastrophe or some budgetary discussion on CSPAN.

Until now…

Previously it was believed the Moon had less water than a dry dessert during drought conditions.  When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back samples of moon rocks.  The moon rocks were analyzed for signs of water bound to minerals present in the rocks; while trace amounts of water were detected, these were assumed to be contamination from Earth, because the containers the rocks came back in had leaked.

"I was hoping we'd see a flash or a flare," one observer, who was demonstrating a telescope at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, told The Associated Press.

"I can't see anything," TODAY host Matt Lauer said during NBC's live coverage of the crash.

The aim of the $79 million mission was to send two spacecraft — a spent rocket stage and an instrument-equipped "shepherding spacecraft" — down into a crater near the Moon's south pole at about 5,600 mph (9,000 kilometers per hour) and see if the impacts threw up water ice.  This experiment forever transformed previous misconceptions about water existing on the lunar surface.

That belief was confirmed on November 13, 2009, when Scientists revealed that studies of the LCROSS mission indicated the dust and data collected from the experiment contains a significant amount of water-ice and water vapor.

Scientists say this finding is a huge discovery as it could provide a water supply for astronauts on the moon in the future.