2005: Neil Armstrong on 60 Minutes

60 minutes rewind so how often do you come back here oh not not  often enough i always enjoy getting up here and   seeing this view along the along this beach and  down here with all these launch pads that was   your life launch pad there for apollo must have  been a lot of force on that rocket but what did   it feel like well when you first get off the  pad you're still lifting a lot of fuel weight   so uh an acceleration is very low but in the case  of the saturn rocket the big saturn rocket it had   a lot of shaking it felt like a train on a bad  railroad track and shaking in every direction   and it was loud really loud did you  have butterflies sure when you got   that much liquid oxygen and hydrogen and  other explosive materials underneath of   you you're uh you're always aware that  there's a certain apprehension is merited   and what about after the liftoff i mean did  you you had to think at some point before or   after that something could go wrong up there  and maybe you couldn't get back you might be   stranded on the moon well i suppose you think  about that sort of thing long before the the   flight goes in the in the months leading  up but once once you're here and on on the   on the launch pad and ready to go you put those  thoughts behind you think positive all the time   just uh try to be ready for everything that's  going to happen and having been there do you   look at the moon differently than you  did before well it's a little bit like   if you look at a a globe of the world in your  in your home and you see places on it you see   places you've been after having been to the moon  you see places you've been and remember flying by   them closer range that july morning in 1969 when  you came out and you gave that that thumbs up i   mean that was a very confident view you put on  yeah it was a little bit of a sham i've met that   we were confident in uh the equipment and  and uh our our own readiness to go but   you know the reality is a lot of times you  get up then get in the cockpit and something   goes wrong somewhere and you go back down so when  you actually lift off it's really a big surprise so when you lift off on this thing i mean that  must be one an incredible feeling of power   underneath you and what about the noise the noise  is enormous it uh it's so loud that it's not just   audible noise you feel the  vibration of the sound and it so   and not until you get up to about a thousand feet  altitude do you start to lose the reflection of   the sound coming off the ground at that point  it becomes manageable to hear things people   talking to you over the radio but that's about  the first but in the beginning it must be hard   for you to hear ground control very difficult  to hear anything over the radio in that that   noise environment you know there's an old saying  in aviation that if it looks good it flies good   and this has to be the exception to the  rule because it flew very well but it is   probably the ugliest flying machine that was  ever been designed and it looks so large from   the outside and i've always heard how little  room there was inside yeah there's not very   much room inside that it looks large but a lot  of that volume is occupied by systems and tanks in the end it worked for you

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 171,329

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, nasa, moon, 60 minutes

Id: wcvNqrTrLwU

Length: 4min 8sec (248 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021