Originally published July 22, 1969

IN a fairy-tale but real live story to Earth, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin signalled they had left the Moon this morning after a two-hour walk there.

They were 50 miles up at 4.05am.

They blasted off at 3.53am AEST, to link up with their command ship Columbia to return to Earth, after spending 21 hours seven minutes on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility.

Mankind watched breathlessly earlier as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon.

Armstrong kicked into the Moon's surface with the toe of his space boot.

He held on to the Moon lander's ladder for several seconds, then he walked away from the ship.

Armstrong said: "There seems to be no difficulty in moving around." He picked up a piece of the Moon and put it in his pocket.

The first television view millions on Earth saw was Armstrong's foot descending the ladder from the Moon lander.

Then there was his full figure, shadowy, mostly a silhouette, but it was remarkably clear.

Armstrong began a description of his own footprints in "the small sandy particles" of the Moon under his feet.

His first description of the landing area was terse.

He apologised for taking a little longer than planned in his landing.

"The auto-targeting was taking us right into a football-field sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks and it required us to fly manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area," he said.

Aldrin's first words on stepping down to the Moon were: "Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A magnificent desolation."

"Hey Neil, didn't I say we'd see some purple rocks," Aldrin said a few minutes later.

"Find a purple rock?" Armstrong asked.

"Yep," Aldrin replied.

He said some rocks were sparkly.

"It's something like the Western Desert of the United States, but it's very pretty out here," Armstrong said.

The astronauts set up a laser reflector on the Moon's surface.

This will enable scientists on Earth to make highly accurate measurements of the Moon's movements by bouncing laser light beams off the Moon and recording the time they take to return to Earth.

The reflector, made from specially cut fused quartz, will also enable scientists to study Moon wobbles previously noticed but never accurately measured, and to determine if the theory that the Moon is drifting away from the Earth is correct.

By taking measurements from sites in different parts of the world -- such as on either side of the Atlantic -- scientists can also learn a lot about Earth.

Whether or not Europe and North America are drifting apart is one example.

Aldrin took a core sample of the ground, driving his sampler five inches down.

"It almost looks wet," he remarked.

Armstrong and Aldrin climbed back into their module after their Moon walk.

Armstrong -- the first on the Moon and last off -- clambered into "Eagle" capsule at 3.20pm.

He had enjoyed the Moon walk so much that he asked for a and was granted -- an extra 15 minutes on the lunar surface.

He spent two hours and 14 minutes there.

Aldrin went back into the capsule ahead of Armstrong after spending one hour and 54 minutes on the Moon.