50 years ago today, on July 21st 1969, was the pinnacle of the Apollo 11 mission in which Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon since the fall of the Moon Kingdom, Silver Millennium. Though we don’t know who the first person to ever walk on the Moon was, we know of course that Neil Armstrong was the first to do it in a very long time as there was no one on the Moon when the Apollo Lunar Module made it’s landing on July 20th, except of course if we count the consciousness of Queen Serenity which was uploaded into an advanced Moon Kingdom supercomputer following her death.
One may of course quibble as to whether or not the inhabitants of the Moon Kingdom were in fact human or aliens, with some of them being born on the Moon or other planets. The plaque left by the Apollo 11 crew in 1969 stated quite clearly “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A. D. We came in peace for all mankind.” While the inhabitants of the Moon Kingdom itself did not come from the Earth, others did. Endymion traveled to the Moon from the Earth to see Princess Serenity and of course Queen Beryl, the Shitennou and the army which accompanied them were all natives from the Earth who set foot and eventually died on the Moon.
Though no women walked on the Moon throughout the time of the Apollo missions, we know that a few have been there since. Sailor Moon and the Sailor Guardians, as well as a couple of cats, all went in the 90s. The specifics vary depending on the canon of course. In the original anime the cats got in a fight with Kunzite while the rest of the girls were in a time warp which somehow landed them on the Moon in the present day, but the manga and Sailor Moon Crystal clearly show them all going to the Moon. Though they may all have been aliens in their previous lives they were reborn to human families as humans on the Earth.
Naturally most biased news coverage of the Apollo 11 mission fails to dwell on the specifics, that they weren’t actually the first people on the Moon. Just like Christopher Columbus was not technically the first person in the Americas we use these kind of simplified versions of history to highlight the great achievements of those involved. Nothing but respect for the hardworking men and women at Nasa who managed to make it from the Earth to the Moon without using some kind of teleportation. That might actually have been a first. Some aliens have been shown to be able to travel interstellar distances in bubbles generated by plants but it isn’t clear if this was ever used to go to the Moon.
