A story of engineers who tried to reach the heavens

Forty years ago today Bren and me had just had our first wedding anniversary, and we were heading off for our first holiday together to a little resort called 'The Devon Coast Country Club', near Paignton. There was great excitement for us at the thought of a free holiday, courtesy of Bren's folks, but also because the Apollo 11 space rocket had taken off successfully from Cape Kennedy, Florida, at the start of the first attempt to land a man on the Moon. The DCCC had set up a special television room, complete with giant screen and 24 hour blackout, so that guests could drop in at any time to watch the historic proceedings. I think it was the Thursday evening (21st) when the room gradually became packed with just about everybody on the site wanting to be there to see the first man step onto the surface of the moon.

As a boy I had watched in awe as Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space and the first to orbit the moon. I had also watched the various Apollo missions and their progress towards this amazing moment. Just thirty months earlier the missions were seriously jeopardised when a fire killed three astronauts on the command module of the Saturn B rocket during tests. Now here we were, watching this amazing event in world history unfold. For a spectacular moment, as Neil Armstrong took his 'one small step - one giant leap' we could turn our thoughts away from a disastrous war in Asia, from shameful civil rights violations, from the threat of Russian invasion, and from the dreadful death of the president some years earlier who had sanctioned this project to put a man on the moon.

The writer J. Bainbridge summed up Apollo as "a story of engineers who tried to reach the heavens". You can read Dr Christopher Riley's article about the magic of Apollo here.