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The space age began when the Soviet Union sent the satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit on October 4, 1957. At that time Sputnik did not make a great impression on me. I have my reasons, though. The United States was in the thick of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As a pilot in the US Air Force, I was stationed in West Germany, where I was training to fly tactical fighters to send nuclear weapons into the Soviet Union. In the event of a nuclear exchange, it was unlikely that I would have a base to return to. That was a sobering reality for a 28-year-old with a young family. When Sputnik went into space and sent back its radio signal, it seemed to me little more than a stunt.

It was different when Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, in April 1961. My own circumstances had changed. I was halfway through a doctoral thesis on piloting techniques for space rendezvous. In those early years of the Space Age, one thing quickly led to another. Less than a month after Gagarin’s return, Alan Shepard made his suborbital flight, becoming the first American in space. And just 20 days after that, President Kennedy made his speech committing the US to send a man to the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth before the end of the decade.

All this time, I was drawing closer to an active part in the space programme. By the end of 1962, I had finished my thesis, and in October of the following year I accepted an invitation from the head of the Astrounaut Office, Deke Slayton, to join the astronaut programme. The tensions between East and West remained high, but the Cold War gave a great impetus to the speed of development in spaceflight. As we pursued our own Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programmes, we knew that the Soviet Union was training its own people to fly in space and had some extremely capable engineers, such as the chief designer, Sergei Korolev.

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As we embarked on the Gemini programme, I put my earlier studies of space rendezvous to use. It was clear that to land on the Moon we would need spacecraft made of modules that could separate and link up again in orbit around the Earth or around the Moon. I was able to contribute to the development of the techniques used to do this. I was also able to help find new ways of training for spacewalks.

After Michael Collins’s spacewalk on Gemini 10, it was decided that we should experiment with underwater training. Now a staple part of astronaut preparation, it was new and untried back then. I had done some scuba diving before joining Nasa, so it was an environment in which I was at home. I was able to put my rendezvous expertise and my underwater training into practice when I flew on Gemini 12 with Jim Lovell in 1966. During that mission, we performed docking manoeuvres and I made three spacewalks.

After Gemini came Apollo. An enormous amount has been said and written about that programme. In retrospect, it now seems remarkable not only for its boldness and ultimate success but for how much we accomplished in a short time (there were just eight years between the announcement of our intention to go the Moon and the first landing) and for how adaptable we showed ourselves to be. For example, we recovered very quickly from the awful fire on Apollo 1. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission into lunar orbit, so it was a big step but it had to be made sooner than planned because we suspected that the Soviet Union was gaining ground on us and were about to attempt their own circumnavigation of the Moon.

When we look back over humanity’s first 50 years in space, it is important not only to celebrate what we have done but also properly to understand the past, seeing where mistakes have been made, so that we can plot the right course for the future.

We should engender a spirit of adaptability similar to the one we had on Apollo as we look ahead. Nasa’s two main projects over the last three decades have been the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Both are technically marvellous but they are highly ambitious and incredibly complex. Despite some successes, they have not lived up to all expectations. One way to make ourselves more adaptable in future is to have several projects running along parallel paths. The main US project for the future is Orion. We need to develop the best possible solution for this programme, because it will provide us with the technology to return to the Moon, scheduled for the end of the next decade. In parallel, I think that we should have a plan for spacecraft to replace the Space Shuttle in low-Earth orbit when it is retired, probably in the next five years.

Spaceflight should not be an exclusive preserve of professional astronauts. I would like to see as many people as possible involved. Since the Shuttle programme, there has been a widening of the net for crew selection, something that should be extended. We should support opportunities for so-called “space tourists” or, as I would prefer to call them, “star flyers” or “star travellers”.

This can be done by making a concerted effort to educate children about space and to make it appealing. Education is, after all, the key to our future. I hope that a future generation of astronauts can be inspired to make the next 50 years of human endeavour in space as rich, exciting, revealing, and successful as the first 50.

This is an edited extract from Spaceflight published by Dorling Kindersley at £25. The book is available to Times readers for the special offer price of £22.50 (free p&p). Call 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst