Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins have been out of quarantine since the end of July, and they’re now doing a world tour called “Giant Step” — visiting 22 countries in 38 days.

I’ve been following it in the newspapers, and what strikes me most is how universal the reaction seems to be. This wasn’t just America’s achievement in the eyes of the rest of the world. When crowds gather in London and Mexico City and Tokyo and Bombay and Lagos, they’re not congratulating America the way you’d congratulate a rival who won a game. They’re celebrating something they feel part of.

Armstrong has apparently said, when crowds cheered “We made it” instead of “You made it,” that it felt right. The first Moon landing belongs to humanity, not just to the United States. The astronauts are American but the achievement is a human one. We went, collectively, as a species that had looked at the Moon for a million years and finally touched it.

Aldrin has been more emotional in the tour than he was in the public coverage of the mission itself. He cried at a reception in Amsterdam. He’s been talking about the beauty of the Moon’s desolation in terms that go beyond the engineering. The experience seems to have affected him deeply in ways that the technical debriefings don’t fully capture.

Collins is, by all accounts, the most comfortable of the three in the public role. He’s witty, self-deprecating about his status as the one who didn’t land, warm with crowds. He told a press conference that he wasn’t as lonely orbiting the Moon alone as people assume — he said he had the whole Earth to talk to, even when the radios were quiet.

The three of them together on this tour are a unit in a way that most people don’t expect from test pilots, who are often described as emotionally reserved. They went through something together that nobody else in history has experienced. That creates a bond that press tours and state dinners can’t dissolve.

I’m glad the world is getting to see them. I hope the world understands what they represent: not American superiority, but human capability. We can do hard things if we commit to them.

We can go to the Moon and come back.