My name is Charlie Duke. I was fortunate to have been an Apollo astronaut. We had 9
missions to the moon, I was fortunate to work on 5 of those missions. I was
twice in Mission Control, backup crew on Apollo 13, Apollo 17, flew to the moon on
Apollo 16 and was the tenth man to step foot onto the moon.
First, 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.
When he made the announcement, I shook my
head, there's just no way. You know, we got 15 minutes in space with Alan
Shepard's flight and he's committing us to the moon, what a bold statement.
I thought it was incredulous, but the country pitched in. Next year, I got to MIT and MIT was
building the Apollo guidance and navigation system and I got to work on
it and I met some astronauts through that work. I never seen
anybody so enthusiastic and so positive that we're gonna do this and so I began
to get that excitement, maybe I could do that job. And so, that was the, really '62, '64
was the timeframe when I was at MIT, when I really got excited that, yeah, we're
going to pull this off. We're gonna do this.
The war definitely, no question, was ripping us apart. But the space program was pulling
us together. I saw the Apollo with hundreds of
thousands of people involved in the program and the excitement that we're in
a race, we're still in a Cold War, but we're in the hot war in Vietnam, but we're
gonna win this, win this Cold War. I went around the country speaking back in
those days. I found a lot of togetherness, if you will, and the kids, the adults
everybody was excited about it. We're gonna do something that's never been
done before. So it did pull together, the country together.
Astronauts and the accomplishments of the space program are still respected. I think the political
climate did change why we spending so much money on the moon and my answer to
that was we didn't spend a dime on the moon, it's all spent on the United States of
America, we had 400,000 people, and so a lot of people benefited from the
technology that was developed in the space program and there been many
studies showing that the rate of return on our investment has been
significant from the space program in the space race, if you will.
I'm a big proponent of technology and I see the benefits that technology has
brought to us and brought the world together. I just got back from India.
The people on the street in India, everybody, they might be poor but they got a cellphone
and they can communicate and they can touch things that they were never able
to do, you know, 40 years ago. The fact that the technology that we developed
was state-of-the-art, it was crude compared to what we have today, but it
was the best we had. People are using technology for advancements in products
and economies and all of those kind of things that are going to a very
beneficial and can pay great dividends to us as a society.
I don't see any conflict. Science is based on immutable laws and the laws
of the universe were put into effect by a designer, I call him God.
The question of science to faith or science to religion is really a question, in
my mind, of evolution or creation.
Evolution is just as faith-based as creation is faith-based and creation is
just as scientific as evolution. And so you never can prove either one
scientifically, so it's a matter of belief, what do I believe. And I think the
evidence now, in my view, points more towards that there's a designer of the
universe. It's too orderly, there's just,
the thought that things just happened by accident is beyond my comprehension these days.
NASA was all of Big Bang and all of that
stuff, that it just happened. A couple of my astronaut buddies still hold to that view.
We had a discussion last night, as a matter of fact, on this very subject.
We can disagree but still be buddies.
I try to get the kids to take the hard courses,
challenge yourself in school, don't just try to drift through school, you know.
You never know what's going to happen in your life. I mean, when I was a kid, there
wasn't any space program but I kept my view wide and I had a sort of a plan
that I wanted, the only thing I knew is I wanted to be a pilot. And so I became
a pilot and then all of a sudden, I was in flight school and Sputnik went up, you know.
And wow, this a new way to fly. We're going to space maybe. And so, I kept,
I just kept going one step at a time. And so I try to encourage kids but
not only my grandkids, but the kids I get to speak to. I'm very active with the
Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and we give scholarships to deserving kids all
over the country. It's good to see the kids being challenged today and the
interest in the space program. When I applied for NASA, there were 3,500 applications,
all men back in those days. In 2017, NASA had 18,000
applications for the astronaut program, so the interest is
there, you know, and the desire to explore in these, in this younger
generation, as all theirs. It's very exciting to me.
It's a different generation. Space is more accepted, I guess you will. So now, I don't
see mounting a mission to Mars as creating the same kind of environment
that we had at Apollo. But that's aviation, you know. You look at, my dad was
born in 1907, 4 years after the Wright brothers. In 60 years, he watched his
son go to the moon. He could hardly believe it. My 5-year-old son Tom, who's
now an adult of course, no big deal. You know, everybody in the neighborhood was
going to the moon, you know. Next-door neighbor went to the
moon. Neil Armstrong went to the moon, he lives right behind us. And you know, Tom
Stafford went to the moon and Frank Borman went to the moon. Everybody in the
neighborhood went to the moon and so it was well accepted. And so I see
that evolution of space not from the drama of it, but just the fact that this
is going to happen. I think that's the human spirit is to, is to go out and
explore and discover and that's the inquisitive nature I think we
all have within us and we channel that in different directions, but space is
certainly a big part of it. And a trip to Mars, I think we will eventually get
there. I might not be alive by then, but
this is gonna be a challenge and I think the human species is gonna accept that challenge.
See what's out there.