Let’s return to the most momentous moment in space history. Michael Collins, who piloted the first mission to the moon, provides a view of space exploration from the cockpit. Tell us about the man and his autobiography Carrying the Fire.

Carrying the Fire is widely regarded as the best of the memoirs written by astronauts. Mike Collins was the co-pilot on one of the two-man Gemini missions in 1966. He went on to be the command-module pilot on Apollo 11. He was the astronaut that stayed in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Readers really get their money's worth with Mike because his book is readable, personal, poignant and funny. It sets the bar for astronaut books.

Collins addresses what he believes the space programme means for humankind. What does he, and what do you, have to say on that subject?

Those of us who grew up during the space age were fortunate to have witnessed the opening act in a drama which is continuing to unfold. Political forces created the space programme. The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is the reason why we had the tremendous acceleration in the space programme in the 1960s, and why we got humans to the moon before the end of that decade. But once that goal was achieved, that political rationale evaporated. All of us so-called space cadets have been left with unfulfilled dreams of the unused potential, that we still have, to become a space-faring civilisation. The most futuristic thing that we've ever done took place more than 40 years ago. But, as I say, this is a drama that is still unfolding.

Let’s talk about the Apollo mission itself. First published in 1989, Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox focuses on the people who built the space programme. What can we learn by reading this book?

It’s a book about engineers and flight controllers who – very many of them – are the people who built the space programme, not only the hardware but the techniques and the methods. They figured out how to choreograph the precise orbital ballet of a rendezvous in space between two spacecraft that are each traveling at 17,500 miles an hour. They designed and built a space ship that could take three human beings to another celestial body and home again, re-entering the earth's atmosphere at speeds of thousands of miles an hour with temperatures outside the vehicle climbing to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit [2,760 degrees Celsius]. These are very daunting problems.

And then they had to figure out how to deal with every conceivable emergency that might come up during a flight, as we saw with Apollo 13. Apollo 13 is the best known example, and really epitomises the kind of “what if” thinking that NASA brought to these problems. Even today, many of the techniques that NASA developed for Apollo stand as monumental contributions to managing very complex operations or endeavours, involving many hundreds or even thousands of people. The Murray and Cox book is a superb account of how NASA managed a complex operation involving thousands of employees. In my work, I focus on the astronauts and their experiences, but that only tells half the story. The story of Apollo would not have been complete without this book.