Here On Earth

The little-known story behind the Apollo 11 party pictures taken for TIME in 1969

- Olivia B. Waxman

TO PHOTOGRAPH A MOON MISSION, THE OBVIOUS direction to point your camera would be up. But David Burnett, a 22-year-old photographer who was based out of TIME’s Miami bureau, instead zoomed in on the ordinary Americans who camped out to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts lift off for the moon on July 16, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A few of his pictures appeared in the July 25, 1969, issue, accompanying the cover story on the moon landing, but the vast majority of the photos he took that day—of revelers parked on the side of the highway near the Indian River in Titusville, Fla., cooking over fires and playing folk music on guitars—were not published. Now, 50 years later, several of those images are making their first appearance in the pages of TIME. “It was the most unorganized organized event I think I’ve ever been to,” Burnett recalls.