NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Buzz Aldrin, engineer and astronaut, and lunar module pilot on Apollo 11, part 4 of 4

...visual impressions or acuity about being on the lunar surface that struck you as being different. I don't think there were any real surprises. It was just such a contrast with anything that we'd ever been able to see here on Earth. There was the curvature, the very distinctness of everything that we looked at because there's no haze, no atmosphere, and the dark sky, you just can't create those things here. You see the dark sky from orbit when you look out, and it's the same looking sky, but now you have the horizon there also because you're on the surface, so that's a little bit different, and that's hard to create, but the objects that are on the horizon are very distinct, and there may be only a mile, mile and a half away, but if there's a rock out there on Earth,

you probably wouldn't see it because it would be obscured with the haze perhaps or the atmosphere, but on the moon you can see it. The balance that you have is different. You have a lot more stability, but you have less indications of what you're... By having more stability, what I mean is that if you exceed your boundary, if your center of mass gets outside, you're going to begin to tip over, but it's so much easier to recover there than it would be here. But your cues in your feet are much less because you weigh one sixth, what you would weigh here, and you have very soft boots, they're not like hard-soled shoes. They're very, very pliable, moon boots, and you know... Well, I talked to a guy named [Wasaper?] because of big geologists, and he said, you know... Let me just stop for a second. He said that even the few samples that you... [clapboard] Well, we brought back some rocks, and they were different than rocks that anybody had really

ever seen before. Maybe they'd seen tektites or other things that may have come from the moon, but we brought back real samples. Maybe we couldn't describe them very well, or we just grabbed them and stuck them, but they were different than anything people had seen here before, so there was a big change in our understanding of the moon. And later missions added to that, but the big change was between having no moon rocks, and now we have a few, whether they were described by the crew or not is very unimportant. Now we have some samples of the moon, and we have statements made by people, and we've gone over them, over and over again, and everything we saw, everything we said has been analyzed. But is that the significance of going to the moon? In no way, is it? It is that people alive today, when I meet them, they want me to know where they were when we landed on the moon. They want me to remember because they remember, and this is multiplied

over millions and millions of people who were alive and had their lives changed. That is the significance of going to the moon. It's not the rocks that were brought back, the little knowledge that we gained that we didn't have before. Is that changing our lives now? No, but America went to the moon. We made a commitment, we carried through that commitment, and that commitment to do that so impressed the Soviets that it brought about eventually the end of the Cold War. Now, not too many people are going to draw that comparison. I can go into more details about making a commitment to strategic defense that they didn't want to see us do because they knew that would ruin their economy. But when you do things like that, you demonstrate the character of the human species, the curiosity to want to explore, but now you don't do that until you're challenged by societies

that challenge you in one way or the other, and now you want to competitively make a commitment to do that. That's the nature of the American spirit, and that's what the achievement of going to the moon means because it meant so much to all those people who were alive. We'd never been to a place like that before, and we haven't been there since, and the longer it takes to go back, in a way, the greater the significance of having done Apollo 11 and the other missions, the greater significance that that'll have as a place in history. Why couldn't we do that again? Because it was difficult to do then. The engineering test, step by step, in retrospect, sound very logical, sound very orderly, but you had to have that rocket, you had to have that commitment, you had to have that investment. There are a lot of lessons learned about Apollo, but how many people

say, what came after Apollo? We built that Saturn 5 rocket. The first stage had five engines, monstrous engines, never been built, anything like that really since, that large an engine. They were never used again. We had hydrogen engines, five of them in the second stage, and then one of the same engines in the third stage that got us into orbit. That was the pioneering of Apollo that the Russians didn't want to take. They didn't want to take the risk of a hydrogen engine, so they had to build a much bigger rocket that never, never succeeded. But we made a commitment to build hydrogen engines. Wonderful engines, J2 engines, never used again. Why? Because America wants to start over again. We defined a shuttle that had a cockpit and a booster. It wasn't necessary at all, but it made the cost too high. I'm just alluding to some lessons

that were learned from Apollo that are meaningful today, but people don't want to pay attention to those lessons. They want to say, what did he say? Who got out first? That's not important. What's important is that we landed on the moon. We made a commitment and people remember that worldwide. Should we go back to the moon? Is that a viable goal? We'll go back to the moon in a logical way as we prepare to go to Mars. We might be able to justify going to the moon for the lunar ice and then see what happens, but I think that would be a mistake. I think the thing that we have to do is to make a commitment to reduce the cost, make a commitment to reusability, realistic reusability, not single stage to orbit. That's pushing technology too far right now. We need two stage reusability. We need to define a next-generation shuttle, and we need it to do a profit-making business. A profit-making business is tourism in space. And in order to make a profit

by putting people into that second stage, you have to have 80 or 100 people. That's not what NASA is going to want to design the next-generation shuttle for. We have to define it for the American people, for the people around the world, for a new industry. And if it's two stage and we're putting 100 people up there, we're going to want to fly it quite rapidly, get it back on the ground again soon. So it's only up there for one day, maybe two. Because it could be very cramped because we have to have paying customers in there, and it's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to be for the wealthy. That's not going to be very attractive unless we use my scheme of having a lottery to pick one or two percent of the passengers. That's what Share Space Foundation is all about. Why do I say two stage? Because once you get 100 people up there, many times you want to keep them up there for a week. How do you get a hotel up there for people to stay at and a week? The way we build the space station, five years, 50 launches, no way. You're going to have to have

a reusable heavy lift rocket. How do you get that? You take that first stage rocket of the two stage and you put four of them around an external tank. Now you have a heavy lift rocket that those four come back and land. The other part goes into orbit. We bring the engines down and we use that big tank plus the whole payload to make a hotel for 150 or 200 people. And that's a profit-making business. That's tourism. That's a hotel, a resort business. Now we build the reusable heavy lift rocket that'll take us to the moon and to Mars. That's the way we have to do things. That's great. That's good. Finally, for the geology community and so forth, they're all disappointed. We didn't go far enough. You think Apollo achieved its objectives. Do you not or don't you? Do you think we should have gone all the way through 20 missions? You know, Apollo 20, final stage. You know, you can learn so many

things in retrospect, and one of the things I think we could have done is to use that first stage and changed it a little bit, put some wings on it and made a reusable first stage out of the first stage of the Saturn 1. The Saturn 5 rocket, the S1C, n retrospect, could have been a reusable first stage. To have a realistic fleet, you'd need three or four of those. So you'd have to have reserved that many. You'd have to take the second stage or the third stage and make an orbiter out of that. We could have done those things had we had the imagination and the foresight to see that the program was going to be so constrained later on. Sure, we could have flown every single Saturn we had and then we wouldn't have had anything to put up a Skylab. I think the Skylab mission with the Saturn 5 was a most efficient way of demonstrating how to put a space station up with one launch. But we didn't follow through on that.

We decided we're going to build a space station with the cargo bay of the shuttle, which is 60 feet long, but it gets smaller and smaller when you start putting a bunch of other things in there. And the capacity, I mean, look how many launches it's going to take to put up a habitable laboratory for six or seven people. That's not the way to do it. That's a lesson from the space station before we ever finished building it, that we have to learn how to make it different. And a single-staged orbit as a follow-on to the shuttle will never be able to put up an efficient space station of the size that I'm talking about. Okay, good, Chris. It's still kind of important to get these countries together. And the other intangible benefit that we have now is the spur that started in 1957 when the Americans said, how come we don't have the ability to put a satellite up and the Russians do? What's wrong with our educational system? And it turned out that

the education of the space program are really been hand in hand ever since that time. A lot of educators now are using a space theme to teach the basic three Rs, arithmetic, and science, and geography, and English. And the kids love it because it's a space theme not realizing, of course, that they're learning something they would always have to learn anyway. So I think these two intangible benefits that our thrust in the future is where we have to go. You are really, truly one of the rarest of all human beings. Not only have you circled the moon, but in Chicago, you've had the great honor of having an expressway name there. He's one of the rarest of people. I keep getting complaints about the potholes on it. I have nothing to do it. No, I would not do well there. Yes, sir? What about the John Glenn question? Is that the last question? Well, we all have an answer on that. I think it's really is a sign of what we're

talking about here today. There's not a lot of public support for the space station. I happen to think it's very important. I think all of us who are involved in it do. But as far as the Glenn's flight go, I think it was more of a stunt and a political payoff. And it was probably if it had any kind of value to it at all it least momentarily increased the public's interest in the space program. I think that Jim Lovell and Tom Hanks with Apollo 13 did more to that, for that, and did more for NASA than NASA has ever done for itself from a PR standpoint. I was disappointed in the fact that we could somehow allow a personal preference to take somebody up in space that clearly had no reason to be there. I still believe that the mission is more important than any personal or individual thoughts or desires. And so I was disappointed in NASA, and I was disappointed in John and of course I've been disappointed in our president for many years.

Well, I won't challenge the very last, the very last point, but I have a slightly different view than Frank. Don't forget. He's not the boss anymore. Frank, I think it's great that John has gone up, if for no other reason that I've also applied, and if he gets to go, then I'll get to go. They said I'm too young. That's right. I was going to be his back up, and they told me I was too young, too. My only thoughts are basically that he brought at least a recognition of the space program to a lot of people who were in their 40s and 50s now that were youngsters then when John went up in his very first flight and sort of brought maybe some recognition back to what we're trying to do at NASA. But I think that basically it was public relations more than trying to find out the effects of zero gravity on aging, which I'd like to see some positive results. But you'd have

to have a large group of people of John's age to go up before he'd get any concrete results on that particular aspect of the scientific work that they were doing. You'd have to stay a while, too. You'd have to stay a while. Would the three of you go back if you were called upon such as John Glenn was? No, I would not go. I said. He's too old. Look, we've had our day, right? We were fortunate. 400,000 Americans did their job well. We went to the moon, and we're alive. And it's time to go on to something else. It's time to get new leadership. It's time, probably time to get new leadership at NASA. People have been around too long. We need to get some creative people in it. We've always asked Frank not to quit, to stop mincing his words, to tell us what he really thinks. I'm sorry sir, do you recall in detail the mission of Apollo 8? I recall every detail of the mission there was. Apollo 8 was the high point, I think, in all of our lives. And it was a remarkable time. And I grew very fond and close to these two guys

here because we shared a lot together. I'm certain that was the same. I was never in combat or in mortal danger before, but I'm sure that's it's that kind of a bonding that goes on. Was there a sense of making history or just making sure you were doing your jobs? I didn't have a sense of making history. All I had a sense of was doing what we were doing... And then the National Arts and Space Act, which formed NASA, it also formed this council. Lyndon Johnson was running it. And in looking into the records, it was clear that the Apollo program came together from Jim Webb, from Lyndon Johnson, and then was handed to Kennedy as the answer wasn't there. But I think Jack Kennedy said, hey, you know, we've been embarrassed with Sputnik and Gagarin. What should we do? He says, if you want to really impress him, let's go land on the moon. Great. Terrific. Well, you know, I heard or read somewhere

that Kennedy got all his cabinet in one room and said, "where's the environment where we can excel? We're behind. Where can we get ahead?" And that Nick McNamara suggested going to Mars. Seriously. Yeah, he did. And then they, Webb, and they all came back with this idea of the moon. And that's how it got started because he had a reasonable chance of success. Frank, did you think that they were trying to to load 8 up with too much science at first? Oh, they always do that. For me, that's one of the things they wanted to do yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we have performed valiantly. Yeah, you've done pretty well. I think you got more, than you ever care to have. Well, no, one last question. Should we go back to the moon? I think so. Yeah, I think I'd be a... I think personally, we'll go back to the moon in conjunction with, maybe if we go to Mars as part of an overall project. That's my own personal opinion. I think we should go back to the moon, but I think it will probably not be in

some wild deal of colonization, but the most maybe a scientific community like South Africa, South America. Antarctica. I think we'll go back to the moon and we won't go to Mars for a long time. When people finally realize how tough it is to get to Mars. Yeah. Ok? Want you to sign one thing. I already signed it. You didn't sign. Did you sign my thing? Did carry a slide rule with me in case we needed to carry out some other kind of calculations, we could of course communicate it to the ground and ask them to calculate what it was. So it was more or less of a souvenir that I carried on the flight. Okay, okay. Cut. Your things buzzing if you want to....your phone. Did somebody answered it? Just it sort of buzzed twice there. You want to stand by with it? You want to keep it here with you so you can...? No, that's probably the hotel saying that they. All right. Was that Houbolt? We talked to John Houbolt. Oh you did. Yeah, we did. And, what did he say? He said, yeah docking...

I'll give you his quote, to react to this quote since you studied this so much, the orbital mechanics. Yeah, but people tend to confuse docking and rendezvous. Rendezvous is something that happens from 160 miles out and it gets you on an intercept to a point where you adjust to being formation flying. From formation flying you then execute docking, which is like landing. So the two are different. You have to do one before you could do the other. He's talking about docking. Yeah, right. Well, he had... I'll just, I'll just hit you with this to see what your reaction was, because I said the same thing to Tom Stafford. Houbolt said that... Take. Buzz Aldrin 137 take two. Take two. Houbolt said basically, you know, that docking was as simple as parking a car in a garage. Would you agree with that? Yes, except parking a car and a garage, the garage is not moving

and the car is... Of course what you're waiting for in those first seconds is an abort, right? Like do we have to get out of here right away? Was that not the case? No, once you stopped the engine, you're there. Let me change, in good shape, moving right along. You don't want to have, you know, you get to a point where you do over-sensationalizing. And I think that some guidance person would do a better job of explaining that. Dead man script? I don't even know what it is. It's a place where if the engine fails and you abort the number of fractions of a second before the pass end stage starts to light and you get thrust. If you're descending, you're going

to hit the ground before you start going back up again. So the fuel situation was pretty close to that. Well, if the engine stops, you're going to start to fall and it's a question of how soon you're going to react to hit the abort button. Well, just as well, I understand you. So we don't have to sensationalize it in terms of this. Just tell me what that is. What, that was a safety procedure, right? No, it's it's a point where there... 140 Buzz Aldrin take one... [clapboard] In any landing where you have a vertical thrust like a helicopter or a rocket thrusting, as you're coming down, there's a combination of conditions where if the engine stops...