NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with George Mueller, engineer and associate administrator at NASA, part 3 of 3

One of the interesting things about our vehicle is the use of Russian engines for powering it. It turns out that the Russians that developed a marvellous new Locks-Carrison engine for their lunar program. And they had built about 250 of them and then they canceled the program because we landed there and it didn't want to be second to us. And we picked them up through Arrowjet for our vehicle. They are better than any Locks-Carrison engines that we have in this country. And they represent probably a significant, in fact we couldn't carry out the program without those engines. And it is ironic that 30 years later the engine that they had developed for their lunar program has turned out to be very useful for the next step in the space.

There you go. That's what happened. The question about Neil's words on the moon, who thought of what Neil was going to say and was it reviewed by NASA? Neil thought of the words he was going to say. Some review was done but it was not in detail and in particular what he said when he finally got there was different than we had heard before. What did you heard? Just the new usual thing about the marvellous of stepping on the moon and so on. But I thought those were, that was a tremendously good statement. At that moment what went through your mind Dr. Miller that Apollo 11 landing and Neil stepping on the moon. I mean I know it's all engineering and getting it done but there had to be some kind of human emotion about all that. Well human emotion was thank goodness that's over and it's successful. Now of course we still had a day or two of worry about can they in fact light that engine and will it bring them back into orbit because straight into them there would

have been very embarrassing but we had done enough testing and knew enough about the system to feel quite comfortable. It was sort of anti-climatic really when you think about it after all of these years of concerted effort to finally have it work and work perfectly. It's probably not as far away as people now think. I think that what we'll find is that as time passes the local supplies of energy diminish and we are going to need to have some nuclear

source of energy to keep the population of Earth going and Helium 3 is by far the most benign nuclear fuel and it will it's byproducts are not radioactive which is the key to a successful nuclear reactors. So I think that and one of the interesting things there have been some calculations made that the Helium 3 on the moon is sufficient to power the Earth for about a thousand years. So you really have a source of energy that is both benign and good and long lived and also it makes it economically feasible to actually have a lunar colony or a lunar workforce to produce that and bring it back here. You can make money out of it which of course is