Thirteen Mintues to the Moon

As has been noted here and many places elsewhere, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. To mark the occasion, the BBC has created a new podcast series, 13 Minutes to the Moon that features interviews with many of the people who helped to send the astronauts to the moon and some of the astronauts themselves.

In total, no fewer than 400,000 people were involved in Project Apollo. Nearly all of them felt deeply connected to the mission and, although only a handful of people finally flew to the Moon, in a very real sense the factory workers, engineers, technicians and scientists that worked as part of the Apollo programme felt that, on 20 July 1969, part of them landed on the Moon, too.

We wanted to tell all of those stories, framed by the drama of the last 13 minutes of descent before touchdown on the lunar surface.

That period of the mission was rife with crisis and, as Armstrong would later testify, "rampant with unknowns".

I've subscribed to the podcast and will be listening for new episodes each Monday.