Forty years later - cool facts about the moon landing in 1969

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you'll know that it's been forty years this month that three astronauts went to the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres in the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and Neil and Buzz became the first humans to land on the moon on 20 July, 1969.

I've always known that sending people to the moon was a great achievement. But it wasn't until this month that I realised how much of an achievement it was. Here are some cool and scary facts about the mission to the moon!

• The moon isn't as close as we think. It's about 375,000 kilometres away! You could fit the Earth into that space around 30 times!
• The computer on board Apollo 11 was less powerful than your mobile phone! It only had 64 kilobytes of memory.
• There was less than 30 seconds of fuel left when the landing module - called the Eagle - landed on the moon.
  
• Some scientists thought that the spacecraft would sink 20 metres into a thick layer of dust on the surface of the moon, meaning certain death for the astronauts.
• On average, the temperature on the moon is 100 degrees centigrade during the lunar day, and -150 degrees during the night!
• Gravity on the moon is six times less powerful than on the Earth. That means you could jump six times higher! If you can jump 30 cm in the air on Earth, on the moon you could probably jump over a person who is standing up!
  
• When Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins took off on their journey back to the Earth, they only had one chance to launch the Eagle from the moon. And nobody knew if this would work because it had never been tested!
• There was no rescue plan, so failure to take off would have left them stranded on the moon.

Just imagine going to a place that NOBODY has ever been to before. You are hundreds of thousands of miles from home. On your journey you see the planet Earth getting smaller and smaller. You don't know what is waiting for you when you arrive. You don't know if you will ever return.

These people were so brave and took so many risks, and this is what makes the moon landings such an amazing event.