He wrote three versions of the article that night for successive editions of The Times. By deadline of the first edition, the astronauts had landed but not exited the lunar module; by the third edition, two astronauts’ boots had touched the gritty soil of the moon. There was no email; to get his article to New York, Mr. Wilford banged it out on a typewriter and then read each word over the phone, making small changes on the fly as he read, to the “recording room,” where transcriptionists quickly typed up pages and passed them to editors.

But after writing up the launch in Florida, there was the problem of how to cover the transition of management of the spacecraft to mission control in Houston. For earlier launches, Mr. Wilford often ended up on a late-night flight. This launch was different. So the publisher of The Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, “let us use his private jet.” After meeting the newspaper’s deadline s, they traveled speedily and in luxury to Houston.

In Houston, the setup for reporters was different, but Mr. Wilford still had his desk, his background materials and his yellow pad with notes about what to expect from the mission — elements of the day-by-day flight plan that he could track as things went along.

His preparation for this reporting was extensive; he had even “flown” a simulator of the lunar lander to get a feel for what Armstrong was up against in piloting the spidery craft. Mr. Wilford repeatedly crashed the vehicle.