With all the recent TV coverage of the moon landing 40 years ago, if the Almighty is gracious, hopefully, those who think that the Apollo landings were faked will now think differently. In those days, there was no technology to fake these sorts of things – no video cameras, no pocket calculators, no MP3, no cellphones, no computers.

But one thing that has emerged (particularly from TV programmes like Space Race) is how effectively we can rewrite history using the media of film and television. If TV is to be believed, then Werner Von Braun, a German scientist, was the golden thread which ran through all manned rocket flight development, beginning with the V2 missile and ending with the space shuttle.

This is true, but only up to a point. I don’t want to take anything away from Von Braun, but he would agree (if he were alive) that he was the thread that ran through the successful development of manned rocket flights. There were plenty of other flight programmes which did not make it into space. The programmes which most impressed me were the Viking programme and the F-104 programme.

The Viking programme was a US Navy-funded project, ostensibly to collect upper atmosphere data (which it did), but it was also a sort of design concept programme to see if a rocket could be launched from a navy ship (which it was). The interesting thing about the programme was that it started off with a whole lot of V2 rockets, which were test-fired to about 100 miles. It was then decided to build a whole new rocket, called the Viking. The design concepts were all from first principles. For example, the engines were designed from scratch (not without major headaches) and the rocket body was 31 inches in diameter – it could, thus, be conveniently rolled out of a 100-inch-wide aluminium plate.

The first firings led to flight oscillations as the accelerometers in the nose of the rocket, which controlled the flight jets, were not sufficiently damped. After this had been overcome, there were other obstacles. But they persevered and, in 1955, the last Viking flew and reached 231 km above the earth, thus proving that a craft could get into outer space and back and that, up there, cosmic radiation is present, but is not severe enough to cook a pilot. (They detected cosmic rays using gelatine plates mounted in the nose of the rocket. Gelatine is derived from collagen, found in animal skins. Radiation damage can be seen by counting the alpha particle tracks in the plate.)

But, withal, who has heard of the Viking programme? Who has heard of the NF-104A fighter programme? If you have seen the film The Right Stuff, then you may recall that Chuck Yeager crashes a NF-104A aircraft in the film. The NF-104A used a reaction control system, which consisted of eight pitch/yaw motors (four for each axis) and four roll motors. The motors used hydrogen peroxide fuel and were controlled by the pilot using a handle mounted in the instrument panel. At very high altitudes, when the craft had no real lift owing to the thinness of the air, the pilot could control the aircraft quite effectively (unless the air density changed radically – which is what happened to Yeager).

But Yeager nearly made it into space. He could have done so if the aircraft had not let him down. And one of the training pilots who was at the same base as Yeager was . . . Neil Armstrong.

But the interesting thing, above all, was that the whole space race was really a glorified contest between super powers in the Cold War to see who could do better than the other, technologically. Much of the space race was motivated by strategic defence – but not so much now. Now it’s about money. It would be inconceivable that we could have gone from the V2 rocket to the moon landing in 25 years without a war to spur things on. But that’s where it all starts – with wars and strategic defence. And then the glory goes not to those who tried hardest, but to those who were lucky and got remembered.