In April of 1965, I thought I was headed
to Northwestern University to become a
graduate student in astronomy
and then I got a call
kind of out of nowhere almost
from this fellow who was
putting together a group within NASA
at the Manned Spacecraft Center to figure out
how to do orbital rendezvous
no one had ever done before.
Bringing two spacecraft together in orbit
and that's how I wound up
four years later the Apollo 11 run
they were training instructor.
It had been recognized about a year before we
got into active flight operations with Apollo
that there needed to be some kind of forum
where anyone could bring in and
bring up potential technical problems
or issues that need to be resolved
and these were fairly important issues
these were things that could prevent you from
attempting the mission
or that might affect safety
or the possibility of mission success
So they set up under the
chairmanship of a guy named Bill Tyndall
At the end of each meeting
Bill Tyndall would put out a sheet
of action items
issues that had come up
or that were pending.
And when I first started going to this meeting,
this sheet would run for several
single-space typed pages.
Sometime about late May of 1969,
there was a rumor went around that the machine
had gotten down to less than half a page.
The list of items that would have to be
figured out or fixed was decreasing
And so I went to that meeting,
A lot of us were sitting in chairs around the edge
and the people that had presentations
who were sitting at the table
and Bill Tyndall went around the table
asked if they had any further critical items.
Each of them answered that they did not.
And there was this dead silence
for 10-15 seconds, seemed like a long time,
while everybody considered the fact that
we had no more technical excuses not to attempt
to land on the next mission,
which was to be Apollo 11.
35 seconds and counting
We are still Go with Apollo 11.
30 seconds and counting.
Astronauts report, ‘It feels good.’
T-minus 25 seconds.
20 seconds and counting.
T-minus 15 seconds.
Guidance is internal.
Twelve,
Eleven,
Ten,
Nine,
Ignition sequence starts...
Well it started for me very young
I was maybe three or four years old
and the thing I remember
that the moon was the first thing that
threw me into astronomy.
I was sitting with my grandmother,
we grew up in Jacksonville Florida,
sitting there and looking through the trees at night
through the moss at the moon
and it just struck me as
beautiful and romantic
and I've always had a mixture
of a romantic and a
scientific interest in it ever since.
My mom encouraged me
to learn and explore
and so as a child she would take me out at night
and she'd point to the moon
she'd point to the stars
I learned some of the constellations
and I think we all have something inside of us
where we feel connected
when we look at those things.
And even as a child you realize
there's something special about them.
I think my father fostered my interest.
I do not actually come from a big science family
but I finally asked him, only about
three or four years ago,
how he got interested
and he told me that it was
his mother who sat him down to read
about the stars and the planets
and this is a grandmother I never knew.
She saw me when she was... I was three months old
and then she died.
And it just was the most
amazing feeling to think that this grandmother
I never knew, I'd always heard of as a homemaker
probably deeply affected my life
through passing down this interest to my father
who passed it on to me.
And then I think it was a huge impact
just having the entire space program unfold.
It was your entire childhood
and we only had two or three channels at the time,
so I think all of America,
when there was something that happened in space,
sat their kids down in front of the TV
from the beginning of the space program
to the moon landings.
We choose to go to the moon.
For me it starts back when Kennedy
made his great speech
saying that we will land a man on the moon
and return him safely within this next decade.
And then that was punctuated, too, by
in 63 when when he was killed
in November, and the way the nation was kind
of ramping up and science was being
funded and you could feel that,
almost feel things happening all the way through.
I mean you didn't have to go to the moon to die.
The test pilots were dying at about a 25% rate.
You don't realize that, you know, pretty large
percentage chance they wouldn't even make it back.
I mean President Nixon had prepared a speech
to the country if they got stranded there.
It's almost like the same type of speech
you'd have if you're burying someone at sea.
It was like burying them in space.
Well, working in safety at NASA
you see all of the things that could possibly go wrong.
When they had the Apollo One fire,
that killed some astronauts just right on the ground,
they learned a whole lot of lessons right there.
When they were starting into this business,
they were very naive.
They believed in success and that's what they focus on.
It's just different for our place in the universe
To have ourselves there.
And even though you're not that person,
you can almost see the place through their eyes.
That July 20th was just...
that was like this was the culmination
of everything the whole the whole nation
had been pushing for
for the previous decade.
All through all the turmoil and dissent of the
counter-culture revolution and civil rights push,
the Vietnam War.
All of that, at least for a time, would drop away.
A moment of clarity, really, for the nation
Every single person was watching that.
There was no one going out for dinner during this,
there was no one driving around, you know.
It was probably one of the biggest events ever.
When they came around from the back side of the moon
and it was very obvious they were, you know, engaged
in the powered descent.
I still vividly remember the pictures coming in
but it was actually fairly ordinary
as far as the setting.
I was just in my living room
but the feeling was extraordinary.
I think you all know that that went throughout the world
as almost like an electric bolt.
My cousins were all younger
and it was like, "Is that really the moon?"
And then as the module was coming down
to the surface there was
basically dead silence just watching.
It seemed ghostly at the time.
Which seemed appropriate in some ways.
That there they are.
They're a quarter of a million miles away
and up on this moon that I Iook at at night.
That didn't seem inappropriate.
So when you're 12 years old you're anxious.
you're like, "Hey get out there and do something."
You know you're wondering, "Why, what's taking so long?"
Well some genius making up the activity plan
for Apollo 11 said, "Well, the first thing
that they'll do once they get down,
since they'll have been up for probably 18 hours,
is sleep.
Well, can you imagine doing that if you
were set down on the moon?
First people ever to do it sleeping for
three or four hours? No.
So the suggestion was made by the commander,
Neil Armstrong, that perhaps they should
begin to put on their suits and go out.
Didn't seem likely anybody was going to get any sleep.
Going to the moon seems really like
impossibility becoming real life.
I think that's what was so stunning about it.
I could hear him talking and then I saw
him move down.
My father's name was Herb
and one of his neighbors,
I just remember him saying over again,
"Can you believe it Herbie, can you believe it Herbie?"
Guess he must have said it a hundred times.
Seemed to take forever to get down that ladder
and it was it was dead silent in the room.
You know, holding our breath like everybody else.
I really wanted to be there sharing in
so we shared it vicariously through television.
There were something over 400,000 people
involved in landing a man on the moon.
That's a lot like a war
and they take a toll on the people that are involved.
After the first landing and
downstream in Apollo, there were people that basically
were burned out.
There were marriages that were burned out.
The weeks following the successful return of Apollo 11
were like all the days after Christmas
that every ten-year-old kid has ever experienced
rolled into one.
What do you do now?
Those been projects,
and I wanted to be part of one,
and I sure was but
they get hold of you.
Your life is not your own
I don't regret any of it but it's tough.
People don't think of these things as
human undertakings, but they are.
If you're present at something like that,
you realize that you are present at some
unique and extraordinary historical event
and I think people do realize that
and we did realize it
and you somehow try to fix it in your mind
what you're feeling and it's hard to do.
It's amazingly hard to do because your attention
is nevertheless outwardly-focused on
what you're listening to and
what you're seeing, but there's still a
part of you in the inside that
wants to have this video
permanently in your memory.
Because you know it's an event in your life
that will never occur again in the same way.