We want to find out what's out there.
We want to be able to, you know,
expand out horizons and I think that
that truly is built into the human spirit,
we are always wondering "What's next?"
"How much farther can we go?"
- The Mercury astronauts when they get introduced
they immediately call us as sort of a hero.
The press conference that NASA had goes crazy
and the astronauts become instant celebrities.
They sorta look like knights in armor, in some ways,
going out there to defend the honor of
The United States.
(radioed) 3...2...1...Lift off.
- Roger, lift off
and the clock has started.
I remember feeling a moment of exhilaration
exhilaration because, of course,
I'd been training for two years
and in fact I was more than ready
for the lift off to occur
and was quite delighted in the fact that it did occur.
It occurred so smoothly.
- (John) Roger, zero G and I feel fine.
Capsule is turning around. Oh that view is tremendous.
- We choose to go to the moon
in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy,
but because they are hard.
- It's outward bound. People have a
human feeling I think for wanting
to go outward bound and it's in us.
You know, to go, to see, to touch,
to understand what's there.
- (mission control) Ignition sequence start.
- We finally come to the day, the moment.
The trajectory had been wrong.
They had targeted into this inhospitable place.
Then, they had to fly over this area
at a high forward velocity.
Then, pitch up to slow down,
so it would kill that forward velocity
and then start down like a helicopter.
Tranquility Base here, the eagle has landed.
- (Neil) That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
- (Charlie) The landing to me was a great celebration
we had won the race, the nation was almost euphoric.
- The knowledge that we gain
about the origin and the evolution of the moon
is one of these days, gonna help us right here on Earth.
Course its only one area,
but I believe it's an important area
and I guess I'm bettin a lot on it.
- NASA has been absolutely critical
to improving the knowledge of all human kind.
Twelve humans walked on the surface of the moon,
which is a stunning achievement,
and we are still the only country ever to have done that.
We're going to go back to the moon
and we're gonna take what we learned there
and we're gonna go to mars.
- (Sandra) To get to Mars, it's about a six month journey.
And as an operator, I would be really really happy
if we could test out our operations
and our equipment in our backyard.
The moon's only three days away.
The moon is the next step.
- So the Space Station is more than a million pounds,
it's as big as two football fields.
You are not going to bring that up in one single lift.
So, we had to bring up the Space Station in parts
and assemble it. The Space Shuttle
was instrumental into bringing up,
at least the American side of that.
It was more than forty missions over about thirteen years
to assemble all of those parts of the Space Station.
- And so human space flight is really interesting
because we do adapt really quickly to the environment.
How quickly, it felt natural to float around.
How quickly, it felt normal to look out the window
and see the earth go by.
- Human being are built to be able to adapt
to weightlessness and that allows us to go do
that exploration and so we have improved
the exercise equipment, we improved the diet,
the vitamins. I mean we came back so strong,
that physically I was actually stronger than
when I left, when I did the physical fitness test
when we got back. It gives me great hope
that, you know, if we have similar type of equipment
on our long duration space vehicles,
we're going to show up on Mars
and be ready to work the minute we get there.
- (Charlie) Orion, our state of the art space craft,
is designed to take crews into deep space,
and then once their work is done,
safely bring them back home.
Sometimes folks ask me, you know,
what do you think the next sixty years has in store?
I don't know all of the destinations that we will visit,
the mysteries we will solve,
the places that we will leave footprints, again.
- And we want to see what's out there,
we want to see how it works,
we want to go explore.
There's always this desire to learn more,
to satisfy that inquisitive nature.
Let's go do it.