Moonwalk hero Neil Armstrong is interviewed for the CPA website.

As a child, Armstrong said he had "become fascinated with the world of flight, as an elementary school student, and determined that, somehow, I wanted to be involved in that."

He served as a fighter pilot in the Korean war and was working as a test pilot when President John F Kennedy issued his challenge to the country's scientists to land on the moon. At the time, the US had only managed to send Alan Shepard 100 miles above the surface of the Earth for 20 minutes. "Now the president was challenging us to go to the moon," said Armstrong. "The gap between a 20 minutes up and down flight and going to the moon was something almost beyond belief, technically."

Over the course of the following decade, each Apollo mission was used to test different parts of the propulsion, navigation and communication technology required on a journey to the moon.

"A month before the launch of Apollo 11, we were confident we could try and attempt a descent to the surface," said Armstrong. "I thought we had a 90 per cent chance of getting back safely to Earth on that flight but only a 50-50 chance of making a landing on that first attempt." When Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their descent aboard the Eagle to the moon's surface, the on-board computer had intended to put them down on the side of a large crater with steep slopes littered with huge boulders. "Not a good place to land at all," said Armstrong. "I took it over manually and flew it like a helicopter and found a level area and was able to get it down there before we ran out of fuel. There was something like 20 seconds of fuel left."