From the engineers at Daytona Beach's GE plant, to the hundreds of tradesmen who built the space center and launch pads, Apollo 11 remains a point of local pride.

He’d already told the world that the Eagle had landed. Had famously dedicated a giant leap for mankind.

A few days later, on Apollo 11’s long trip home from the Sea of Tranquility, 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong spoke directly to some of your neighbors.

From a command module pointed toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, Armstrong first properly acknowledged the “giants of science who have preceded this effort.”

Next, the first man on the moon, who’d watched the monumental effort unfold among the palms and mangroves of East Central Florida, who’d witnessed the widest variety of goal-oriented tasks the world had ever known, thanked the workers — from ditch diggers to engineers, from plumbers to rocket scientists, more than 400,000 in all.

“We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you.”

Some 3,000 of those workers were in Daytona Beach, working for General Electric. Hundreds of others from this area commuted south from Volusia County daily to Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral, working on the blossoming space center and launch pads. Many others worked and lived down there and eventually ended up in Volusia and Flagler counties.

This 50th anniversary celebration of man’s first landing on the moon — considered the most astounding accomplishment in the history of aviation, if not all of recorded history — has given those long-ago workers a chance to reflect on their roles in Neil Armstrong’s giant leap, a leap made possible by millions upon millions of small steps before it.