Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure by Dan Parry

PROLOGUE
What would the Moon be like?

While this question fascinated those back on Earth, for Neil Armstrong the Moon was playing no more than a supporting role. Here was a chance for man to achieve something beyond comparison. If it were successful, the Apollo 11 mission would demonstrate that humans, as a species, were capable of escaping from their planet and visiting somewhere a world away from home. It didn't matter much whether the Moon was made of brown rocks, grey dust or even green cheese. To Armstrong, all that really counted was landing safely and then coming home again, without letting anyone down in the attempt to do either.

Standing in the lunar module, the most fragile manned spacecraft ever built, Armstrong was flying at more than 3,000mph, five times faster than a passenger jet. There were no landing pads on the Moon, no ground crew to guide him down; 50,000 feet below him lay nothing more than an uncharted area that was pockmarked by rocks and craters and which was believed to be a little less dangerous than other uncharted areas. If he were to reach his designated target site, Neil would have to gradually reduce his speed to walking pace and then find a relatively benign area to touch down before his fuel ran out. There was little margin for error. Landing too fast on a landscape strewn with boulders could damage the spacecraft and potentially end any hope of returning home.
One way or the other, in the next 12 minutes it would be over and all the hand-wringing, the months of agonising expectation and the endless press questions could finally be laid to rest. The newspapers were fascinated by lunar landscapes. But while rocks and craters captured the media's attention, for a pilot they were to be avoided. As far as Neil was concerned, Apollo 11 wasn't about boxes of stones. Exploring the surface was secondary to the mission's prime objective. None of the early aviation pioneers, who had so inspired Neil as a boy, had regarded their greatest triumph to be a stroll beside their aircraft. Armstrong, like the Wrights, Earhart and Lindbergh before him, knew that nothing was more significant about a test-flight than safely completing it.
Standing beside Neil was Buzz Aldrin, and together the two men would have considered themselves to be flying horizontally face down had they not been in weightlessness. They were also travelling backwards, feet first, using the engine as a brake to reduce their speed. The gleaming white surfaces of their cramped cabin were bathed in sunlight, yet somehow the aura of a brandnew spaceship was personalised by the grubby ways of people. Handwritten notes were stuck on the dull grey instrument panels and here and there other personal items were secured by Velcro or held down by netting. Having taught himself to go to the Moon, man was bringing with him urine bags, food trays and doodles in margins.
While Buzz monitored the instruments, Neil looked through the triangular window in front of him. In timing their journey over the alien terrain below, he discovered with dismay that the crater known as Maskelyne-W had arrived early. They were three seconds ahead of themselves, and three seconds equated to three miles, which would take them beyond the edge of the landing zone. They would be coming down in an area Neil knew to be strewn with boulders, and in a spacecraft with walls so thin you could poke a pencil through them. He knew they would be lucky to avoid any damage. Luck wasn't enough. He had the facility to override the computer and fly the spacecraft manually but this could only be done in the closing stages of the descent. For the moment he must follow the flight-plan.
At 40,000 feet, Armstrong rotated the lunar module by 180 degrees so that he was no longer looking down at the Moon but staring up into space. By repositioning the spacecraft, which was operating under the call-sign Eagle , Neil enabled the landing radar to get a clearer view of the surface. Now that they were due