by Aldrin A Wilding-West

Created on: February 13, 2011   Last Updated: February 15, 2011

The Apollo program was the culmination of arguably the largest and highest profile single technological endeavour the human race has ever embarked upon.

The United States, in the form of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), won the race to the moon when the Apollo 11 mission touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969, achieving and surpassing President John F Kennedy's 1961 goal of “landing a man on the moon” and bringing him safely back to Earth “by the end of this decade”.

On that momentous day, the 'Eagle' Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) delivered Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon. “Houston. Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.” Six and a half hours later, Neil Armstrong descended the ladder of the LEM, and becoming the first human to stand on the surface of another world, uttered the words that have become engraved in not only space exploration history, but the history of the human race as a whole. “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Apollo program followed on from the Mercury and Gemini missions which put first one and then two astronauts into orbit around the Earth and paved the way for unmanned and then manned missions to the moon. The missions were launched from the Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre, and overseen by Flight Director Gene Kranz and a massive team of mission controllers.

The mighty Saturn I, Saturn IB, and ultimately the Saturn V rockets were used to lift the weight of the Command Module (CM), Service Module (SM) and the Lunar Module (LM, or Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)), into Earth orbit. The first missions, during the period February to August 1966, were designated Apollo-Saturn (AS), missions AS201, AS202 and AS203. These unmanned, suborbital missions tested and demonstrated, amongst many other things, the capability of the Saturn V rocket stages and the safety of the Command Module re-entry heat shield.

The AS204 mission, later officially named Apollo 1 in memory of its ill-fated crew, was due to be the first manned mission in February 1967. A multi Earth orbit mission, planned to further test the Command and Service Module (CSM), ended abruptly during a launch rehearsal on 27 January, when a still undetermined electrical fault caused a fatal fire in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the Command Module cabin, killing all three crew members, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward 'Ed' White and Roger

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