I'm writing this post whilst listening to the live transmission from Mission Control in Houston. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are making the last of 12 orbits around the moon prior to the Lunar Module's descent to the surface. There are three hours to go before the Eagle lands and Earth is a long way away. Sure it's 40 years on, but it makes for a riveting listen.

History has inevitably focused on these three individuals. But I'm just as interested in the 389,997 other people who contributed to the Apollo program.

Last winter I visited the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral for the first time, where all the Apollo launches took place. It's also home to one of three remaining Saturn V rockets, which I had been desperate to see ever since my chat with Buzz.

Sitting beneath the rocket was one of the Apollo engineers, who was there to answer questions from the public. I listened awhile to some of the Q & A, all of which revolved around the astronauts and the business end of the Saturn; where they sat, how powerful it was, how fast they flew. He answered politely and comprehensively for someone who must have been asked the same questions hundreds if not thousands of times in his life.

I took a different tack and asked the engineer what his role in the Apollo program had been. Suddenly, he burst into life, full of animation and enthusiasm. It turned out that he had been one of the people responsible for the television camera that relayed those legendary black and white images of Neil Armstrong stepping down the ladder and onto the moon.

He explained to me that the reason why you don't see Armstrong put his feet on the lunar surface is because the mechanism that lowered the camera out of the side of Eagle froze in place when it had only partly deployed.

Being responsible for the successful transmission of the most famous television images in history must be incredible. Because without any kind of record of an achievement, it's difficult for other people to become inspired by it. And we all need a little bit of inspiration every now and then.