Apollo 11: half a century on

On 20 July 1969, history was made when the first humans ever to set foot on another planetary body away from Earth opened the hatch of Apollo 11’s fragile four-legged Lunar Module and took their “giant leap for mankind”. The two men – described the following day in the New York Times as “Mr [Neil] Armstrong and his co-pilot Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. of the Air Force” – were captured on a television camera that beamed their every move back to a global audience of 600 million. Their first actions on the Moon were to set up a further television camera, plant the American flag, collect rock samples, deploy scientific instrumentation and test their mobility in the unfamiliar, low-gravity environment.

While Neil Armstrong was a civilian aeronautical engineer, his lunar companion ‘Buzz’ Aldrin (who was to later legally change his name to his childhood moniker) was a military man who had served as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, flying 66 combat missions. With degrees in mechanical engineering (United States Military Academy) and astronautics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Aldrin had already been into space on the Gemini programme in 1966, when he clocked up five hours of extra-vehicular activity (EVA), as well as testing the docking procedures that would later become crucial to Apollo 11’s success.