Apollo 11 Crew interview 1989

Apollo 11 was filled with vivid experiences one that comes to mind my case is the flying through the moon shadow and seeing the Sun eclipsed by the moon as we approached it that was very spectacular sight well I think the thing I remember most visually is the asset stage of the lunar module the ascent stage of Eagle in front of my window and then in the background seeing of the lunar horizon and seeing the earth pop up above it so that you had the horizon the lunar module and the earth all all in a row I thought that was something that would rarely be seen again and I remember that most vividly I think for me the the most memorable time may not have been one that happening I was most aware of but I've had occasion to challenge my memory and think back of those first few seconds when Neil and I touched down and and there was there were numerous things that we needed to do but we also needed to announce to the world that we were there and then pause for a moment then things were quiet and we gazed out the window and it was just a magnificent view and that's the most impressive memory that I carry now because I refer back to it so many times I think perhaps the final descent to the lunar surface was for me the highlight of the flight it was very challenging a lot of unknowns and it was for a pilot that it was a wonderful experience there there's so many things that can go wrong on a trip to the moon and back is sort of a long and fragile daisy chain of events and I can remember being in the mobile quarantine facility the little house trailer aboard the aircraft carrier after we landed in the Pacific and thinking gee none of them did none of those little links broke and to me that was the amazing part that everything worked and some as well as it did I think the most rewarding part of Apollo 11 was having it to be the major event in my life which changed my life entirely and gave me an opportunity to reorder priorities and chart a course off for the future based on a new life of being a representative of the human race having done a very significant thing and it's enabled me to deal with that in a way where I feel very confident about the future my participation in helping to shape the future of the space program well every launch day is a time of excitement enthusiasm and apprehension but I think in most circumstances you always feel that the chances have actually lift an offer are fairly distant of remote and if to temper your enthusiam enthusiasm with the realization that in fact you may be coming back in and trying to go another date I I agree with Neil it seemed to me at that time I was most interested in just getting that thing off above all I did not want to recycle to have to empty out those gigantic fuel tanks and and try again a different day I just desperately wanted to go on the on the 16th of July I think the momentous most memorable thing that I can recall about that particular day was the opportunity while my my two friends here were being put into the spacecraft to stand alone by myself out there and look at the rocket and the quietness and see the Sun come up and the waves rolling in and the evidence of the millions of people watching but but nothing specific and it just so quiet and to realize that indeed such a contrast was going to take place all the frantic activity preparing the rocket but it's so quiet up there for me personally and that in a very few moments so we were going to be departing in it and a great roar and offer a momentous event well I think the impressions of the moon started much earlier on our approach thousands of miles as we get closer and closer we can see more and more so we got down into low orbit about the moon we could see additionally more we kept getting impressions then the final descent you got closer and after landing of course we then we were very close we had hours to stand there a mere 15 feet say above the surface and look at pretty much everything that was available out the front windows we had a sense of the gravity the character of the of the environment there so long before we actually got out on the surface we already had pretty good appreciation for what the moon was like I agree with Neil there are many different moons to it to remember the one that we see from the earth the one that's enroute as we're sort of alone between the Sun and and the earth and the moon and as we approach the moon it's a different one when you're in orbit you look down on it and it's a rather rough lonesome foreboding location Neil had a much better view during the powered descent of that transition right down to the surface I think I was relieved by the ease that we had and being able to maneuver around perhaps impressed by that the talcum powder nature of of the fine surface itself as you'd look at a boot print it just was so smooth just like you'd put your foot and talcum powder it was just a many-faceted moon it was a stranger to me before the mission but it I now look back at it as somewhat of a friend a place that I visited well the thing about the moon that I thought was peculiar was that it seemed to depend on the the angle of the Sun when the Sun was almost overhead and it was noon down below the the moon appeared to be a warm and a friendly place on the other hand near dawn or dusk it became very foreboding looking the craters cast very long shadows and the place looked distinctly unfriendly so I was intrigued by the contrast based purely on what angle the Sun happened to be coming from well I enjoyed being in the command module by myself it was a happy little home all the machinery was working properly and my concerns were not within the command module but simply that something might go wrong with the lamb with the lunar module and these two guys might get stuck on the surface of the moon that was my main concern well of course all three of us had flown in orbit before and seen seeing the wonders of Earth as seen from space this was a new experience for us in seeing it from a fairly long distance away does probably have a change in in character as you become far farther away I think you most notice that though at the time you leave earth when you're departing at a great rate it's very clear that this is an unusual experience well the the earth is it appears from the moon is a very small and fragile object and when you think about it that's not a inaccurate description certainly a lot of the things that we do down here can affect the balance in a very fragile way the the greenhouse effect we're noticing today for example the changes between a healthy atmosphere and an unhealthy atmosphere are very subtle very very fragile and you sort of get that feeling when you look at the at the Earth from a great distance when we're on the surface of the Moon even though that the earth was only a slight slight 24 degrees off the vertical there was no attraction on my part to divert my attention from from where we were and what we were doing to look up at it except for the one time when we tried to take a moving picture or a stirring picture a memorable picture and it certainly in retrospect looked awfully small personally there was a time when when an ironic thought sort of filtered through my mind that here Neil and I were so far away from home much further than people had ever been and yet at that same time there were more thoughts concerns back so far away on what it is that we were doing at that bear moment I thought that was very unique in the history of mankind of course we did go back a number of times after our departure in for a combination of reasons that program was terminated in favor of other new initiatives do you think there's an increasing momentum to to go back to the moon their studies of the Moon are indicating more and more new reasons why does make sense to go back but I'm not in a position to say here right now when we might make that next trip I'd prefer to see us go to Mars rather than go back to the moon unless we need the moon as a stepping stone to Mars it could be that in studying Mars that you will discover that the best way to do it is by way of a base on the moon and if that turns out to be the case well and good but I see the moon really not as an end in itself but really a stepping stone to to deeper space to Mars and to the planets beyond I look back on those days now of landing on the moon and I try and put myself in the position of the historians maybe even off into the future that looked back and seeded it was an international challenge in response that prompted the president to chart a course for this nation to go there and but getting to some specifics I'm aghast at just almost exactly six years to the day after we left the earth to go to the moon land we launched a mission that in essence gave the Soviets the ability to say that they are equal to us technically and then we proceeded in the next six years not to even fly one human in space and I think it's going to be inconceivable when future historians look back and see that what a tremendous capability was put together by one nation and then it was sort of set aside and laid to rest I hope that we don't do that in the future I feel that as humans expand outward that they should be in a and a gradual continuous self-sustaining way and I suspect that it will involve visiting the moon simultaneously or in in melding together with our are growing visits of humans to Mars I would expect to see them happening at about the same time we used a moon where necessary to prove out things I agree with Mike that the nation needs a strong goal strong objective and Mars is a much clearer one to use as our compelling drawing force into the future what there could be some very attractive cases made for going to Mars some of the various approaches to doing that in both manned and unmanned machines seem to be very persuasive to me I'm not surprised I would have preferred that we would have already had a permanent president in space however takes ten years or so to accomplish any big project these days and I understand that our reps will have freedom up in in the middle of the 90s and I hope that's true well I would advise them not to take my advice it's a rapidly changing world science and technology evolve at a rapid pace the things that my experience would dictate our three decades old and are probably not applicable today but I do I am encouraged by the fact that there are so many people asking those questions which seems to assure me that our future has a great deal of the promise well I think a Martian astronaut would probably better off studying the voyages of vasco da gama or Lewis and Clark rather than he wouldn't listening to the three people who'd spent only only eight days out on the on the road round-trip for a Mars mission is going to be in the vicinity of two and a half years and that's closing duration to those of the early explorers nothing Mike's right a trip to Mars is going to be a very long and involved and a major segment of a person's life and there's going to be a lot of times to be thinking about it discussing it in route beforehand and and afterward I I don't know as our advice would be that pertinent to anyone at that time people who come here to this museum and and look at our spacecraft Columbia are most often struck by its small size which from their perspective is understandable from our point of view the command module was a wonderful improvement over our previous spacecraft which were really cramped and so we enjoyed the luxury of a big volume machine I thought we had amazingly good accommodations we had hot and cold water the food was even edible all in all it was it was a it was a nicely packaged small enclosure and we could comfortably have stayed there far in excess of eight days I think it was a treat it was certainly a major step up where it was a marvel of technology and had the company to enjoyable people to keep us occupied things occasionally would get to drag a little bit on I think in a very long duration mission inside the command service module would thanks to the experiences that we'd had previously in flight we saw to it that there were adequate windows and quite a few of them to look out I think that's a very key thing in the future to provide good outside visibility for people in our simulations we're accustomed to having a large number of these kinds of difficulties and we had in fact simulated landing with very small amounts of feel left so I didn't feel that this was a an oppressive situation not that we weren't concerned about it we certainly were because they were serious matters but they were felt to be within our ability to make proper judgments on might turn it over suppose some simulations had indicated in missions beforehand that that the ground controllers needed to learn a little bit more about some alarm so that the senior director had directed that a number of people do some research on it so it was not perhaps as totally as much a surprise to them maybe as it was to us I'd not have been involved in in a particular simulation where some computer alarms like that had come up I think the major concern we had was that we we felt we needed a confirmation as soon as possible from the ground and the computer alarms did interrupt what both of us were doing was which was a systematic surveying for myself of the inside of the cockpit and Neil's concentrating his attention on outside and as soon as a computer alarm would go off and who would display something he'd have to stop looking outside where he should be looking to to see what was happening and then we'd have to get a response from the ground as to what the nature that was clear the display and then be able to proceed on so it became a bit of an interruption I think the follow-on crews certainly benefited tremendously by our coming marginally close in fuel and I'm sure they had a much greater incentive to land with a more significant margin well actually I didn't worry about it until after landing because I guess in my own do we didn't have that good a chance of completing a successful landing but it was I did think about it between that time of landing and the time when we actually exited the spacecraft was knighted well I think it certainly was there was a lot of discussion before we went just how certainly we represented all of mankind that the plaque that we left on the surface of the Moon indicated that here meant in the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon we came in peace for all mankind but I think all of us were with varying degrees of some service to our country that had been a major investment in our life were most aware that this was a national response to perhaps an international challenge of our capabilities and engineering and technical prowess by the Soviets and that we certainly were in retrospect responding in a sense and charting a course which was a national response and because of the major events that took place as result of the teamwork that we had between the government their academia and an industry I've certainly felt that the American flag is what belong there is characteristic of previous explorations to plant a symbol upon arriving at a new Shore and it indeed was a philosophical moment of achievement it was also a technical challenge as we found that flag didn't exactly perform as we put it together and it didn't stick in the ground exactly the way we thought it would there was no breeze to wave it so we had to maybe artificially create a little breeze so it was a great mixture with a I think a sense of pride and it will be a remembering event photographing individuals alongside the flag of course it so happened at environmental awareness increased during the same period in history that space travel evolve and there been various efforts to correlate those those two events certainly the views from space have have given all of humanity and a increased appreciation and awareness of this planet the earth does appear fragile from space part of it is simply it's so small it's about the size of your thumbnail if you hold your your arm out at full length and it courses a absolutely spherical atmosphere is not apparent it it shines it bounces the sunlight very well so you have this very small very shiny spherical object and somehow it just appears to me at least extremely fragile that would be the the one most fundamental quality that it projects is one of fragility I don't know why but it but it does and I think it's nice to imagine that voyagers going out to land on another object would reflect back during the mission on how fragile the earth was had to be honest with you I was particularly concerned about what we were doing it was a narrow corridor of that fragile body in the atmosphere that we we had to aim for and that would enable us to get back I think after the fact reflecting back certainly a technology and the advanced advanced nature of society in using resources has caused us to become more sensitive more concerned about our environment because we're using things materials resources that tend to damage that but I think the advancement of technology as evidenced by the space program holds with it also the keys to better monitoring of the rate of dangerous approach to any condition that is endangering our environment and I think also it may be that space provides the means of alternate energy sources or at least projecting energy from space back to the earth if indeed the production energy right now through fossil fuels or through some other means including nuclear generation wants us to do to move away more from from Earth in the production energy so I think the advancing technology as evidenced by the space program is evidence of our cause our concern about the atmosphere but it also is our approach to the answers and the solutions of our environmental problems to me the important thing is that we learned that human beings can operate successfully on the surface of another planet and we don't have to stay here on earth we have a choice of where we want to go and stay either here on earth or on the moon or beyond the moon on a place like Mars I think that was the to me the fundamental lesson of Apollo we can can't operate successfully in places other than the surface of the earth I point of the moon certainly was the first expedition departing the earth and viewing back on the earth and in its very simplistic initial challenges that it gave us it gave us ways of looking at other planets in the universe and and gave us a better perspective as to how to look back on our own planet and and to make judgments as to its origin and perhaps some of the dangers that it might face in the future and how to go about analyzing that certainly the moon had many contrasts it's not a live tectonic body it's it's a very dead object created by combinations of volcanism and meteorite impact rather than answering many questions I think it raised many more questions but certainly our level of understanding was immeasurably increased and it's not for us necessarily to give the best appraisal of that I'm very reluctant to advise young people as to what to study the requirements for space travel keep keep changing they might want to test pilot one day a physicists and next a medical doctor the following Tuesday I think what is important is that children do well in whatever field they they choose I think excellence is the key to it and I think excellence in is a lot more important than excellence in a particular field excellence in whatever field they feel suits them best space and it's frontier certainly are new and challenging and because they're new and challenging they're also uncertain and I think anyone aspiring that as a career field has to be equipped with a lot of patience and the ability to cope with things not turning out exactly the way they may perceive that they would ahead of time the wingless plane took all the lifting body Oh No yeah yep Reaper

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Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2012