400,000: Total Apollo workforce

Neil Armstrong was one of Nasa’s most accomplished pilots. As he descended towards the lunar surface on 20 July 1969, the success or failure of the first Moon landing depended on the skills, reactions and expertise of this one man. With a boulder field ahead of him, alarms sounding and fuel running low, he guided the spacecraft to the ground.

But in the few talks and interviews Armstrong gave about the landing, he was always modest about the achievement. He pointed instead to the thousands of people who had made the mission possible.

At its height, Nasa estimates that a total of 400,000 men and women across the United States were involved in the Apollo programme. The number includes everyone from astronauts to mission controllers, contractors to caterers, engineers, scientists, nurses, doctors, mathematicians and programmers.

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To see how Nasa arrived at that figure, consider a single aspect of Apollo 11 – the lunar landing itself. Armstrong’s right hand man was Buzz Aldrin. On the ground, there was a room full of mission controllers. Behind this core team of 20-30 (per shift) were hundreds of engineers in Houston and a team at MIT in Boston advising on the computer alarms.