Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the unexplained.

Well, this time a very special edition, we're not going to do any of the usual things here, we're going to get very quickly into the content of this edition, because it is something very special and a milestone in the history of humanity.

As you will hear many times from many people in the weeks that are to come, 50 years ago in July 1969, man set foot on the moon for the first time, and the words of Neil Armstrong will probably be repeated by school children a thousand years for now if this species is still existing.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and indeed it was, an amazing technical and human achievement.

That required a lot of expenditure, not only financial, but also human expenditures, you will hear.

Well, one man has decided to document the entire story of what led up to and what followed Apollo 11, that mission that changed the face of history.

Dr David Whitehouse is former BBC science editor, and an old friend of mine and an old friend of this show. He's written a book called Apollo.

The Inside Story, actually Apollo 11, the Inside Story, but as you will hear, this is the story of the entire Apollo program and the people behind it.

Now many of us will know pretty well the story that you're about to hear, certainly the bare bones of it, the skeleton of the story.

What you want here are the anecdotes, the quotations, the accounts of the emotions of those remarkable events 50 years ago, and David Whitehouse's painstakingly.

Documented those things in the book. I've speed read the book before we do this interview, and after we do this interview, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to start reading it in a calm and non-time pressured way, because it's a fantastically written book, and I'm sure it will sell in vast volumes when it's released at the beginning of June.

So that is what we're going to talk about Apollo 11, and everything that led up to it, and those things that followed Apollo 11, and perhaps we'll get an idea of where we are now as we prepare to go back to the moon, and we prepare perhaps to set foot on the surface of Mars and then even branch out from there.

What did Apollo do for those people who are involved in those programs now? How were the foundations set by Apollo? What did it mean? And what obstacles had to be overcome in order to be able to get Neil Armstrong to put his boots down on the surface of that grey dust all those years ago?

Let's get on now to Hampshire in the United Kingdom and speak with Dr David Whitehouse, the author of Apollo 11, the Inside Story. David, nice to speak with you again, and thank you for doing this.

You're very welcome. So David, I mean this, for those of us of a certain generation, and that includes me, that's both of us. We both grew up with all of this, but most of us believe that we know the full story because it was, you know, we were at school, we were exposed to it constantly, but actually we really don't.

There was a level of blood, sweat and tears, a level of technology, a level of politicking that ordinary people and certainly kids were not aware of, don't you think?

I think you're right, because in those days we had no internet obviously, that we had no 24 hour television. We just had the BBC and ITN giving us little reports and even during the missions themselves,

the BBC Apollo news test. Remember that was with James Burke and Patrick and Patrick Warren Cliff Mitchell more.

Yes, I mean, these people were great shots and over in Houston.

They were great broadcasters, these people and they were the equivalents of Cronkite and his team in the US.

They were wonderful broadcasters, but that's the only information we had. We couldn't go and check anything. We couldn't follow anything up.

So we did, you know, as you say, get a certain view of this. And I think as we got older and we started, you know, we were bitten by the bug.

...