Apollo vet Sy Liebergot shows Ars how NASA got men safely to the Moon and back.

Lee Hutchinson - Nov 1, 2012 1:45 am UTC

Video clips from Podcast "13 Minutes to the Moon"

How the first moon landing was saved. The full story of the people who made Apollo 11 happen and prevented it from going badly wrong. Theme music by Hans Zimmer. Episodes released weekly.

• Updated: weekly
• Episodes available: indefinitely

Your handy reference to each station in the Apollo Mission Control room.

COMMENT:

"Name one thing that has come from "space exploration" that we couldn't do without. Tang?"

You probably misunderstood.

Well, many did.

Background of the problem:

Sweeney had the devil of a time during his bombing run. Nagasaki was his secondary target, and he had reluctantly headed for it when he could find no break in the cloud cover over his primary target of Kokura. When he reached Nagasaki, and finally found a brief opportunity to drop "Fat Man," because of where it was released, it ended up detonating over the industrial heart of the city, instead of the vast, sprawling suburbs. These suburbs happened to be separated from the industrial heart of the city by hills and valleys.

Even though "Fat Man," a plutonium device, was about twice as powerful as the uranium 235 bomb that had completely destroyed Hiroshima three days before--"Fat Man's" detonation only yielded about half as many casualties.

You see, for a nuclear weapon to be a credible deterrent, it must be understood that the bomb will be placed at a precise, predetermined location.

The German V2 had proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a warhead-tipped ballistic missile could defeat any anti-aircraft defense anyone could devise. A fleet of fighters planes, indeed even fighter jets, and concentric circles of the most powerful antiaircraft cannons ever developed could not stop a V2 from dropping its payload. And it could do so with with no more than a few seconds warning.

Where a bomber could not get through, a V2 could. It had proved unstoppable during the war.

But V2s weren't accurate at the relatively short range from Peenemünde to London. The problem was vastly more formidable at a distance like that between Washington and Moscow, for instance.

And that fact reveals the value of space exploration.

In 1957, the Soviet Union put up a small radio emitting satellite into low earth orbit with their version of the new, improved V2 rocket. Sputnik orbited the earth in such a way that it traveled over nearly every major city on the globe before its batteries died and its elliptical orbit decayed and brought it back to the surface. People in New York and Virginia, et al, looked up at the sky in terror as Londoners had just 12 years before.

But the Soviets did not demonstrate they could bring Sputnik down at a precise, predetermined location. Their V2s were not credible threats yet.

The Soviets needed to demonstrate that they could put up a Sputnik, and drop it directly over the Washington Monument. America needed to prove they could launch a V2 into orbit and drop it over Red Square.

The race was on.

America, being populated by the greatest marketers the world had ever produced (think Kellogg's Cereal, Elvis and the Beatles here), decided to beat the Soviets by winning the Hearts and Minds of the world. The USSR made no pretense: their space program was run entirely by their military. The US decided to pretend that its own "space program" was a non-military civilian venture.

NASA was born.

Never mind that NASA inherited its missile technology program from the classified military program. Never mind that all of America's astronauts were Air Force officers.

It was still sold as a civilian-government venture. And lots of people bought it.

Heh.

But its primary goal was to show that it could launch a missile into orbit, and bring down a payload at a precise location. By 1961, the US was beginning to demonstrate success. Allan Shepard completed one orbit of the earth. John Glenn orbited the earth 3 times in 1962. But when their capsules splashed down it was only within about 50 miles of target.

But we and the Soviets were getting closer.

John Kennedy, a consummate Cold Warrior, began to think of the Moon as the "ultimate high ground."

The idea of putting up orbiting missile platforms was thought to be the Checkmate move in the race for effective nuclear weapons delivery systems.

The problem with orbiting platforms was they were just too damned provocative. There was just no way to put one up in orbit and pretend it was for a peaceful or benign purpose. We would never allow the Soviets to put up a missile platform over us, and likewise, they would be willing to go to war if we ever tried to put one up over them.

Hence, the Moon.

The Moon isn't in geosynchronous orbit over earth, but it is tidal locked. Moscow slides underneath of it once every day. Whoever got to the Moon first could then threaten to build or secretly build a missile base, and achieve the same checkmate that an orbiting missile platform would achieve.

This was Kennedy's aim, and this was the urgency behind the project.

The problem was, just as Neil Armstrong was misspeaking the most famous sentence ever uttered from the surface of the Moon, the defense department contractors had perfected the solid rocket fuel Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, the US could launch a low maintenance missile from a silo in Iowa, and it could drop its payload over Red Square about 30 minutes later.

The problem with the Moon is it's really, really, really far away. 250,000 miles.

Most people think of the relationship between the earth and the moon as this:

O__o

In reality, it is more like this:

O___0

It takes days to go that far.

30 minutes, 1 1/2 days. It was a no brainer. We didn't need missile bases on the Moon anymore.

So, to the dismay of everyone who had bought into the marketing that made everyone believe NASA was a cross between Queen Isabella, Lewis & Clark and Sir Edmund Hillary, the astronauts played a couple of rounds of golf on he Moon, and then left, never to return.

You're right that there's nothing of value on the Moon.

But there are other reasons for exploring space and improving rocket technology.

The greatest goal within our reach today is SBSP, of course. SBSP is the very essence and sine qua non of man's future.

But there are many other reasons as well.

They were looking for a direct route to India, and found oh so much more back in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

It's not a waste of time. It never has been, even with our shifting priorities, needs and goals as a people and a nation.

Men will continue to venture into space whether you think it's a waste of time and resources or not.

And it's not.

But it's never going to be what you expected.

COMMENT: "Space exploration" is government waste on steroids.

REPLY:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
"But what...is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Attributed to Bill Gates, 1981, but believed to be an urban legend.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." -- Lee DeForest, inventor.
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." -- A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." -- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With the Wind."
"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." -- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." -- Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.
"It will be years -- not in my time -- before a woman will become Prime Minister." -- Margaret Thatcher, 1974.
"I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone." -- Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1869.
"With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market." -- Business Week, August 2, 1968.
"That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react--to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work. The remark was retracted in the July 17, 1969 issue.
"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." -- Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.
"Ours has been the first, and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality." -- Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.
"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." -- Workers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932.
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.
"There will never be a bigger plane built." -- A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Attributed to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899, but known to be an urban legend.
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." -- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.
"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." -- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, the first men to land on the moon, plant the U.S. flag on the lunar surface, July 20, 1969. Photo was made by a 16mm movie camera inside the lunar module, shooting at one frame per second. (Nasa via AP) Remembering Tranquility Base. It’s been 48 years since we heard those famous words announcing that | Read More »

Panorama view of Apollo 16 lunar surface photos as lunar module pilot Charles M. Duke Jr. is photographed by commander John W. Young collecting lunar samples at Station No. 1 during the first moonwalk of the mission at the Descartes landing site. The panoramas were built by combining Apollo 16 images starting with frame AS16-114-18416 thru end frame AS16-114-18431. The panoramic images received minimal retouching by NASA imagery specialists, including the removal of lens flares that were problematic in stitching together the individual frames and blacking out the sky to the lunar horizon. These adjustments were made based on observations of the Moon walkers who reported that there are no stars visible in the sky due to the bright lunar surface reflection of the Sun. With significant overlap and time delay between frames, it is possible to create two different versions of this panorama with astronaut Charles Duke (Apollo 16) in the center (jsc2012e052598) and both in the center and walking away to the right (jsc2012e052599).

Explore this photo album by NASA Johnson on Flickr!

Astronaut Walter Schirra's decision to bring a Swedish-made Hasselblad on his Mercury spaceflight set the course for NASA's choice of the camera for the Apollo lunar program. //

Schirra's was a much more sophisticated — and pricey — choice than the simple Ansco Autoset that John Glenn bought for $40 at a Cocoa Beach, Florida, drug store. Glenn used it to take pictures from orbit on Friendship 7 in February 1962. The Hasselblad retailed for about $500 and used a much larger negative than Glenn's 35 mm camera. It also sported interchangeable, Carl Zeiss lenses and removable film magazines. //

Schirra acknowledged that his six orbits in October 1962 didn't leave much time for photography, but that on the next flight the following spring, with 22 orbits, astronaut Gordon Cooper "got some absolutely gorgeous pictures," said Schirra.

Hasselblad's Chris Cooze says until then, the space agency was so focused on the technical side of spaceflight that photography was something of an afterthought.

He says it was in 1965, when NASA released stunning photos of Ed White's spacewalk on Gemini 4, that Hasselblad "put two and two together" and realized the pictures were taken with one of their cameras.

"Then they got in touch with NASA to see if there was anything that we could cooperate on," Cooze says. //

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module landed with two cameras, but only one went outside — carried by Neil Armstrong. That explains why nearly every photograph of an astronaut on the surface during that first landing are of Armstrong crewmate Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Armstrong had the only camera for nearly the entire two-and-a-half hours the two walked around the Sea of Tranquility. //

"There were no directions to take photographs of each other, which I always find really interesting," she says. "You're going to travel all the way to the moon and nobody ever thought, 'Gee, we should take pictures of people.' " //

Moon rocks, it turns out, are more valuable than cameras. So, the astronauts were instructed to pack the exposed film but leave behind the Hasselblads.

And, that's where they remain today, untouched, at the six Apollo landing sites.

Apollo Guidance Computer software engineer, "invented" virtual machines for AGC (which explains how it was able to prioritize during the 12-02 alarms in Apollo 11 landing).

Join us for a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, featuring a 363-foot Saturn V rocket projected on the east face of the Washington Monument and a special "Apollo 50: Go for the Moon" show. This presentation was conceived and commissioned by the National Air and Space Museum, and is made possible through a partnership with the U.S. Department of the Interior and 59 Productions.

On July 16 through 20, the projection will be live from 9:30 pm to 11:30 pm.

It all builds up to July 19 and 20, when we will also present "Apollo 50: Go for the Moon," a 17-minute show that will combine full-motion projection mapping artwork and archival footage to recreate the launch of Apollo 11 and tell the story of the first Moon landing. The show will unfold on the face of the Washington Monument and supporting screens, including a 40-foot-wide recreation of the famous Kennedy Space Center countdown clock.

The free show will run at 9:30 pm, 10:30 pm, and 11:30 pm on Friday, July 19, and Saturday, July 20.

Despite what everyone says about the power of modern devices, they’re nowhere near as capable as the landmark early NASA system. //

How do you define power?” O’Brien asks. “It’s great to say, ‘This machine is so powerful.’ What do you mean by that?”

For him, it’s not about the raw number of transistors, but the machine fitting the mission. Capability, not power. “We had to get to the moon, get down, and get back, autonomously. They hit their targets of being accurate after a quarter million miles, hitting a target within 500 to 600 feet and one-tenth of a foot a second,” O’Brien said. “And you go, ‘My watch is more powerful.’ No, it is not.”

Religious faith always animated the American quest to explore the heavens.

Fifty years ago this Saturday, after Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar module had landed in the Sea of Tranquility, Buzz Aldrin took to the communication system and sent a message back to the ground crew on earth. “I would like to request a few moments of silence,” he asked. “I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.”

Then, NASA censored the most significant spiritual event in the history of space exploration.

After Aldrin ended the communication, he read a verse from the Gospel of John: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.” He then opened two small packages containing consecrated bread and wine from his church in Texas. Aldrin poured the wine into a chalice. “In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” he later recalled. As Neil Armstrong looked on in silence, Aldrin took communion. The first foods ever prepared or consumed on the moon were the Body and Blood of Christ. //

From the beginning, religious faith animated the American quest to explore the heavens. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy concluded his famous “we choose to go to the moon” speech by asking “God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Kennedy embarked on that journey to win a space race that pitted the God-fearing United States against godless Soviet communism.

Imagine this: It is July 16, 1969, and hundreds of thousands of people are camped out near the Kennedy Space Center overnight waiting for the launch of Apollo 11. Hundreds of millions more around the world are glued to their TVs and radios, awaiting the magical moment. It’s a bright sunny morning and Apollo 11 is gleaming on the launch pad as technicians check the | Read More »

The second day of Apollo 11 was a true journey into outer space. Having left behind the earth, gotten a ‘night’s’ sleep, and with the moon more than a day in the future, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were occupied with checklists and a great many adjustments, many of which were manually performed, as well as a mid-course correction burn of the engine. | Read More »

The landing sites that were planned for the lost Apollo missions are still waiting for the footsteps of human beings, //

However, three more missions to the moon - Apollos 18, 19 and 20 - could have been flown, but instead were canceled. All of the hardware for these missions had already been built, and trained astronauts were ready to fly. The savings of those cancellations amounted to only a few tens of millions of dollars.

An article in Seeker suggests that what was lost by this must be one of the most outrageous, bureaucratic decisions in space history.

"If the Apollo 18-20 flights were realized, school kids today could be looking at stunning photographs taken from the mountain-rimmed floors of the young impact craters Copernicus or Tycho, or the terrain on the far side of the moon, or the frozen volcanic lava flows from billions of years ago."

success of the Apollo missions to the moon would have inspired the United States to mount more voyages of discovery, not to be so anxious to bring the program to a close that it would cancel missions for which hardware had already been built.

However, the stress of the Vietnam War, racial tensions, and the efforts of some unscrupulous politicians to paint the space program as a drain of money that would better be spent on social programs contributed to Apollo's early close.

William Gerstenmaier is no longer leading the way //

The head of NASA’s human exploration program has been replaced within the agency, just months after Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA to send humans to the Moon within the next five years. The move is the latest in a couple of high-profile executive changes NASA has made in recent months as the agency strives to return humans to the lunar surface. //

Another high profile NASA employee, Bill Hill, has also been reassigned — from deputy associate administrator of human exploration to another special advisor position. Effectively, NASA’s first and second in command of humans in space have been replaced at the same time.

Nearly 50 years have passed since the Apollo programme first delivered astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

In that time, millions of words have been written about that mission, and the pictures the astronauts and cosmonauts captured on the race to our nearest neighbour have become iconic images.

But there’s been one problem for space enthusiasts poring over the images captured in orbit and on the lifeless lunar surface – they only reveal its beauty in two dimensions. As spectacular as they are, they can only do so much to make you feel like you’re there.

But amid the thousands of photos taken on Nasa's space missions, some of the images created were intended to make the viewer feel they were right there - stereo photographs that have only now come to light, thanks to a new book masterminded by Queen's Brian May.

“The Mission Moon book came about because we’re all kind of nuts about the Moon shot, and it all seems like yesterday to us old people. It’s 50 years ago – incredible,” he says.

“No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”

The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could easily be turned into 3D images.“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those.

“I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”

May can add inventor to his long list of achievements, as well. At the back of each copy of the book is his patented Owl stereoscopic viewer, a pair of plastic lenses that help create the 3D effect. The Owl is the result of May collecting viewers since the early days of Queen, and combining the best bits of various designs.

“For me, it’s a nice coming together,” says May. “It is stereoscopic work, and it’s also astrophysics and it’s astronautics, and to bring them together is great. It wasn’t on my own, we have a great team. David Eicher wrote the text, he’s a wonderful writer and editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine, and as a team we put this together.“

The guy who wrote our afterword – Jim Lovell [Apollo 13 crew member] – said this is the closest you can to feeling like you’re there.”Mission Moon 3D by David J Eicher and Brian May is published by the London Stereoscopic Company on 23 October. You can also visit the book's site, www.missionmoon3-d.com

In the first of BBC Future’s stories recounting the Apollo program in 50 numbers, we look at the people who helped make the Moon missions reality.

Neil Armstrong was one of Nasa’s most accomplished pilots. As he descended towards the lunar surface on 20 July 1969, the success or failure of the first Moon landing depended on the skills, reactions and expertise of this one man. With a boulder field ahead of him, alarms sounding and fuel running low, he guided the spacecraft to the ground.

But in the few talks and interviews Armstrong gave about the landing, he was always modest about the achievement. He pointed instead to the thousands of people who had made the mission possible.

At its height, Nasa estimates that a total of 400,000 men and women across the United States were involved in the Apollo programme. The number includes everyone from astronauts to mission controllers, contractors to caterers, engineers, scientists, nurses, doctors, mathematicians and programmers.

To see how Nasa arrived at that figure, consider a single aspect of Apollo 11 – the lunar landing itself. Armstrong’s right hand man was Buzz Aldrin. On the ground, there was a room full of mission controllers. Behind this core team of 20-30 (per shift) were hundreds of engineers in Houston and a team at MIT in Boston advising on the computer alarms.

Mission Control was supported by communications ground stations around the world, the engineering team at the Grumman Corporation that built the lander, and all their subcontractors. Add in support staff – from senior managers to the people selling the coffee – and already there are thousands involved. Multiply that by all the different components of the endeavour – from rockets to spacesuits, communications to fuel, design to training, launch to splashdown…and 400,000 seems an almost modest figure.

Teasel Muir-Harmony, Apollo Spacecraft Curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “Each of the [Apollo 11] crew members was born in 1930, they all have military experience, they're all pilots and I believe they're all Christian – so they fit a very narrow set of criteria that was required at the time to be an astronaut.”

At 38, Armstrong was the joint youngest Apollo commander (with Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan). Charlie Duke, the 36-year-old Apollo 16 lunar lander pilot, was the youngest Moonwalker. The oldest man to walk on the Moon was America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard. By the time of his Apollo 14 mission in 1971, he was 47.

The record for the oldest man in space is held by the same astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth. John Glenn was 77 when he took part in a nine-day mission on space shuttle Discovery in 1998.

Thirty three men flew 11 Apollo missions. Of these, 27 men reached the Moon, 24 orbited the Moon – but only 12 walked on the surface. They represented “mankind” and had the challenge of conveying the experience to a global audience.

No-one knew what Neil Armstrong was going to say when he stepped down onto the lunar surface. He’d not discussed it with anyone, although his words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” could not have been more poetic or appropriate if they had been conceived by a committee of speech writers.

But what do you say when you’re the second man on the Moon? Buzz Aldrin summed-up the view of the barren lunar landscape perfectly in just two words: “magnificent desolation.”
All eight astronauts – along with six Soviet cosmonauts – are commemorated with a plaque left on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 15.

Looking at the coverage of Apollo, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a solely (white) male endeavour. The astronauts were all men, the mission controllers were all men, even the TV anchors were male. The only women seen on TV were the astronauts’ wives.

However, as we now know, there were thousands of women behind the scenes supporting Apollo and essential to its success. There were secretaries and nurses, mathematicians and programmers; women sewed together the spacesuits and wound the wires for the Apollo guidance computers.

Even so, the space programme wasn’t geared-up for women.

“Even when they built new buildings they forgot there were going to be more and more women as workers,” says Morgan. “The first building I worked in only had one ladies room in the whole three-storey building - they had to convert a men's room on each floor to a ladies’ room…so we had ladies’ rooms with urinals.”