By Rob Miller | Portfolio Manager at NAOS Asset Management

20 July 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the “giant leap for mankind”, the Apollo 11 moon landing.

This podcast series by the BBC, released to commemorate this anniversary, gives us a detailed look behind the scenes into the work  it took to put the first humans on the moon. During the cold war, the US was falling behind the Russians when it came to space exploration. The idea of putting man on the moon was first announced by President JFK in September 1962 and his goal was to see it happen before the end of the 1960’s.

This series starts by giving us the background of how and why the Apollo spacecraft program came to be. Next they step through the ambitious and expensive plans to achieve a moon landing before the end of 1969. Finally, they dive deep into the period when the Eagle Lunar Module separates and descends to the moon, known as the '13 minutes to the moon'. We hear the real audio and the stories behind it from the perspective of unsung heroes, the computer controllers and engineers at NASA headquarters, guiding the mission. There were so many alarms and near misses that it is quite astonishing they even made it to the moon.

Listen to the podcast