Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin 'planted a British flag on the moon'

Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission, was launched on 16 July 1969

A British engineer has claimed that a Union Flag was planted on the moon by an unwitting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Keith Wright was an engineer at the Kennedy Space Centre, working on experiments for the 1969 Apollo mission.

Fifty years on, he has disclosed that he secretly ensured a little piece of Britishness made it to the moon, because he “wanted to give Brits a bit of credit”.

Speaking to The One Show on BBC One, Mr Wright said: “We were working on the experiments that the astronauts were going to put on the lunar surface. We had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin come to our facility for a run-through.

 “There were two brackets on the experiment which held the solar panels folded while travelling to the moon. We got a ball pen and signed our names.. I signed my name and I thought, well, I’ll put ‘UK’. Then I thought, I’ll draw a little Union Flag.

 Aldrin is shown beside the foot of the Lunar Module.

“So we had a little Union Flag sketched onto there, installed it on the experiment package and it went to the moon.”

Mr Wright said the US flag was planted first, before the astronauts laid down the solar panels.

Spaceflight United States of America, Moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969: Neil Armstrong's first photo after setting foot on the Moon, lunar module skirt on the left - July 20, 1969

The Nottingham-born engineer worked in the UK for de Havilland before winning a coveted job on the Apollo space missions and moving with his young family to the US.

Of his meeting with Armstrong and Aldrin on the eve of the mission, he said: “Neil was very relaxed and quite jokey. We were concentrating so hard on doing our job, and seeing that they could do the job properly, it almost seemed normal. But, thinking about it afterwards, I did get their signatures.”

The planting of the US flag was back in the headlines last year when it was omitted from the Ryan Gosling film, First Man. Although the flag was seen at a distance as the men returned to Earth, there were no scenes of it being planted.

The omission led to a major row, with Republica senator Marco Rubio branding it “total lunacy” and Aldrin tweeting a picture of himself on the moon alongside the words “proud to be an American”.