Moon landing shock: NASA engineer’s ‘bad’ Apollo 11 admission that ‘keeps him up at night’

“Over the next several months, Bales spent hundreds of hours in flight techniques and mission rules meetings and many more hours in the room dubbed the “Guidance Officers Training School” running through every type of guidance failure conceivable.

“There were also trips to the MIT Instrumentation Lab, where the Apollo Guidance Computer had been designed to go through all the software what-ifs, and to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles with astronauts because they would navigate by the stars, he had to know them also.

“In Houston, because so many flight teams were practising a lunar landing, there were shifts throughout the day and evening.”

Mr Donovan went on to reveal why Bales felt confident heading into Apollo 11.

He added: “A couple of months or so before the Apollo 11 launch in July, Bales began to notice something.

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