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will have to wait a few more years for their memoirs.
    Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. I shall certainly feel much happier when I have told the true story behind the timing of the first lunar flight, about which there has always been a good deal of mystery.
    As everyone knows, the American, Russian and British ships were assembled in the orbit of Space Station Three, five hundred miles above the Earth, from components flown up by relays of freight rockets. Though all the parts had been prefabricated, the assembly and testing of the ships took over two years, by which time a great many people—who did not realise the complexity of the task—were beginning to get slightly impatient. They had seen dozens of photos and telecasts of the three ships floating there in space beside Station Three, apparently quite complete and ready to pull away from Earth at a moment’s notice. What the picture didn’t show was the careful and tedious work still in progress as thousands of pipes, wires, motors, and instruments were fitted and subjected to every conceivable test.
    There was no definite target date for departure; since the moon is always at approximately the same distance, you can leave for it at almost any time you like—once you are ready. It makes practically no difference, from the point of view of fuel consumption, if you blast off at full moon or new moon or at any time in between. We were very careful to make no predictions about blast-off, though everyone was always trying to get us to fix the time. So many things can go wrong in a spaceship, and we were not going to say goodbye to Earth until we were ready down to the last detail.
    I shall always remember the last commanders’ conference, aboard the space station, when we all announced that we were ready. Since it was a co-operative venture, each party specialising in some particular task, it had been agreed that we should all make our landings within the same twenty-four-hour period, on the preselected site in the Mare Imbrium. The details of the journey, however, had been left to the individual commanders, presumably in the hope that we would not copy each other’s mistakes.
    ‘I’ll be ready,’ said Commander Vandenburg, ‘to make my first dummy take-off at 0900 tomorrow. What about you, gentlemen? Shall we ask Earth Control to stand by for all three of us?’
    ‘That’s OK by me,’ said Krasnin, who could never be convinced that his American slang was twenty years out of date.
    I nodded my agreement. It was true that one bank of fuel gauges was still misbehaving, but that didn’t really matter; they would be fixed by the time the tanks were filled.
    The dummy run consisted of an exact replica of a real blast-off, with everyone carrying out the job he would do when the time came for the genuine thing. We had practised, of course, in mock-ups down on Earth, but this was a perfect imitation of what would happen to us when we finally took off for the moon. All that was missing was the roar of the motors that would tell us that the voyage had begun.
    We did six complete imitations of blast-off, took the ships to pieces to eliminate anything that hadn’t behaved perfectly, then did six more. The Endeavour , the Goddard , and the Ziolkovski were all in the same state of serviceability. There now only remained the job of fuelling up, and we would be ready to leave.
    The suspense of those last few hours is not something I would care to go through again. The eyes of the world were upon us; departure time had now been set, with an uncertainty of only a few hours. All the final tests had been made, and we were convinced that our ships were as ready as humanly possible.
    It was then that I had an urgent and secret personal radio call from a very high official indeed, and a suggestion was made which had so much authority behind it that there was little point in pretending that it wasn’t an order. The first flight to the moon, I was reminded, was a