Countless small steps went into mankind’s most famous giant leap.

And while it was Neil Armstrong’s boots doing the first real moonwalk, and he and his fellow astronauts became international celebrities, their achievement was the product of thousands of people putting in too many man hours to count for nearly a decade.

People like Bainbridge Island’s John Q. Adams.

Adams, 95, began work for the Boeing Company in 1949, where he started out in various phases of design, installation and analysis of airplane power plants before being transferred to missile programs in 1957. He worked as manager in field installation design for many programs, including the iconic Saturn V rocket, which propelled both NASA’s Apollo and Skylab programs into space.

Basically, he was the pioneer on the ground who got things ready for the interstellar pioneers’ big push.

Technically speaking, Adams acted as operations analyst and design liaison support for launch complex installations for nearly 20 years, supporting such famous programs as Bomarc (the world’s first long-range surface-to-air missile, used during the Cold War; also the first missiles that Boeing mass-produced); Minuteman (land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, a later model of which is now the only land-based ICBM in service in the United States); Dyna-Soar (a never-realized, but totally awesome sounding, spaceplane slated to be used for aerial reconnaissance, bombing, space rescue, satellite maintenance, and as an interceptor to sabotage enemy satellites, but was cancelled in 1963, just after construction had begun); and, of course, Saturn V.

Boeing constructed the first of rocket’s three stages, and was responsible for integrating all three components together.

“To me the most amazing thing was what they did in 10 years,” Adams said.

And there was plenty to do even before getting to the glamorous work of space travel. The Saturn V was designed, under the direction of Wernher von Braun, at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. But there was no space center there when Adams and company first made the trek. In fact, there was practically nothing.

“I was part of the first team that went down,” Adams recalled. “For the office building, they took an old cotton warehouse and converted it into a pretty nice facility for the Boeing team.

“There were so many people; we’re talking about massive [numbers] of people,” he added. “Not only for work, but where do they live and all that sort of thing?”

At Cape Kennedy, too, Adams and the advance team found slim pickings on which to build initially.

“I spent a lot of time at the cape,” he said. “At the cape there was nothing relative to this program. It was a swamp.”

Ultimately, Adams worked in logistics for the ground complex, managing a myriad of practical concerns like spare parts requirements, assembly procedure, inventory control and even compiling maintenance manuals.

Collaboration was the order of the day, Adams said. Different contractors had to work cooperatively and everyone was feeling the pressure of time whizzing by.

“I thought there was a lot of pressure, especially on the operating crew, and that’s not considering anything to do with the payload, the spacecraft,” Adams said. “The thing that impressed me the most was how they pulled everybody together in a coordinated operation. It was very good, I thought.”

Of course, Adams had a very different idea of pressure than many of his colleagues — and he’d already seen enough history close up to suit him.

Before going to work for Boeing he served two years during World War II, completing 35 missions in Europe as a radioman with an Eighth Army Air Force bomb group.

“I thought I was living through history when I went through the war,” Adams said. “I landed in Europe in June [1944] and our first mission was two weeks after D-Day. By Christmas, I was on my way home. Then they gave you R&R at home for a while and then they sent me to school [training] on the ordinance system on B-29s. I was a flight instructor at Alamogordo [New Mexico].”

There again Adams found himself near the center of the action — although very much inadvertently this time.

“I was in Alamogordo when the test bomb when off,” he recalled. “I was 80 miles south, driving across the runway in a Jeep, and all of a sudden the whole sky lit up just like noon. A while later we heard the boom.

“We knew they were testing [atomic bombs]; we knew something about it and the race between Germany and us over who was going to get the bomb first.”

Originally from Wisconsin, Adams moved to Bainbridge in 1977, the year he retired from Boeing, and still lives in the same house today. He is an avid gardener and father of seven who has lived through war, seeing man first walk on the moon, the advent of computers and cell phones, the eradication (and inexplicable return) of measles, the changing of the century — and the passing of two children and his wife.

In the recent commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Adams said he was not particularly interested.

“I’d been through it,” he said. “I know it’s nice landing on the moon and stuff like that, but the accomplishments of getting there was the thing that impressed me more than anything.

“I thought it was very interesting, but I was glad when it was over.”

Adams said the lessons learned and advances made in the process of getting to the moon were, to him, more important than all the flag waving.

“I wish they would have had a more concentrated effort as to what to do after you got to the moon,” he said. “I think they lost a lot of emphasis in the next steps and so forth. Where do we go from there?”

Asked how he feels knowing that a small but vocal portion of the population believe the moon landing never happened at all, and was in fact the product of a massive conspiracy, Adams simply shrugged.

“I think there’s a lot of people like that,” he said.

“I remember during the program I had a vacation and I went back [to] Wisconsin, and I drove back to visit my folks. There are a lot of farming communities up there and they didn’t believe that we even went to the moon. They didn’t even know the program was going on.”

During the era of the Space Race, Adams said people seemed to trust the government more — but then again, the government also seemed more trustworthy.

“The government was more unified,” he said. “We still had the aftereffects of the war, plus the controversy after the war.”

Of course that may be the rosy glow of retrospect talking, because, as Adams himself is quick to caution: “When you get to my age there’s two things: One is you forget a lot, and the other is you exaggerate a lot.”