Professor Brian Cox meets Buzz Aldrin

so we thought we'd start with them two images actually so start at the beginning buzz flew twice into space on Gemini 12 and of course in Apollo 11 and there's a particular image that's not news to you I heard so if we could see the first image this is famous for many reasons but we're talking about it earlier it's also we think the first ever selfie in space so Buzz could you describe this spectacular image from Gemini 12 well the mission was ultraviolet photographs of star clusters at night so Jim Lovell the commander would locate the spacecraft at the right position and then turn off the thrusters so they wouldn't fire while I with the hatch open stood on the seat and operated this camera in time exposures 5 seconds 10 seconds whatever it was and the spacecraft might be drifting a little but it would catch this an ultraviolet now between two different night passes there was about 50 minutes of daylight coming back for the next so we we were real sightseers at least I was because I was standing in the open hatch and looking down at the parts of Texas and in other parts and I was reminded as cameras blind me I jail wonder if it could take a picture of me and turned out pretty good I didn't check the lighting too well we have to either move the Sun or we have to move a little in orbit to another location but so to get these builded geometries you're in the Gemini spacecraft I suppose it's smaller than this actually and Jim Lovell had to sit in his seat with his space suit on and you got to stand did he not say to you I would like to see us were sort of like this because they were ejection seats and if you eject and you go and slightly different but you do that on the launch pad if you had to yeah so you could eject from Jamie 9 mm-hmm after this there wasn't an escape tower the way mercury had and the way Apollo did also now you pioneered the the early spacewalk technology didn't you because we are interesting diving that you said to me that you'd wanted to when it it's a little bit the other way around we were experiencing difficulties some missions had to be stopped terminated early and we didn't get to do that space walking or there was a situation where the person doing the spacewalk was getting overheated and then he got frustrated and trying to do something so there there was not really a great success Mike Collins on Gemini 10 and a maneuvering guard Leo the Hatcher moved out and and did everything with her actually it was a dead a Gina it was left up there from the previous mission but when he caught back in he had to mess around with the umbilical so we always had some things going wrong and I had been training to do this backpack maneuvering unit on on the last flight Germany 12 because it hadn't been flown on the flight nine before I was under backup crew on that one so this is the last chance to use this number one air force experiment and someone has suggested from around Baltimore they did some research and discovered that if you were neutrally buoyant under water that it behaved quite a bit like being in space where you would be floating so they had suggested and and being a scuba diver from nine years previous I I felt yeah this this I think we'll really want some of the other astronauts and now you don't think that's good but they were wrong and I was right and it did make things easier but still NASA was a little conservative so they canceled the backpack maneuvering unit and I was really disappointed because I would have loved to have separated and and fly around the spacecraft NASA insisted on him underfoot tether all that would do is get in your way but those of you who've seen the movie gravity George Clooney was flying around with a backpack that's what I was going to do but but it was cancelled on that flights and on Gemini 12 yes so I just did some very simple tasks but it there were three different successful evie a is short the long one taking a selfie and then another one were I was going to activate the backpack and then there was a young garbage disposal da we had some things that we needed to get rid of so we opened up the hatch and you would appreciate this we were fine like this and I had these nice robot straight up not thinking that oh they're going to go up come back yeah and one orbit laser there sure enough there they were yeah they just passed buying it yeah cuz I think I remember talking to Chris Hadfield recently about when they throw things off the space station you're supposed to throw them down and forwards aren't you to get them out of the way I think yes I said what you said if you throw them up you just meet them again yeah so you said there that you meant oh if you throw them down they're gonna call like to go back I should sell it see because your PhD was on this wasn't it at MIT it was on docking maneuvers in orbit or orbital dynamics and I remember I read that you talked about a conservative nature of NASA but so you became an astronaut in 63 on them and then on the back of that PhD from MIT and then three years later you're in space so the pace of it seems to be anything but conservative in that sense well yes when when the training for Gemini was gone some of the early missions and I helped to train some of the people along with the company McDonnell Douglas for the first rendezvous and I had asked the top guy I said you know I'd like to fly on one of these rendezvous flights fiance anything but then as the assignments came out I was going to back up a flight and then switch to prime crew but there wasn't any mission so I wasn't going to fly on Germany but then a tragedy took the life of my back door neighbor and then we moved to replace him on Gemini 9 and has a crew for 10 and 11 so then Jim Lovell and I to unjam II 12 and I was a success so then I was in good position to be selected to fly an Apollo mission so Neil and I were assigned to what eventually became Apollo 8 the first flight to orbit the moon and I was really a wonderful flight to be on the backup group and then to see all the training in Neil and I worked pretty close together on that and then the normal rotation would be after Apollo 8 was a crew to Apollo 9 and 10 so we would fly on Apollo 11 and if everything worked out we might be able to make the first attempted landing all worked out pretty good speaking of that we have a second picture that we wanted to talk about which is which is this one from Apollo 11 and I should ask who is that a photograph of it I suppose it's a fairly obvious answer that would be both given the conversation we have it but manica is probably the most famous picture from the surface of the Moon I would say and many people say that's a Neil Armstrong but in fact it's you and Neil in the reflection so what was the story of that there's probably most iconic photographic human history actually all Neil was such a excellent see I I was walking along like this and he said hey stop try stop looked at him and he took the picture right away and you can see parts well you can identify that that I was just still moving a little bit but people ask me because it's so so well staged and we call it the visor picture because the reflection in the visor will show the landing craft and it'll show the white suited astronaut Neil that took the picture and you can see my shadow moving out so we call that the the visor picture but people have asked me why is that such a perfect an iconic picture and I've got three words location I should actually be about that you must have been asked all the time over the last decades but what to land on the moon and to walk out you've spoken about it many times but it might be worth saying a few words about what that feels like to come down the ladder and onto the surface of the Moon well we certainly knew that the pressure was going to be on us to be able to to do that of course due to all of us the most important thing and that mission was to make a landing if you don't make a landing you can't go outside you have to do it again and then but that's not the way the the press and the media see what's the most important thing is opening Lichter well i was easy but there was some controversy because it was the first time that two people were going to go out previously on all previous spacewalks the commander was so occupied training for the very complex things he had to do and make decisions so generally the experiments were given to the pilot NASA doesn't like the word co-pilot but the pilot always did the space walking and as I did on timoney 12 I was the pilot Jim Lovell was the commander but it for a number of reasons it was decided I think the customary thing would be that the commander does the leading of his troops and he should be the one symbolically to go down and an out was the way it was decided the experiment shal still should have been overseen by the the junior Brisby that isn't quite the way it worked out because kneels down there first and then he began I began following a brown and that's that worked out fine and did you it was there any suggestion then that the you stay in there because it just seemed to make sense doesn't it that somebody's there you don't know what's going to happen is the first time on the moon it's quite bold actually to send both astronauts out was there any discussion about that what did they - you know they're going out it really wasn't do if you put a person out there and and he were to have some trouble best thing is to have somebody right behind him not somebody back and the spacecraft now if the spacecraft is flying and the person outside then you might have to move this base craft over to pick him up or you might have to be the boss be the person then charged and and your junior person is out there doing something yeah and I think we touched on it before but the rate of technological developments and that that moved from Kennedy's speech in less than a decade to the moon and what did you think when you heard Kennedy's speech first of all that you would have a chance of being in the space program and secondly there indeed by the end of the decade there would be the mission to the moon well when he gave that speech in May of 1961 I was still at MIT and I was kind of working on my rendezvous thesis dealing mostly with rendezvous around the earth but I'd pretty well finished that and then it looked like there was a debate sort of between a Wernher von Braun and the science advisor who both thought what started with the lander that Ron Brown and his people had designed it was big and it would have required a much bigger rocket the Nova rocket with nine engines but that wouldn't be ready until into the 70s so I wouldn't work so they had to use two Saturn five the first would put up the rocket stage that would take the spacecraft to the moon so then you send up the spacecraft and you join together in Earth orbit and go to the moon and the big spacecraft would then do pretty much everything but an engineer from another center came along and said now if if you look at the task of taking somebody from the earth and putting them on the moon and you break that up into pieces you need to send a command module to the moon with the crew and it needs a service module but when you get to the moon you need to have a lander and an asset stage so if you put those together then you land when you come up with the ascent stage you have to join up with the other ship to come back home so we leave one person Airport two people down on the surface and that was judged to be very risky but it was by far the easier way to do that and it only required one big rocket whereas the other system required two but that wasn't the argument was how risky this is versus how safe this because they want to sell more Rakas maybe but that to me was too many of this was the most decisive deciding how to get there that really made the mission successful so you think it was obviously the right choice in the sense that it worked but in terms of developing a system that could go on words out to Mars and beyond but it wouldn't have been better to go for those bigger rockets and that more flexible and complicated system well it might have let Lee enough land first and we want that dammit sabot was the right choice because it seems obvious now everyone who grows up with Apollo there's the lamb and as a command module in the surgeon and it just seems like the way to do it but it is worth reflecting that back in 61 nobody knew how to do that at all it's a blank sheet of paper and after we did it the way there to work I'm sure that those do people still felt that we should have done it their way yeah but they were wrong it would cost more and they said well if we join things up in Earth orbit maybe that'll lead to a space station now that was much much later that that would come along now I have a strategy that makes lunar activities much much better than that but I can't tell you them I was just about to ask because they you'll say nothing about it what do you did you think on in in 69 and we there was many more Apollo missions planned did you think that we'd go straight to a moon base essentially in a single program with Saturn 5 launching that technology was that what you felt would happen well when the three of us came back from a 45 day trip around the world stopping it to replace those kings and queens and prime ministers we came back and had dinner in the White House and the president say well we guys want to do now he said I might I know you've been talking to secretary Rogers about a State Department and Neil said well I want to work on arrow Aeronautics airplane flying and work that NASA would be doing and I said well I want to really return back to the service that I was in the Air Force and I became the first astronaut that did go back now quite a few of them too and has been rewarding some not not in my case but now we we could have stayed in the crew rotation but I think about then they were beginning to look at maybe not flying the last tour there were 20 missions abled but 18 19 and 20 were cancelled out and you went back just you mention you accept that Michener's book well but he became apollo-soyuz didn't be one of them I think there's one of the news for that 17 well after the last mission people had been looking at what can we do with this Apollo equipment and it looked like the upper stage of the rocket there in a first second and third stage that went into orbit with the rest of us but if you didn't have the rest of us there it could go into orbit itself and become a container for people to then visit and there are two ways of doing that one was to have fuel in it but burn the fuel out and you could do that with Saturn one but if you wanted it empty when you lost it then you'd have to use much bigger Saturn five and it was decided to do the latter probably a good idea because to go up to a station get inside and it had been filled with hydrogen and now you were coming in and put to present oxygen and to it maybe that's not the smart way to do it so you just mentioned briefly but we did Skylab and flew to that for three times 28 days 56 and then 84 days and and we really learned a bit about operating and of course the Russians Soviets have been doing Siyad stations and so after the last landing there was a period of daytime somewhat between the Soviet Union and the United States the ABM Treaty was signed and it was felt by some people I'm told that it was a an offer of rewarding from us to the Soviets a peaceful let's do a joint mission and space you go up there and we'll come up and rendezvous with you we'll build the thing that will join the two of us together and that became the joint mission in space and looking back on it it's a legacy that from 1975 up to the present time has led to rather peaceful sharing activities in space at the time that the Soviet Union came apart and and then other things happened and of course I can't help but project into the future now that that we could have a spacecraft that could dock up with the Chinese and and that could have that kind of a long-term legacy of relations in space that would be cordial peaceful and that just might lead to more acceptable peaceful relations here on earth I know when you just been speaking to Stephen Hawking because it yesterday or the day before here and then you had questions for him and I noticed in one of his answers that he said that he felt that Apollo was the the most important thing that humanity has done I suppose he meant as that the first step out into the cosmos so of course I suppose there's some modesty involved here but I wanted to ask you whether whether you feel that looking back at the whole programme that from through Mercury Gemini Apollo whether that was perhaps the pinnacle of our achievement so far well it certainly was a bold step of progress when when we made that commitment we hadn't even put anyone in orbit yet so it it clearly was a a big movement forward the Russians have put Yuri Gagarin in space were probably going to do and they did many many more things but the two-man spacecraft the Japanese spacecraft is where we really began to learn more things than the one man mercury that couldn't even translate it did rotate but not translate and you have to translate with the Germany to be able to make the rendezvous maneuver so it was a very essential in between and prepared us for being able to carry out much more complicated things with Apollo now having done that and seen what an impact that had in our country and the world I think that being able to do that sort of a joint mission in space could have long-term effects on it so the plan I have starts out very briefly in low-earth orbit and then does things at the moon so that we can put things together but we need all the nations to come together we don't want to compete with China that would just make it very very messy right now they're they're ahead of us by quite a bit because we've made some decisions is we're not all that productive but if we can do things together in Earth orbit where we know a good I'm at the moon where we know a good thing about helping them Europe and Japan Europe has a agreement with Russia to work together at the moon and we the United States would like to work with the commercial people that could use the war the ice the water and the fuel to be able to aid and assist missions going elsewhere to Mars so that's very important so you see the return to the moon is a development step a learning step to learn to be so self-sufficient on a body Bo well it enables us to help the other nations and they jointly make use of permanence we never had permit we and then came back the last mission was three days they had a rover but they still landed and then came back so to make activities on the moon you'd like to leave land and stay there for a month three months six months and and rotate him keep somebody there all the time and a permanent and that's the sort of thing we'd certainly like to have at Mars so the design should be the same and the procedures of joining them together we can learn at the moon so that we can make sure we do it right because I'm just actually about the the atmosphere in NASA at that time because it strikes me you know but I think everyone here is probably a fan of space exploration but that timescale in the fact that you fight the first manned test flight of Apollo is what is it October 68 December 68 you go around the moon July 69 you land on the moon so less than a year from first test flight well was the atmosphere a test flying sort of rather more military atmosphere we just we have to do this and we will we will take risks if necessary we will just get on with it we'll do the engineering we'll do it what is that how different is that today and the first question is what was the atmosphere like at the time it was competitive and because the at that time the Russians in the sense were maybe a little ahead of us we had the Apollo fire loss three crewmembers in part of one and so that slowed up our momentum and then it it looked as though the Russians had sent an unmanned spacecraft and it was a small spacecraft that went around the moon and then landed in aral sea I think and they did that again unmanned and landed in the normal landing play we're Russian lands and we felt it was just a matter of time for them to put a cosmonaut in there and go around the moon first so that's why we accelerated the second mission of Apollo the Polaris first was just in Earth orbit but the second mission would have been the first time anyone got on the big rocket and we decided to send him to the moon and move it very bold maneuver and it saved us probably about six months and develop on time because then we could follow that with testing the lunar module and earth orbit and in lunar orbit and then we could perhaps land so you just have an atmosphere where everybody the engineers the the astronauts everybody's focused on whatever it takes to I remember I remember talking to a who's Charlie Jude can I ask him similar question he said well you when you've got four hundred thousand people and unlimited budget you can do a lot it's that there's nothing kind of atmosphere whatever it takes get them headed in the right direction yeah we're going to take some questions from the audience in a moment but I just wanted to ask you about Mars just briefly because that that's your your passion now isn't it just aiming to get a mission to Mars well it's not like it's a new thought in 1969 July we landed and then they had a space Task Group do some studies and they looked at three levels of intensity and the highest intensity they felt we could get to Mars in the sometime in the eighties nineteen eighties and the slowest would still get to Mars before the year 2000 that was very optimistic stay but but there was that focus on Mars as early as that and it has been the ultimate objective for him final five presidents now but there hasn't been the steps leading to that that make it a firm decision that's what we're going to do so so the in the eights is you would have used Saturn fives or the bigger than Oh boom booster and who knows what we would have used it now of course that was a great rocket personally I think it it was better than the rocket that was being worked on now to be the rocket to take us to Mars but there's been a lot of shifting around we we felt we needed to do something that was reusable and there was a study to make quite an advanced reusable two-stage that was cancelled and then we rushed into the shuttle design and perhaps in retrospect skipped a few things because we had the crew and the cargo in one big airplane so there's no way to separate the crew except to take the whole airplane with you and that was decided not the thing to do after the accident board so we by that time we begun putting up a space station had someplace to go and just while we're talking about the future I just then we note sit down you mentioned these the two things that you're working on now so you've got the Buzz Aldrin space Institute Florida Institute of Technology which is really looking at the Mars missions but with the with the cycler orbits yeah sir perhaps you could just comment very briefly on that because that's an interesting ambitious planet president bush's mission was called a vision for space exploration and some of us decided that a vision for space is more than just exploration it's a number of things but whatever it is we should unify space vision and I enumerated the things and nobody's improved on it but we have exploration that we develop something no sorry exploration and science is second more important than we knowing the science we develop that hopefully it can become commercial and the last and most important is security all of this must lead to increasing the security of the nation and that's why that gets more resources so unified space vision is what my plan was that would that tell you very much no it doesn't but we did a study of rather complete at Purdue University and then I decided I need to get a little bit more concise this the feature of the plan is getting Mars and the way to get to Mars that is different from other people's ways is to have a perpetual a continuous cycling between Earth and Mars and it may not go right back it paid to you may have to cyclers and it gets more economical that way and that that has been what we've been pursuing now but it's cycling Orbitz so these are so I wanted to call it cycling path ways to occupy Mars not just visit and come back but to keep Mars occupied you go and you stay and other people come and then you may come back so these are a stable orbit you build a space station essentially which is like a conveyor belt on several space stations which are constantly always in for free once you get them going and you ride them backwards and forwards transfer resources that's what the idea is that unlike Apollo and unlike this shuttle these are things that have a bærum work for continued exploration building one on top of the other well you you first put a cycler into the orbit you make sure but now it's going to swing by the earth so as they swing by you join up and it gets to Mars and you get off now the only thing that you need to take there is a lander because the rest of the things have been put together on the ground and the only thing for the route of going is six months worth of life support so if you can take one lander maybe you can take two or you can take three and and that provides a system with redundancy if one engine fails and you can discard that and still get there with the other systems other ways don't have that because had one last question for you open its the audience which is with a commitment from the world as you said everybody who scientific advance Nations cooperating together when could you begin to build that infrastructure if we wanted to well that it would be impossible to say if we got all the nations together and said okay we're all going to contribute to do this no one nation could do it in a reasonable time you'd have to be skipping and still you would come up short or it would be very costly in take a good bit of time and besides the other nations Europe Russia Japan China haven't gone to the moon yet they would like to do that and then maybe go to Mars I've always suspected that if the Russians say oh we're going to build a permanent base on the moon to convince us that we should build a permanent base and then they'll change their mind in Elko to Mars but what we we really don't want to do it that way we want to help them not compete I mean worst thing would be to compete with China and it's not real peaceful in the South China Sea right now but it wasn't really that peaceful between the Soviet Union and the United States back in 1975 so we could be doing some things in orbit or at the moon and the Chinese and chatting with them know that they would like to have some of our experience now maybe they're just telling us that but I really think that they would they know a lot more that we knew back then but but I think it would just be so unproductive for them to do things their way and for us to try and catch up the best way is to bring all the nations together and then let China advance and other nations will advance but we can pool our resources and set up a degree of permanent occupancy at the move where people I go for six months and then rotate cruise so there would always be somebody there like the space station doing different things like like the space station okay well let's let's have some questions from the audience so so stick your hand up and if you will and it's a particularly valued questions from the younger members of the audience actually anyone does anyone here is there there's one day yes gone nobody in the front row yeah go ahead so there's a vacuum on the moon this I in space there's no air so when the Sun comes on the surface it warms up the surface and when the Sun is gone it the heat leaves and the sun is shining for 14 days as it goes over because it takes twenty-eight days for the moon to go around the earth so when it's dark it does get quite cold and a lot of the spacecraft have to sort of be shut down and maybe they won't wake up or after being so cold and there's no atmosphere the radiation from the Sun for a solar flare would be very difficult for people on the moon as it would be for people leaving the earth outside the magnetic bouncing and heading somewhere else so you need to apply some radiation protection and that's still a little debatable as to just how much to get rid of all of it would be very very expensive and very costly to put that much weight up there so there's always a compromise difficult to vacuum outside the spacecraft in orbit is the same all the way to Mars and all the way around the moon it's it's a vacuum the Laird Reid you got to take your oxygen along with you so questions is that I find quite difficult say oh there's one this one right the front man that's great okay such as Boeing well it certainly is the the government spacecraft rate from the beginning we didn't have any comparison but they were not cheap and if there hadn't been some company able to put something together it would have been rather expensive to do that competing with the government but but we've worked it so that the government can help companies put together a spacecraft and they'll have a contract to then deliver people to the space station you start with delivering cargo first and we're in the process of doing that now with with two companies and it'll be three pretty soon and then there are some contracts already for SpaceX and and also Boeing to take people up the station we don't have the shuttle anymore and we don't have the commercial and we don't have the government Orion now when it was decided in beginning of for to not fly the shuttle past 2010 we assumed that seven years we could come up with something but it's not there yet and it probably won't be for until 2021 maybe so that means that if the commercial companies can begin to take people up then we won't have to use the Russian Soyuz right now we're we're paying twenty seventy million or more for each astronaut to go up to a space station that we've invested a hundred billion dollars in that's not very smart how did we get here well we need to look back and see what it is and I've got a think tank underway we're just looking for a little funding but we're ready to go to begin to look back at good things not so good and also look to the future so that's one project that I have started but it's not underway the other one is my cycling pathways Ford occupy Mars and that year by year the evolutionary steps at intermediate objectives may be an asteroid may be flyby Venus other people are doing things at the moon were developing refueling so that we can be able to put things on the surface of Mars from the moon of Mars and then eventually go and land so it's a step by step so you don't lose that momentum again you don't lose AK disease as we did well it it still starts off kind of slow but we're really not ready to put a lot of money into it I hope that that we can begin to build that financial support to be able to design efficient rockets and spacecraft that that really are needed we take another we may be let an older person ask question well yeah I was going to try and go further back you see then when I write in the back there what was someone at the back who's got their hand up because it's not fair we've got that we've got I think we were in that time a bit but I was told we could overrun a little bit because you know I don't got anything urgent they want to do based agree the breeze or the danger of being operating in orbit Norris toughness now it is a growing problem there's no doubt about it and there are people working on ways there's not a big incentive there's not a prize for how much garbage you can bring back maybe that would be a good idea so it's just I can't be a good thing to do it be a good thing to yeah we have climate change not happening but we have pressing things right now and that's how do we get the other nations together doing things that are needed to have the confidence to then go and put together a base on Mars and you can't do that from the earth you can do the slow-moving things close together but it will take time now if you put people at the moon of Mars it's much better but it's costly to get people there and and to have people at the moon of Mars bringing bringing pieces that are a mile apart that's valuable time doing things that we could have done from Earth if we take enough time to do that and there are ways of being able to space out the launches and use launchers from all nations to be a One Nation just couldn't do the things that are necessary to build up a location on Mars that you would be confident of landing and and staying there for several years some other people could come and you could come back there there are a lot of things really should be done before the first people go down and it is so much more efficient without going into details to Rovers on either side and five years accomplished a certain amount that the project manager said manager said what they did in five years could have been done in one week if we had human intelligence in orbit so that we could control things with a second time to life instead of 15 minutes yeah you can do a lot more science as well as this project but it's nice if you have a pace that lends itself to easy coming together if they're just arbitrarily that it's difficult say what we just talked about miles in the future but we start here in front of these images and I just it is that occurred to me a question I've never asked actually because I don't I've met you flew on the so the Atlas rocket wasn't it Gemini and then and then the Saturn 5 on Apollo I wondered what it was a their target the Agena target flew on Atlas mercury caps flew on atlas yeah a Gemini we flew on a ICBM Titan Oh Titan heaven - yo mr. Josh my question eh you got on top of an ICBM and flew it into orbit and then you get a number satirize did the same thing what is it as a pilot how what are the differences and how thrilling is it to pilot that become a Saturn 5 is the most powerful flying machine we've ever built to this day right so what is it like to pilot that thing did you feel your eye not violent in your along for the ride yeah that's such papers technically if things did go wrong there's a way you could do some steering nobody's ever done it fortunately but but there is that provision with the end controllers that if the guidance for the engines started to veer off that you could possibly get it straightened away and then separate yeah not bail out but separate with parachute yeah compass it's it's a very very different experience than to flying a fast jet fine an aircraft is it it does anything prepare you for flying well the the Germany spacecraft was really a pilots spacecraft because you could renew ver it you could go up down forward and you could do the maneuvers to bring spacecraft together and you could dock as we did with our another rocket that had a powerful engine and then it could take you up to eight hundred miles that we did that on on one mission we're supposed to do it on Jimmy twelve but something went wrong we didn't do but that spacecraft really was one that you could maneuver Apollo was so programmed in its pathway that it just wasn't the sort of thing that you could move around everything was very well orchestrated to be part of the total total flight plan of getting there yeah so so really the thing is that you on the rocket you just sit there and wait until you get into orbit but then the then the flying start well you know I get in before I go flying an airliner I'm talked to the pilots and that I flew around the world with some people knew what they were doing and they set things up with the buttons it flies itself it's not being flown except for landing in and take off so we're getting very mechanical and and as a result in some cases when the pilots do take over to make a landing they're not always as proficient as they should be you can be too automated and if something goes wrong when it's automated you better know how to recover from it me I take one last question but we busy and so that I was reading Norman Mailer's book a fire on the moon recently which has this terrific description of Apollo 11 taking off and I'm so at that moment when the countdown finishes and you take off are you busy or ie what's going through your mind now you're just thinking Christ this is this isn't this is a hell of a ride or are you really check this check this chat listed well there's the thought in the back of your mind you've gone through all this preparation you're up there on the top and they're beginning to countdown a lot of times there's a hold and then there's a scrub and you got to come back down now you got to go through all of that again one or two days later you don't want to do that so you're really hoping that nothing goes wrong and when when the engines light they're 300 feet below you and and if you're out in the crowd it's big loud noise shockwaves but you're up here you don't hear that I got a headset on and you're talking it it increases a little bit no when the three of us started talking about what the liftoff was like we all three concluded that the exact moment of leaving the ground was not that discernable except for the countdown but there was not any force but we said to each other we felt like we were being guided with the guidance to most dangerous part of that launch is going sideways and crashing into the tower because it's a big big boom and you may not be able to get away from it in time so when the rocket clears the tower that's the point where the control from the launch pad Kennedy Space Center the control the spacecraft is switched over to Mission Control in Houston once they passed the tower clear and you relax then well but but we're still not feeling that much it's smooth and gradually pushed down and then about four minutes we've reached about three and a half four G's and we're pushed back we get it smooth and what the engine cuts off we sort of move ahead in the seat it is not a traumatic we've seen pictures of the shuttle when they take off to somebody cameras going and they're bouncing around like this it's the shockwaves supposedly between the big solid Rockets not knowing that much about I suspect it's more than that because they're four segments solid has some instabilities near burnout and that was a problem when we went to five segments and that sort of terminated that program of going to the moon in the Vision for Space Exploration in 2010 yeah it's still difficult to build as Rocket Weaver is temporary actually we supposed to feed you three or they say one last question and then we'll do got it and I know there's loads of older feel is there any more younger members of the audience area there's one right over there let's do that that's wrong you've been really wait yeah that'd be great can you see him there with the microphones uh-huh can't see there's no doubt that the technology has has come a long ways when somebody tells me that their iPhone has more computing power than our computer did in the spacecraft I did a little resentful now I know we didn't have a lot of storage but my answer to them is well so you know I can take this and throw it open here now can it take a star sighting and know exactly what his position is and can it command a maneuver of rockets can it land now it's going to crash and break I can show a lot of pictures and a lot of names and things it's all depends on what you design something to do yes I've seen the glass cockpits of airplanes and and it is a marvel much much different than when I flew in the Korean War and ours were much better than the Russians that the Koreans flew but there's still a degree of automation and you have a tendency to let the autopilot fly and when you do that you're not getting the feeling of the response of the craft so I'm not legally flying but once I do go with somebody and they let me fly the airplane I'm not going to turn them autopilot on I'm going to fly the thing all I can to get the practice and we will have we do drones flying around no pilot him and four fighter pilots we don't like to be out of a job I love like the drone you don't have to bring back your left to feed them I love what you said that is it maybe it's a great so many the spirit of the age when you said even it exists today when you said I'm not legally flying but when I fly I don't want you to answer that why I I do a lot of writing yeah you know the rules now you can't be up in the cockpit an airliner and but oh I one more thing my father was the contemporary of Jimmy Doolittle and in world war ii he was the person that called back both of them into world war ii and Jimmy Doolittle trains right away to take off from a carrier that would be close to Japan and they would bomb Tokyo and they did and they take off early so a lot of them crashed in China or were in prison and Russia but Jimmy tulo became a real hero and and somebody that I looked up to and when my father passed away I spent a little bit more time visiting with him and I just loved to tell him because he was the first one to take off on aircraft Gerrit and the airplanes were behind him so he had the shortest and I used to tell him Jamia our rocket was taller than your takeoff roll was 360 feet is all he had to get airborne and his co-pilot is still alive as a hundred years old yeah yeah and that's nice that was 30 years ago wasn't it guys they've been having reunions and that's where I want their Apollo people in the German people have reunions so we can build up the public interest of what we were able to do and what we may be able to do in the future up to the 50th anniversary of when we landed that should be a big deal yeah yeah yeah that's a big deal for some President to say we should land on Mars yeah yeah yeah fitting tribute wouldn't it but well I know many of you perhaps all of you going to meet Buzz and after the short break we're going to have to get book signed it cetera I just heard these t-shirts as well there you can find these I think here can you buy them me rather than because because all the money's them for the share Space Foundation which goes to the one of the things that the giant destination Mars map which is a huge map making using schools and we were talking before if there teachers here or you want to tell your school you can buy those things are you can apply for them actually can't you on and they're funded partly by these t-shirts I said it share space dog yet but for now so we're going to finish with a short video of the Tim Peake launch talking about space as it is today and we're going to retire for a few minutes and then so you if you stay seated and then buzz will come back with the signing table etc and then you can all come down and chat suppose you want to find out more about what we're doing Buzz Aldrin calm because I'm in order to send this a message Twitter and the real buzz yeah real buzz is there is there an input an imposter there at Buzz Aldrin is there an at Buzz Aldrin he's not the real buzz buzz lightyear so thank you okay thank you thank bugs again

Channel: Science Museum

Views: 405,406

Rating: 4.435576 out of 5

Keywords: buzz, aldrin, buzz aldrin, brian cox, nasa, apollo, apollo 11, moon, lunar lander, imax, science museum, neil armstrong, misson to mars, mars, moon landing, talk, 1969, moonwalk, gemini, what is it like to be an astronaut, astronaut, space, life in space landing on the moon, what was neil armstrong like, who is buzz aldrin, who is neil armstrong, Brian cox

Id: UbfH209HCkA

Length: 70min 51sec (4251 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2016