If you hadn’t already noticed, today is exactly forty years since man first walked on the moon.

In many ways, the moon landings represent the high point of human enterprise – our initiative, our energy, our courage, our thirst for knowledge, our technology, and, possibly most important of all, our ability to organise took us from primitive civilisation to space travel in less than 6,000 years.

It is in the nature of high points that decline must follow, so it is hardly surprising that the decades since then have seen nothing as spectacular.

Yet the amazing strengths that took our species to the moon are still to be found, even if they are far from common, and they continue to achieve marvellous things. Most of those achievements are low key – everything is low key relative to attaining another world – but they include the establishment of millions and millions of enterprises, all of which depend on the same qualities, if not always to the same degree, that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon.

So perhaps we lesser pioneers of the human race should remember some points from the Apollo Programme.

1   Set definite objectives, with a timescale, and stick to them. President Kennedy’s 1961 proposal that America should put a man on the moon by the end of the decade is the model of a clear Mission Statement.

2   Expect setbacks. NASA faced disaster after disaster, above all the fire that killed three astronauts and nearly killed the Apollo Programme. They persevered.

3   Courage is rewarded. A computer warning suggested that Neil Armstrong should abort the landing at the last moment. He did not – as a result, everyone remembers Armstrong, no one remembers the computer.  

4   Trust enterprise. Although NASA is a government organisation, most of its technology was developed by innovative private sector contractors.

5   “Blue Skies” research is a good investment. Technologies developed for the space programme influence almost every aspect of engineering and computer science today. Research which might seem theoretical at the time can yield huge returns later when its practical applications are discovered.

6   You will never convince everyone. Even today, there are people who say that they believe that the moon landings never happened – in the same way, even if you really do offer the best product in the world, there will always be some who refuse to believe you. It may be irritating, but you just have to accept it.

Neil Armstrong: “Just remember that all the mechanical parts in the Saturn V were made by the lowest bidder”