Apollo 11 launched this week in 1969, carrying the first men to land on the Moon.
In the months leading up to the historic take-off, Nasa put the crew through gruelling, relentless simulations in order to prepare them – and BBC Tomorrow’s World paid a visit.
“There’s not much room in here, and these couches are very uncomfortable,” said the BBC’s John Parry as he sat suspended upside down, alongside James Burke, in the Apollo space capsule simulator at the Nasa space research centre in California in August 1968. “But it doesn’t matter very much,” he conceded, “because when you are in space your body doesn’t weigh anything at all.”
BBC Tomorrow’s World had gone to see how Nasa was devoting vast sums of money and huge amounts of effort trying to mimic what the astronauts of Apollo 11 would see, hear and experience in space.
In 1962, President John F Kennedy had committed the US to the ambitious goal of landing a man on the Moon, and bringing him safely back to Earth.
Since then, the space agency had marshalled an extraordinary amount of people and technology, not to mention ingenuity and perseverance, to a project that would ultimately, in July 1969, propel astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins into space – and the history books.
