Listen to Fred Haise, the ill-fated Apollo 13's lunar lander pilot
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Even now, the plain unlikelihood of it can make the mind reel. Men strapped themselves into the nose cones of 360ft rockets, exploded into orbit, rode 225,747 miles through space to the airless Moon, lowered themselves to its surface in a spidery tin can, blasted up again and fell back to Earth through raging heat before splashing into the Pacific under a bouquet of parachutes.

You need not have lived through those times to catch the wonder of the Apollo missions – but it helps. It helps to have pondered the fogged pictures on newspaper front pages, seen the scratchy television images, heard those implausibly calm American voices crackle through the static, looked up at the Moon when a mission was on and strained to see (implausibly, in every way) men up there.

Maybe it helps, too, to have pressed the Shell petrol-station coins into their cardboard mounts, gummed the PG Tips cards into their album, pasted newspaper images into scrapbooks – the acts of avid fandom that this interplanetary heroism inspired. Some of us were faultless on Apollo crews in the same way that we were faultless on football lineups. (Apollo 8? That would be Borman, Lovell, Anders, I think you’ll find.)

You can see the Apollo project in many reduced ways, as historians nowadays frequently invite us to – Cold War one-upmanship, a cynically manipulated distraction from race riots or Vietnam, even a $22 billion (£11 billion) exercise in what we would now call PR, the strategic repositioning of good ol’ brand USA. But no retelling, however jaded, could strip the tale of its exorbitant magnetism.

At the pinnacle of it all, in July 1969, the three-man crew of Apollo 11, America’s 21st manned space flight, sat on top of a Saturn V rocket, consuming 15 tonnes of kerosene and liquid oxygen a second and managing five inches to the gallon, and set off for the Moon’s surface. Today, a rocket bound that way would have to plough through the ever-thickening belt of satellites that rings the Earth’s atmosphere – some 30,000 of them, from small, bleeping blobs to communications hubs the size of double-decker buses. Back then, it could cut through almost clear skies, on its way to the unknown.

At the time, so little was known about the Moon’s surface that no one could discount the possibility that the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, would set down in quicksand and, filmed by its own outboard cameras, sink bathetically from sight, live on television sets around the world. Alternatively, there was a chance that it would drop into dust so deep that its hatch wouldn’t open. As it was, Neil Armstrong ended up improvising wildly at the controls to prevent the module landing at the bottom of a 15ft-deep crater, eventually bringing it down in a cloud of dust with the fuel light blinking at him and an alarm sounding. The landing – and with it, the entire mission – had come within 20 seconds of the order to abort.

Consider, then, the transcendent confidence on the part of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, freshly landed on the Moon, in powering down the frail craft that had carried them there – switching off the engine, as it were, and trusting it to restart or leave them to die a uniquely grim death among the lunar rocks.

As Armstrong (visible at first, in the televised pictures, as a dimly discernible white boot on a metal step) took his one small step, Michael Collins circled above in the command module, his orbit taking him to the far side of the Moon, where, out of radio contact for 48 minutes in every two hours, it occurred to him that he was the farthest-flung human being in the cosmos and therefore, technically, as lonely as anyone had ever been.

“If a count were taken,” he wrote, in Carrying The Fire, “the score would be three billion plus two over the other side of the Moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side.”

No time was wasted between launches. Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on July 19, 1969. Apollo 12 took Charles Conrad and Alan Bean to the Moon in November of the same year. In all, the Apollo project put 12 men on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. With repetition, the magic faded.

The explosion of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13, and the hastily improvised mission to bring the crew back to Earth, prevented one from believing that there was any such thing as “a routine space mission”, but, in their increasing confidence, the Apollo astronauts did their best to float the idea. They hacked golf balls about. They scurried across the surface in the four-wheeled Lunar Rover. David Scott, on the Moon with James Irwin, his Apollo 15 crewmate, dropped a feather and a hammer through the airless atmosphere to reaffirm the findings of Galileo for a 20th-century television audience – certainly the most expensive science lesson delivered.

Evntually Nasa ran out of reasons to return and the US Government ran out of justifications for the expense. When Apollo 17, announced as the last mission, was scheduled for lift-off, a man named Charlie Smith, the oldest living American, whose given age was 130 and who claimed to have ridden with Billy the Kid and Jesse James, was invited, along with Chester, his 70-year-old son, to witness the launch from the VIP enclosure. His response (recorded by Andrew Chaikin in A Man on the Moon,) seemed emblematic of a more widespread disenchantment: “I see they goin’ somewhere,” the old man conceded, “but that don’t mean nothin’.”

In the December 1969 National Geographic, which recorded the triumph of Apollo 11, Dr Thomas O. Paine, the administrator of Nasa, had written: “Space is an endless frontier for our children, and for all future generations. I believe that men will drive onward in the years ahead to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter, and to other new worlds in our vast solar system. Some of these destinations are attainable in this century, some even within the next two decades.”

But we did not colonise the Moon. We did not begin going there casually for holidays or on business. Nor did very many of us become astronauts. Sometimes, however, it’s not the destination that counts, but the journey. At the National Space Centre in Leicester, a chunk of moon rock glimmers darkly from within an impregnable case. It is blackened, uninviting and charred-looking and in no way causes one to doubt the testimony of those who have handled it, that the smell of moon rock is “spent gunpowder”.

Yet the sight of this hacked-off stone is somehow deeply compelling – although what one is marvelling at is not the rock itself (in its way is as underwhelming as coal) but the still unmanageably huge thought that a man went up there and brought it down – Gene Cernan who, when he climbed into Apollo 17’s Challenger module on 13 December 1972, became the last man to leave the lunar surface.

The Apollo project may have brought back little more than rocks and dust, but what it returned to us in the way of an adventure story may never be surpassed.