WHEN Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 in July 1969 and became the first man to walk on the Moon it was the culmination of a decade of the space race.

That moment owed its success to brilliant planning, training and the trial runs of previous Apollo missions, particularly the trip undertaken by Apollo 10 in May 1969, which was the dress rehearsal for the first Moon landing two months later.

Two years later, the people of Scotland got the chance to get up close to the Apollo 10 craft when it went on display at the Glasgow Museum Of Transport, then in Pollokshields.

So great was the demand to see it that the queue stretched almost around the building for the six days it was on show. From August 11 to 16 an incredible 56,137 people visited the museum to see the Command Module.

They wanted to see what astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan experienced. While Young had waited in the command module (named Charlie Brown for that mission), Stafford and Cernan flew the landing module (nicknamed Snoopy) down to just nine miles above the moon's surface.

Apollo 10 was the first mission to carry a colour television camera inside the spacecraft, and made the first live colour TV transmissions from space.

Now we regularly see pictures from deeper space, but Moon missions are no more.