The astronauts on Apollo 11 soared to heights never before reached by humankind. The return to Earth was, perhaps inevitably, traumatic, as Craig Nelson reveals in an exclusive extract from his upcoming book, Rocket Men.

Just after the Apollo 11 landing, CBS commentator Eric Sevareid said of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: "We're always going to feel, somehow, strangers to these men. They will, in effect, be a bit stranger, even to their own wives and children. Disappeared into another life that we can't follow. I wonder what their life will be like, now. The moon has treated them well, so far. How people on Earth will treat these men, the rest of their lives, that gives me more foreboding, I think, than anything else."

The men returned to the United States, first stopping at the White House, where Pat Nixon gave them a tour of her husband's collection of historic gavels, and the President commented that night at dinner that Romania's president Ceausescu had finally agreed to a state meeting in the wake of Apollo 11, a diplomatic breakthrough that Nixon believed was worth the cost of the entire space programme.

Armstrong next accompanied Bob Hope on his Christmas USO tour of Vietnam, Guam, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy, and Germany. The American tabloids used this generous effort on behalf of American soldiers to report on a scandalous affair between Armstrong and fellow United Service Organisations (USO) volunteer Connie Stevens, an affair that both publicly denied. The following May, Armstrong toured the Soviet Union, giving Premier Aleksei Kosygin a moon rock and a flag of the USSR that had travelled to the lunar surface.

During the foreign travel for "Giant Step", Buzz Aldrin, usually a reasonably outgoing man, had begun to lapse into periods of brutal silence. After the Los Angeles Century Plaza dinner, Joan Aldrin wrote in her diary: "The tinsel is tarnished. Buzz, who was never comfortable with all this, pushes loyally on. I cooperate, but I am tired and unhappy." In Sweden, the couple had a terrible fight.

"We fell into an uneasy silence which I ended by saying I felt all six of us were fakes and fools for allowing ourselves to be convinced by some strange concept of duty to be sent though all of these countries for the sake of propaganda, nothing more, nothing less,"

Buzz Aldrin remembered. "We proceeded to get drunk and we both cried. That night we slept like two frightened children, hanging onto each other."

Afterward, Michael Collins said: "Fame has not worn well on Buzz. I think he resents not being the first man on the moon more than he appreciates being the second."

Aldrin conceded, "This guy walked on the moon! I've got to uphold that image for the rest of my life. What do I do?"

The answer would be long in coming, leaving Aldrin lost and in misery for a number of years.

NEIL ARMSTRONG had spent his adult life as a military pilot, a test pilot and an astronaut. Had he been aware that, after becoming the first man on the moon, no one in the United States would want to take the chance of letting him fly anything that posed even the slightest risk again?