ON the eve of his great Moon odyssey, and with the clock ticking to lift-off, the former Boy Scout from Ohio was realistic about his chances of success.

See the Daily Echo this weekend to see more on the Apollo 11 Moon landing, including how we reported it in 1969

Astronaut Neil Armstrong considered the odds of landing on the lunar surface to be no better than 50-50. Nonetheless the time had come.

Placed at the summit of a Saturn V rocket the height of St Paul’s Cathedral, Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins entered orbit just 12 minutes after the incendiary missile was ignited.

Hanging mysteriously in the heavens against a backcloth of infinity, Earth’s nearest celestial neighbour waited for them to cross the 250,000-mile void.

The Moon’s pitted, shadowy face had a peculiar hold upon their fellow Earthlings. It moved the planet’s oceans, marked the passage of time and, claimed some, effected fertility and sanity.

Armstrong could break the spell by reaching it, touching it, claiming it.

And so he did, defying the odds at 3.56am on July 21 1969 when he became the first human to set foot on another world.

See the Daily Echo this weekend to see more on the Apollo 11 Moon landing, including how we reported it in 1969

Planting his white left boot on the Moon’s alien surface, he famously declared “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind”

before tucking a soil sample into a right thigh pocket and making a panoramic sweep of the Moon’s horizon with a TV camera.

Those ghostly black and white images were transmitted to a stunned TV audience of 500 million, the largest for a live broadcast at that time.

And among those watching the intense human drama were many of the engineers and scientists who had performed the technical miracles to make the $24bn mission possible.

It was, quite simply, Mankind’s greatest single technological achievement.

In an age before micro-computers, mobile phones and the Internet, slide rules were still in every engineer’s top pocket.

Nonetheless, the 400,000 strong Apollo 11 team managed to invent seven million engineered parts specifically for the eight-day mission with success or tragic failure dependent on each doing their job.

First the 25,000 mph take-off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida had to be perfect. Then the Eagle landing craft’s smooth detachment from the orbiting Columbia command module was crucial.

Next came the Moon landing itself which saw the spindly legs of Eagle touch down four miles from the planned target area at 9.17pm on Sunday July 20, 1969.

Just 13 seconds of fuel remained in the tank.

Fifteen minutes after Armstrong’s first historic step early the following morning, he was joined on the Moon’s powdery surface by Aldrin who memorably described the eerie Sea of Tranquillity as “magnificent desolation.”

The two astronauts, armed with buckets and spades, then collected data and performed various exercises – including kangaroo hops across the lunar landscape – before planting the American Stars and Stripes flag.

They also unveiled a plaque bearing President Nixon’s signature and an inscription reading: “Here men from Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD.

We came in peace for all Mankind.”

Armstrong and Aldrin spent a total of 21 hours on the Moon’s surface – including 150 minutes exploring outside the Eagle.

Then, after a fitful five hours sleep inside the landing craft, they blasted off with 40lb of lunar samples, the exhaust gases toppling the US flag planted just eight metres away.

Ten minutes later Armstrong and Aldrin rejoined Michael Collins in the orbiting Columbia mothership before the astronauts left for home on July 22.

Preparing for their Pacific Ocean splashdown two days later, the men made a TV broadcast with an emotional Aldrin telling Earth: “We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all Mankind to explore the unknown.”

In total, 24 Americans were to travel to the Moon as part of the 1961-75 Apollo programme, with twelve walking on its surface and three making the trip twice.

Funding was then diverted to the Skylab and Space Shuttle projects but the world will forever be indebted to Apollo’s explorers.

These emissaries from Earth spurred advances in many areas of technology peripheral to rocketry and manned spaceflight including major contributions in the fields of engineering, avionics, telecommunications and computers.

The facilities and machines created for the Apollo programme also remain landmarks of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.

The moon adventure was of more profound significance too.

Firstly, this was our first tentative step in the search for extraterrestrial life. Indeed, the three astronauts went straight into biological isolation when they came home for fear of infection by lunar organisms.

And while the sprint for the Moon represented the ultimate one-up-manship in Cold War politics, it also momentarily united a divided world.

Indeed,when Man landed on the Moon,we could all look back and contemplate the fragility and vulnerability of the Earth for the first time. The Apollo astronauts gave us our first sense of the beauty of our planet – and its splendid isolation.

In short, the first Moon landing served to change forever how we saw ourselves.

See the Daily Echo this weekend to see more on the Apollo 11 Moon landing, including how we reported it in 1969