Hear Buzz Aldrin tell the story of the first moon landing

I am Buzz Aldrin and I receive lunar module pilot on Apollo 11 five four three two one zero all engine running liftoff we have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour liftoff on Apollo 11 power cleared I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish [Music] everything looked normal when we separated little communications problems with earth but then when we got to the point of lighting the engine for power decent Neel said I think we might be a little long well how could he tell that he had some lines marked on the map and looking at the watch clock we had we were we get to a point looking down we were gonna want a yacht around and that the landing radar begin to correct the knowledge that the computer had of exactly what the orbit is angle s van pH - Niner y'all +18 then shortly after that happened we began to get some program alarms which interrupted the displays now the displays to the crew from the computer were pretty basic there were three registers of a lot of numbers and you to know what each one of those meant but now they were blanked because we had this program alarm and so we asked houston what the problem was if we're still go on that after a few minutes they came back and said we're going that alarm we continued down but it tended to distract a little bit a little bit but we are still on a good landing trajectory as the lander gets down to about 500 feet the commander nobody has ever really maneuvered and checked the response of the landing craft and so all the commanders agreed that at 500 feet they would begin to manually control toward what looked like reasonable landings black and everything still appeared to be okay and I could see and and Neal also wanted to avoid a crater that was in front of us [Music] [Applause] forward forward but when we were at about a hundred feet now Neil is looking out the window and manually controlling him and I'm giving him the numbers of the altitude the altitude rate or descent rate and the speed over the ground and I keep updating with that information at about a hundred feet there's a light that comes on as a fuel quantity light and about that time the capsule communicator Charlie Duke says okay under feet 67 we better ease downs what I'm saying but I don't want to disturb Neil by saying hurry up hurry up human I thought a little further 30 seconds but we're ten feet I figured we got it made when the landing gear is just about to touch there are probes that come down about five six feet and as soon as they hit the ground they will Bend dessert it's supposed to bend and that sets a micro switch and that lights light in the cabin and that's when I said I'm back right of course Neil is looking out we've been doing controlling it but that's the first indication of actually touching down and then we actually touched down with the fourth here and I call out a few things we need to do like shut off the engine tranquility we copy on the ground you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue we're breathing again thanks a lot so we touched out and I think the estimate not because somebody put a dipstick in the fuel to see how much was left but it was calculations and information on board we probably had about 15 seconds of fuel left there's really no place on earth that we could simulate a gravity of one-sixth of what we have here so there really wasn't a great simulation because of that we were scheduled at the bottom of the ladder to just hold on and sort of see what it was like under the gravity Neil went down first and he did things I could see him through the window he had no trouble at all just moving around Samantha so I knew that there wasn't gonna be any trouble for me to move around so walking was relatively easy we could I demonstrated several means near the end of our stay on the surface in front of the TV camera and that was planned up here if we had the time and it looked to people back on earth as if I was just having fun but I was really doing something for people to observe their ease of mobility so we went through the countdown and when the call came from Earth you're cleared for takeoff I can end ahead when I was going to say now when the lunar module takes off it's about 1g but that's six times the gravity so we leave breathe pretty rapidly the ascend engine is fixed so it's a rather sloppy feeling but it's what's expected there's nothing wrong and when the engine cutoff we already a good on it some way when those two Americans stepped on the moon the people of this world were rocked closer together that it is that spirit the spirit of Apollo that America can now help to bring to our relations with other nations the spirit of Apollo transcends geographical barriers and political differences it can bring the people of the world together in peace [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Science Museum

Views: 377,924

Rating: 4.5073519 out of 5

Keywords: buzz aldrin, nasa, apollo, apollo 11, neil armstrong, jfk, kennedy, nixon, charlie duke, gene krantz, mission control, eagle, columbia, michael collins, moon, moon landing, lunar, one small step, the eagle has landed, space, space exploration, saturn 5, saturn v

Id: 9HvG6ZlpLrI

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019