50 years since man’s ‘greatest achievement’

20 July 1969. Neil Armstrong had travelled 240,000 miles in 76 hours to land on the surface of the Moon. Millions were watching back home as he stepped out of the lunar lander and uttered some of the most famous words in history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Getting there was not easy. It took about a decade for 400,000 engineers and scientists to create the technology for the Apollo space programme.

At the time, computers were still new. The machines analysing the mission at NASA headquarters were big enough to fill a room. On board Armstrong’s spacecraft, the “Apollo Guidance Computer” was the size and shape of a suitcase. It was the most advanced “miniature” computer in the world. It navigated and landed the spacecraft using just four kilobytes of memory — that’s about 250,000 times less than a smartphone.

It was all worth it. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. Meanwhile, third crew member Michael Collins waited in the spacecraft, orbiting the Moon. He got them all home safely.

Was it the greatest scientific achievement of all time?

It was. Sending people to the Moon was the most ambitious project that humanity ever tried in history. It required thousands of people working on complicated tasks that had never been done before, and its success brought the whole world together in wonder. The fact that we achieved it with such early computing technology is, frankly, mind-boggling.

The greatest scientific achievement happened in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick (with help from Rosalind Franklin) discovered the structure of DNA. Understanding the building blocks of life has led to many medical breakthroughs in the decades since, and it will save countless lives in the future. We should be most proud of this milestone.