60 minutes rewind
so how often do you come back here oh not not often enough i always enjoy getting up here and
seeing this view along the along this beach and down here with all these launch pads that was
your life launch pad there for apollo must have been a lot of force on that rocket but what did
it feel like well when you first get off the pad you're still lifting a lot of fuel weight
so uh an acceleration is very low but in the case of the saturn rocket the big saturn rocket it had
a lot of shaking it felt like a train on a bad railroad track and shaking in every direction
and it was loud really loud did you have butterflies sure when you got
that much liquid oxygen and hydrogen and other explosive materials underneath of
you you're uh you're always aware that there's a certain apprehension is merited
and what about after the liftoff i mean did you you had to think at some point before or
after that something could go wrong up there and maybe you couldn't get back you might be
stranded on the moon well i suppose you think about that sort of thing long before the the
flight goes in the in the months leading up but once once you're here and on on the
on the launch pad and ready to go you put those thoughts behind you think positive all the time
just uh try to be ready for everything that's going to happen and having been there do you
look at the moon differently than you did before well it's a little bit like
if you look at a a globe of the world in your in your home and you see places on it you see
places you've been after having been to the moon you see places you've been and remember flying by
them closer range that july morning in 1969 when you came out and you gave that that thumbs up i
mean that was a very confident view you put on yeah it was a little bit of a sham i've met that
we were confident in uh the equipment and and uh our our own readiness to go but
you know the reality is a lot of times you get up then get in the cockpit and something
goes wrong somewhere and you go back down so when you actually lift off it's really a big surprise
so when you lift off on this thing i mean that must be one an incredible feeling of power
underneath you and what about the noise the noise is enormous it uh it's so loud that it's not just
audible noise you feel the vibration of the sound and it so
and not until you get up to about a thousand feet altitude do you start to lose the reflection of
the sound coming off the ground at that point it becomes manageable to hear things people
talking to you over the radio but that's about the first but in the beginning it must be hard
for you to hear ground control very difficult to hear anything over the radio in that that
noise environment you know there's an old saying in aviation that if it looks good it flies good
and this has to be the exception to the rule because it flew very well but it is
probably the ugliest flying machine that was ever been designed and it looks so large from
the outside and i've always heard how little room there was inside yeah there's not very
much room inside that it looks large but a lot of that volume is occupied by systems and tanks
in the end it worked for you