At 2.56pm NZ time on July 21st 1969 New Zealanders listened as the first man landed on the moon. 40 years on we look back at what is regarded as mankind's finest achievement.
If man's first moon landing had been scripted as a Hollywood blockbuster, bursting with drama and danger, it could not have been better written.
Despite years of planning and training, a multi-billion budget and America's best scientific and aeronautical brains behind the project, the Apollo 11 moon landing 40 years ago very nearly went wrong. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, 38, had just 15 seconds of fuel left when he over-rode an on-board computer and manually flew the lunar module Eagle in search of a safe landing spot on the crater-strewn surface of the moon.
The Eagle's crude, on-board computer, with less grunt than today's mobile phone, was overloaded with tasks and was guiding the lunar module towards a vast boulder-strewn crater. As the Eagle approached the moon, alarm lights began to flash. Taking instruction from ground control in Houston, Armstrong took control.
Houston, and nearly a billion people watching on TV, held their breath. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, broadcasting live, knew Armstrong had deviated from his flight path; Armstrong was too busy flying to explain.
Then, with less than a minute of fuel left, the astronaut spotted a small, flat space.
When the Eagle's four legs settled gently in a fine layer of charcoal-like lunar dust, Armstrong and his fellow astronaut Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, 39, made history on Earth and in space as being the first men to land on the moon, witnessed by a transfixed radio and TV audience of billions of people.
Although thousand of miles away, New Zealanders were no less zealous about Apollo 11's daring mission. In the lead-up to the moon landing, Kiwis invented space-age noms de plume for their Golden Kiwi lottery tickets. Local shops ran out of batteries for transistors as New Zealanders prepared to live the moment the Eagle touched down through the radio broadcast.
No one was going to miss out on being part of man's greatest adventure. Outwardly, Armstrong's coolness and control didn't falter. The only hint that the module commander was under pressure was his heartbeat, monitored by Houston, which rose from a normal 70 beats a minute to 160.
Then came Armstrong's first words after a sweat-inducing few minutes: "Engine arm off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
In Houston, and around the world, earthlings erupted, cheering, clapping and crying.
Houston's reply said it all: "Roger ... Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thanks a lot ... be advised there are lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world."
It was indeed the moment the world had been waiting for, a moment cherished by hundreds of thousands of employees who had worked relentlessly on the US$29 billion Apollo progamme since President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge in 1961.
Fuelled by the Cold War and stiff competition in the space race, Kennedy wanted America to commit itself to landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to earth, within a decade. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, did not live to see his dream come true. But just over eight years later - July 20, 1969 - two men lived that dream.
Once on the moon, the plan was for Armstrong and Aldrin to have a meal, clean up and sleep before opening the hatch. That plan was never realistic.
The men, fuelled by adrenalin, wanted to get on with it as, no doubt, did spectators on Earth. The astronauts asked mission control if they could leave the module earlier than planned.
In the Eagle's cramped space, the astronauts donned their bulky space suits - on display now at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum - and prepared to make history.
Early plans had Buzz Aldrin, as co-pilot, first down the ladder but as the launch date drew closer the order was switched to Armstrong - solid, dependable, unflappable, he was viewed as the ideal choice.
With the whole world watching, not a single detail was left to chance. As he placed that first footstep on the moon's surface (2.56pm NZ time), Armstrong uttered those famous words: "That's one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind."
Later Armstrong and the Space Center's PR machine would argue that Armstrong said "one small step for 'a' man", as scripted, and that static cut out the word. But Aldrin, Collins and the rest of the world clearly heard the sentence without the "a".
Aldrin, about to leave the Eagle and climb down the ladder, made what could be the first moon joke when he said: "Just making sure I lock up on the way out". The two men were about to become overnight superheroes in the eyes of a moonstruck world, fame that was to plague them for the rest of their lives and take a toll on their personal lives.
About 400,000 kilometres away on Earth, an ecstatic President Richard Nixon had kept up a marathon viewing of Apollo 11's journey since blast off from Cape Canaveral's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In New York, thousands of spectators stood in the rain watching the landing on huge screens, Parisiens cheered on the Champs Elysee, Londoners did the same in Trafalgar Square, while the Queen and royal family watched from Windsor Castle.
Pope Paul VI viewed the Eagle's landing site from his personal observatory south of Rome before watching the landing on a specially arranged colour television at his summer residence, while the rest of Italy watched it in black and white.
Staff at the Manned Spaceflight Network tracing station in Australia's Carnarvon, concerned that they would miss the highlight of their careers due to lack of TV reception, arranged for ABC to hook up a TV at the local movie theatre to get live satellite coverage. Spectators in the theatre's balcony watched the TV screen on stage through binoculars.
Ironically, one of the few Americans not to see the lunar drama unfold was one of the astronauts, Mike Collins, 38, who was left alone aboard the command module, Columbia, without TV coverage. As the historic moon walk approached, office workers throughout New Zealand abandoned their desks and interrupted meetings to gather around radios. The Auckland Electric Power Board adjourned its meeting and housewives gathered at each other's homes to listen.
In Wellington, Prime Minister Keith Holyoake listened throughout the day, July 21 New Zealand time, on a transistor radio, and later, in a Cabinet meeting, ministers were updated as the moon walk grew closer. Travellers at Auckland International Airport got first-hand news when Air New Zealand announced "the arrival of Eagle Flight No 1 on the moon." Department stores joined in the celebration, piping "moon music" titles like Fly Me to the Moon, Blue Moon and Everyone's Gone to the Moon on their sound systems.
Circling high above the moon in the mothership Columbia, astronaut Mike Collins sweated and waited. His "secret terror" was that the Eagle's engine wouldn't restart or the module would fail to blast off and return to the Columbia, forcing him to return to Earth alone.
"If they fail to rise from the surface or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home ... but I will be a marked man for life and I know it," he said at the time.
Also fretting, but for different reasons, was Buzz Aldrin's young son Andrew who, watching his father leaping around the moon, was worried his old man would trip over one of the TV cables snaking across the surface.
In a new book, Rocket Men by Craig Nelson, Andrew Aldrin says: "All I could think was 'he's going to trip and fall and he's going to lie there like a bug on his back in front of three billion people and every one of my classmates'."
But there was very little time for the two astronauts to lark about, enjoying the lack of gravity. The pair had a long list of tasks they needed to complete, printed on the cuffs of their outer lunar gloves, including taking more than 1400 photographs, TV footage, collecting precious samples of moon rock eagerly awaited by scientists back on Earth and planting the American flag.
And they had to take a call from the President: "for one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one," he told them.
New Zealanders did not see what the rest of the world were watching until five hours after the moon walk. But if it had not been for a secret deal done between the national broadcaster NZBC, the RNZAF, Customs and ABC they would not have seen the moon landing footage at all that day.
Back then, New Zealand television had to rely on international news coming via satellite to Sydney, where it was copied on to video tape and flown across the Tasman on commercial flights, usually the next day.
But a New Zealand Air Force Canberra Bomber happened to be in Sydney on the day of the moon landing. ABC rushed tapes to Sydney Airport, the Air Force flew them to Wellington, New Zealand Customs gave the precious cargo quick clearance and they were sped by car to NZBC's headquarters in time for the evening news.
TVNZ's former head of news and current affairs, Rick Carlyon, a TV journalist since 1963, remembers TV technicians jury-rigging a makeshift network link the length of the country, from one main centre to the next, so all of New Zealand could watch the broadcast simultaneously.
NZBC played the 40-minute moon landing tape twice more that night and that was the beginning of the country's first television network.
After more than 21 hours on the moon, it was time for Armstrong and Aldrin to blast off and rejoin an anxious Collins aboard Columbia. Houston: "You're cleared for takeoff."
And another joke from Aldrin: "Understood. We're number one on the runway." The Eagle's departure was perfect. "
That was a beautiful burn," Armstrong said.
"They don't come any better than that."
Cue Houston: "We've got you coming home."
But there would be no red-carpet reception for the three astronauts after their spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, 1600km south-west of Honolulu.
While America partied and the press camped on the lawns of the astronauts' homes, the three superheroes were treated like aliens from outer space. As they bobbed in the ocean, a navy diver from a nearby US aircraft carrier, USS Hornet, tossed three isolation suits through the quickly opened hatch.
Scrubbed down with anti-germ fluid and clad in their suits, they were transferred by helicopter to the Hornet and quarantined inside a metal caravan. The caravan, later flown to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston with the astronauts still inside it, was their home for three weeks as a precaution against diseases or toxic substances they may have brought back.
The astronauts' first contact with their loved ones was through the glass window of their caravan, talking through a microphone.
Released from captivity, they began a 45-day tour of the world. Used to a different world, none of them was comfortable with the superstar status.
Nasa executives were dismayed to find that they had little photographic evidence of the first man to walk on the moon. Of the hundreds taken by the two astronauts, only four showed Armstrong, taken at a distance by Aldrin.
Photography was the one area of the mission that had not been rehearsed. While hundreds of photos exist of the 11 other men to walk on the moon, only one good picture of Armstrong exists, a photo he took of himself reflected in Aldrin's visor.
Within two years everything had changed for the men. They would never again work as astronauts and all three left Nasa.
Armstrong lectured but rarely granted an interview, teaching aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati and later retired to a secluded farm in Ohio. Collins became the director of the new National Air and Space Museum and later wrote several space books. Buzz Aldrin was the hardest hit of the three, struggling for years with depression and alcoholism that cost him two marriages.
After he left NASA and the Air Force, he says he felt "isolated, alone and uncertain". For the first time in 40 years he had no one telling him what to do, no one sending him on a mission, he wrote.
"I moved from drinking to depression to heavier drinking to deeper depression."
He too has written several books and is on a book-signing tour for his latest one, Magnificent Desolation.
Bizarrely, the 79-year-old has recorded a space rap song, Rocket Experience, produced by rappers Snoop Dogg and Soulja Boy. He is even on Twitter, with a message posted last week to Snoop Dogg asking "Nasa wants you to intro my rap song at Apollo 11 40th events in DC. Are you free to join?"
And he will appear in a Louis Vuitton ad campaign photographed by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz with two other astronauts. But he wasn't always so enamoured of the rocket experience.
Seven years after the moon landing Aldrin was suspicious of the motives behind the Apollo mission.
"We didn't go to the moon to get rocks," he said.
"We didn't go for scientific information. We didn't go to improve our scientific techniques. We went there simply to beat the Russians."
As Americans' distrust of their government grew through the 1970s and 1980s, conspiracy theories abounded. The moon landings had never happened, some claimed, but were an elaborate hoax manufactured by a top-secret government film crew in the Nevada desert. In an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes three years ago, Armstrong lamented the lack of space progress after the Apollo programme was mothballed five years after the moon landing.
"When we lost the competition, we lost the public will to continue."
Conscious of increasing domestic problems, the American Government was unwilling to keep pouring billions into the space programme. Even at the time, there were those who questioned the enormous cost.
Sir Edmund Hillary who, like other Kiwis, watched every step of the moon landing, acknowledged the occasion was great but questioned the price with which it came.
"If mankind can perform this miracle," he said, "then surely to God we can do away with poverty, hunger and war."
