SARA RUSSELL: You know, it's one of the inspirations for me going into science.
MARISSA LO: So, you sort of have to go, 'Wow, this actually happened.'
SARA RUSSELL: I'm Sara Russell and I'm a research scientist at the Natural History Museum,
looking at the formation and evolution of the solar system and the evolution of the Moon.
MARISSA LO: My name is Marissa Lo and I'm a PhD student at the University of Manchester
and I look at volcanoes on the Moon.
WALLY FUNK: I'm Wally Funk and I'm part of the Mercury 13 testees from back in the 60s.
WALLY FUNK: I was being processed to see how girls could pass to be into space.
WALLY FUNK: NASA said, 'You're doing great. You've passed all the tests but we can't take you
because you don't have an engineering degree.
SARA RUSSELL: For the Apollo 11 landing, I was two years old, so I'm not sure that I remember it.
WALLY FUNK: I do remember seeing a lift-off and the going around in the atmosphere and the landing.
WALLY FUNK: I think it was fantastic.
MARISSA LO: So, when the moon landings took place, I wasn't born.
SARA RUSSELL: We're going to have a look at a film of the highlights of the Apollo 11 landing.
WALLY FUNK: He's being told what to do when you're coming down for a landing.
WALLY FUNK: It's just like when I'm coming in for an aeroplane landing.
MARISSA LO: You can see that they're just sort of landing onto an area with absolutely no craters.
SARA RUSSELL: I can see the dust starting to come up now,
so it's actually really hard to see anything on the surface.
WALLY FUNK: The eagle has landed!
MARISSA LO: The classic line: The eagle has landed.
SARA RUSSELL: Amazing. It must be such an emotional moment. It's just incredible.
MARISSA LO: So, this is really interesting. He's describing what the surface is like here,
so this would have been the first time that someone had seen what the lunar regolith is like.
MARISSA LO: So, the lunar regolith is like the soil that's on top of the surface of the Moon.
SARA RUSSELL: And it actually turned out to be super powdery and actually, the powder got everywhere.
SARA RUSSELL: It got all over their suits.
WALLY FUNK: They love it. Flag is up. Yay!
SARA RUSSELL: I know when they left, the flag actually fell down.
SARA RUSSELL: Now they're just experimenting with different ways to walk around the Moon.
SARA RUSSELL: I know they experimented with jumping around and walking around.
MARISSA LO: Okay, so they're collecting a core tube sample.
MARISSA LO: So, we do this for a lot of rocks and actually, glaciers on Earth as, say, ice or rocks
are deposited and formed over time, that's recording a history as you're going deeper into the ground.
MARISSA LO: So, these cores are giving us more information than we could just get at the surface.
SARA RUSSELL: And we're still studying these rocks now. 50 years later, we're still working on them.
WALLY FUNK: They're, I guess, lifting off. Yep.
SARA RUSSELL: Amazing. Wow, thank you. That's really good.
ADAM LEVY: How does it feel to watch it?
SARA RUSSELL: It actually feels really emotional because I actually am not sure that I have seen that...
SARA RUSSELL: I haven't seen that for decades to be honest.
MARISSA LO: I can't imagine what it must have been like to watch this live.
SARA RUSSELL: What I remember really struck me was the adults all seemed so excited about it.
SARA RUSSELL: I honestly didn't know that adults were capable of having that emotion.
ADAM LEVY: How new was the kind of flight they had to do for this then, compared to the conventional, traditional...
WALLY FUNK: There's no comparison. They were going into space by rocketry.
WALLY FUNK: They were just kind of ahead of their time but they were doing what they needed to do to get into space and get to the Moon.
SARA RUSSELL: When Kennedy said in 1961, 'We're going to get a man on the Moon by the end of the decade',
that must have seemed unbelievable.
SARA RUSSELL: You get kind of overwhelmed by what an amazing achievement it was.
WALLY FUNK: I knew all the tests that those guys had to go through because I beat them
on many, many of those tests, the physical and mental tests.
MARISSA LO: Even nowadays, we're still thinking of ways of landing on the Moon, and it's not a given.
MARISSA LO: The success rate of moon landings is not 100%.
WALLY FUNK: You can't jump from there to the Apollo. You have to learn to fly, you have to learn to fly jets,
and you have to understand how the gravity works. So, you just don't jump in there and go up there.
SARA RUSSELL: It's really hard to say what our field would be like without moon landings,
but I'm not sure that we would even have a field without the moon landings.
MARISSA LO: During each of the Apollo missions, they placed several seismometers around the landing site.
MARISSA LO: Using these seismometers, they have been able to deduce the internal structure of the Moon,
and before the Apollo mission this was something that we didn't have a grasp on at all.
SARA RUSSELL: Before Apollo, we had no idea how the Moon got there. We didn't know how it formed.
SARA RUSSELL: This giant impact of a Mars-size body into the Earth that smashed into it
and then splashed material out that coalesced to form the Moon.
SARA RUSSELL: I think that's an amazing scientific achievement of Apollo.
MARISSA LO: I was speaking to someone who works at the Goddard Space Flight Centre a couple of weeks ago,
and they were saying that they're using an Apollo 16 core that's never been opened before.
MARISSA LO: It was closed on the Moon, this sample, and now it's going to be opened by her.
SARA RUSSEL: Lots of countries are interested in going back to the Moon, which is great
because there's still so much that we don't know about the Moon.
SARA RUSSELL: So, the Apollo missions only looked at a tiny bit of the Moon. They looked at the near side and the equator.
SARA RUSSELL: We've only scratched the surface.
WALLY FUNK: It's wonderful what they're all doing and what they plan to do.
WALLY FUNK: In many books I have signed Where do you want your kids to go? Well, they want them to be astronauts.
MARISSA LO: Getting to watch a live moon landing would be amazing.
SARA RUSSELL: I don't know what I'd be doing if it wasn't for Apollo, but I don't know that I'd be a research scientist.