Apollo Moon landing: The 13 minutes that defined a century
Media playback is unsupported on your deviceThe BBC World Service launches a special podcast series on Monday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Called, it details the final phase of the descent to the lunar surface - and the months and years that led up to those extraordinary moments when the world held its breath.
The very first of our interviews for the series was with Michael Collins who, along with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, completed the crew of Apollo 11 on the mission that saw human beings land on the Moon for the very first time in the summer of 1969. As Armstrong and Aldrin descended from 50,000ft above the Moon, radio communications with Earth broke down; the lunar module was running long on its target landing site; the onboard computer - on which the astronauts absolutely depended - started flashing up error codes that the crew had never before seen; and the in the final few seconds, it looked like Armstrong and Aldrin might actually run out of fuel.
Even as a schoolchild, I think I understood that if people could fire human beings off the surface of our planet, and land them on another world, then surely anything - anything at all - must be possible.
When President John F Kennedy set his nation on course for the Moon, to arrive in the course of a single decade, Nasa had to scrabble together a workforce capable of delivering that promise. They hired quickly and often without interview, choosing instead to get people who had the requisite skills and then evaluate them on the job.
In mission control someone was always watching, even if you weren't sure who and, as attention turned from the Gemini's orbital flights to the business of Project Apollo and a landing on the Moon, Steve was assigned to the Guidance, Navigation and Control team. These were the people responsible for shaping the spacecraft's path as it flew through space.
In the midst of Armstrong's and Aldrin's descent in those final 13 minutes the crew and their essential support team in mission control were beset by problem after problem. The on-board computer display and keyboard together resembled a giant calculator and its rudimentary display was able to flash up only a series of numbers to display information and help identify problems.
In the 15 seconds that passed from Armstrong and Aldrin first spotting the alarm, Steve Bales talked with his backroom support team, desperately searching for a response to Armstrong's urgent question. It told them that the computer was struggling but still working and able to perform its mission-critical tasks.
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