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HOW did the crew of Apollo 11 know how to land on the moon? Practice. In the early days of the space race, NASA engineers spent countless hours simulating space flight before the first astronaut ever left Earth. That is why most Fridays in 1960, Harold Miller and Dick Koos took the 鈥渇ruit flight鈥� from Cape Canaveral in Florida to 狈础厂础鈥檚 Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Miller and Koos had been part of a small team working on space simulations at Langley for about a year. But eventually they needed to move their operations far from their homes, to Florida, where the mission control would be based. The passenger planes that flew them home from Florida鈥檚 Patrick Air Force Base at the end of the week were always loaded with the Sunshine State鈥檚 citrus bounty. When travellers grabbed their bags at the end of the journey, they could also get a large sack of oranges for $3.

Cheap fruit was one of the few perks of working at the Mercury Control Center and launch facilities on the isolated and jungle-like Cape Canaveral all week. If a test rocket blew up (which happened about half the time in those days) and a brush fire started, you had to watch out for the alligators or wild hogs trying to escape the flames.

, 狈础厂础鈥檚 first human space-flight programme, had the goal of putting humans in Earth orbit and getting them safely down again 鈥� preferably before the Soviet Union did so. But in those days, no one knew for certain if a person could stay alive, let alone work, in the weightless environment of space. Even if they could, no one knew how humans should operate a spacecraft.

Miller, Koos and the small simulation task group were charged with , but also with training the fledgling flight control team on the ground. Like everything else under 狈础厂础鈥檚 purview at that time, it meant figuring out how to do things that had never been done before.

鈥淢y first trip to Florida in 1960,鈥� Koos recalls, 鈥淗arold gave me a tour around the cape, and I said, 鈥榠t sure is sink or swim around here.鈥� And he said, 鈥楾hat鈥檚 right. And we don鈥檛 have time to teach you how to swim either.鈥� And that鈥檚 really what it was. Everything was happening so fast; it was like drinking out of a fire hose.鈥�

Chris Kraft, 狈础厂础鈥檚 first flight director, had the idea to combine the training for flight controllers with the astronaut crew training, because astronauts would work closely with mission control during the flights. Members of the simulation group needed to organise these 鈥渋ntegrated simulations鈥�.

In a back room at the first Mission Control Center at Cape Canaveral they used the Mercury cockpit trainer, a rudimentary spacecraft simulator that contained replica switches, gauges, dials and controls 鈥� just like the real Mercury spacecraft that would soon carry the first Americans into space. All the instrumentation was connected to a computer console that could manipulate the readouts. In turn, the readouts were wired to the basic consoles developed for the flight control team so it could monitor the spacecraft鈥檚 鈥渄ashboard鈥� during a mission.

The simulations used a room-sized computer to recreate the gauge readings of many events that would take place in a spacecraft during a real mission. Ways were also developed to inject problems during the simulations. Staff could fake a huge drop in cabin pressure, for instance, or loss of the manoeuvring thrusters. They could also make the various gauges in the cockpit show readings that called for a simulated abort or flight modifications.

Unrealistic problems were deemed off limits, but the simulation team鈥檚 goal was to think about all the things that could go wrong so that flight controllers could develop solutions to have at their fingertips. Using simulations, mission controllers went through every system, working out what could be done if the spacecraft malfunctioned. This helped them produce guidance for what to do in the event of almost every potential glitch.

Looking back now, the initial training runs were crude, says Miller. But they built a close-knit team and helped prepare the astronauts and the flight controllers for all the possible contingencies in the various phases of flight.

When the Mercury missions to Earth orbit began in 1961, the simulations continued. The weekly trips to the launch base in Florida turned into longer stays, mostly because of launch time slips due to bad weather or problems with rockets. One stretch had Miller and Koos there for six weeks straight.

The entire space programme kept moving at an incredible pace. Just as the Mercury flights got started, President Kennedy challenged NASA to reach the moon before the end of the 1960s. The simulation group knew that would mean an even bigger job. After Mercury came the , again to Earth orbit, but they were longer and involved space walks. And the that followed would involve finally landing on the moon. It all had to be practised in advance.

The simulation operations moved to the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. With better computers and more functional cockpit simulators 鈥� some even had a moving base to recreate the motion of a spacecraft 鈥� Miller and Koos鈥檚 team devised more sophisticated and complex scenarios.

The mission control building had no windows, but that hardly mattered, says Miller. During the run-up to Apollo, the team usually worked seven days a week, and 10 to 12 hours a day. There was no time to glance out of the window, let alone leave the building.

The simulation supervisors began to develop reputations for being diabolical, with the crazy, complicated problems they concocted. 鈥淚n the Star Wars era, we would have been considered to be on the dark side,鈥� jokes Koos. But they had an uncanny knack for coming up with problems that ultimately happened during real missions. For example, they inserted engine failures in several early Apollo simulations. Then during the uncrewed Apollo 6 flight, two engines shut down prematurely. Because of the training, the flight control team knew to burn the remaining three engines longer to compensate.

The most celebrated instance might be the 鈥�1202鈥� computer alarms that occurred during the Apollo 11 lunar landing. This obscure error code signalled that the lunar module鈥檚 navigation computer was overloaded and needed to reboot. The flight control team knew how essential the navigation computer was for the lunar landing, and might have called it off.

However, just a few days before Apollo 11 launched, Koos introduced the same computer alarms in the final training run, and one of the flight controllers knew the computer could handle a reboot. Without that simulation, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin鈥檚 Apollo 11 moon landing may have very well been aborted, changing forever the mission鈥檚 distinguished place in space history.