‘Fine and powdery,” was how Neil Armstrong described the lunar landscape when he became the first man to walk through it. “Magnificent desolation,” said Buzz Aldrin, who has never recovered from being only the second man on the moon. Meanwhile, orbiting the spooky grey-white sphere in the command module overhead, lonely Michael Collins would gaze down at a “withered, sun-seared peach pit”. While Armstrong and Aldrin were setting up the experiments listed on their spacesuit gloves and struggling to erect the American flag on the tough moon rock, Collins was sweating. “If they fail to rise from the surface or crash back into it,” he resolved, “I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.”