It's one of the most immediately recognizable photographic sequences ever made: Ralph Morse's dizzying pentaptych capturing the July 16, 1969, liftoff of Apollo 11.
Here, in five narrow frames, we witness—and celebrate—a distillation of the creativity, the intellectual rigor, the engineering prowess and the fearlessness that defined the best of the Space Race.
[See the complete LIFE special issue on the Apollo 11 triumph, 'To the Moon and Back'].
Morse, now 97 years old, recently spoke with LIFE.com, and briefly described how the sequence came about.
"You have to realize," he says, "that the rocket had to go through the camera, in a sense.
It took me two years to get NASA to agree to let me make this shot.
The camera was wired into the launch countdown, and at around minus-four seconds the camera started shooting something like ten frames per second. »