I still remember this, though a little vaguely. My parents, sister and I were staying in a rented apartment in Guernsey (Channel Islands). While the actual moon landing happened in the middle of the night when my sister and I were asleep, I remember going to my parents room early in the morning to watch a rerun broadcast. Now that was in a time when there was no morning television in the UK. The BBC had made special arrangements for the studios and transmitters to be running when they would normally be closed down. We saw these grainy pictures on a tiny television, but even then as children we knew this was special.

I had been an Apollo nut for a while when it happened. My bedroom was plastered with photos of the Apollo 8 mission (which I knew inside out at seven years old), collected from a promotion by a breakfast cereal company. My friends and I saw the dream and the vision of man going to the stars. The magic year of 2000 seemed so far away, but we knew that by then men would be living in space and under the sea.

The BBC coverage of Apollo was amazing. We had Patrick Moore and James Burke there to explain it all to us, with models and cartoon illustrations, and diagrams to show the progress of each stage of each mission. And the theme tune from Also Sprache Zarathustra, if an accidental choice for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, just captured the moment perfectly.

But soon the gleam came off. A few months later in 1969, my Meadgate schoolfriends were asked to suggest a new name for one of our school “houses” (that very British concept), and “Armstrong” won hands down in the voting. Then we were told by the teachers that the name assigned would actually be “Marconi”, because Neil Armstrong was only one small part of the huge NASA program. We were gutted – Neil was our hero and who we all wanted to be. So much for democracy.

Apollo 13 held us all spellbound. Moon missions had started to seem routine. Now we all saw just how dangerous it was. Truly that was NASA’s finest hour.

Apollo 15 took the moon rover out onto the surface, and we started to see some real exploration and science going on. This was beyond the pure politics of the first missions, which did relatively little science compared to the later ones.

When we learned that Apollo 17 would be the last, it came as a shock and a disappointment.

We had Skylab, and the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, but it was clear these were just there to use up the remaining Saturn V launchers rather than to do anything really useful. We knew the Shuttle was coming, and with that there would be space stations, and the construction of ships in space for longer missions.

But the Shuttle turned out to be a damp squib, unable to reach geosynchronous orbit. Hubble and SpaceLab missions opened our eyes to new things, though limited by the limitations of the Shuttle. The various unmanned probes caused some excitement.

Will we ever get there? I don’t know but I’m not greatly optimistic. There will always be short term crisis that some people will say needs the money more. I think that’s very lacking in vision, but it’s an easy target.

Would Apollo have happened under different circumstances? Probably we needed the Cold War and, yes, even the Kennedy Assassination to make it happen. If Kennedy had lived, would Congress have continued to fund the project in tough times? Or was it that nobody was prepared to speak against the words of a Blessed Martyr President? Well thank God for Kennedy in any case. And thank God for LBJ too, who did all the donkey work before Nixon came in to steal the credit for an achievement that was mostly done by the time he arrived.

40 years later, the bright lights of Apollo have dimmed an awful lot. Kids don’t want to be engineers because it’s too hard compared to “media studies”. Science went in a different direction for anybody’s expectations. Instead of rocketry and stardrives we got software and harddrives.

But even in a world of HDTV, IPTV and Broadband Internet, nobody today can bring us a live television picture from the moon.

40 years ago there were two superpowers striving to take mankind into space. The USSR came extremely close to matching Apollo, and on a much smaller budget. Now perhaps we’ll see a new space power emerge, such as China or India. I’ll be cheering them on. Racing to the far horizons is a much better thing than racing to build H-bombs. And if the “developing” nations start to make today’s not-so-superpowers feel nervous and left behind, perhaps the West will again turn eyes to the heavens.

So raise a glass to Neil and Buzz. Forty years ago, they rode on the tip of the spear of human endeavour. Lets hope we still have such men in 40 years time, and the guts to send them on their way.