NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Buzz Aldrin, engineer and astronaut, and lunar module pilot on Apollo 11, part 1 of 4

this year it was well i guess a lot of people might think that dad germany was kind of a substitute program does apollo when quite ready after we'd gotten weaker than mercury but really it was essential in their major objectives that we set out to perform in germany won was to demonstrate that the alleged support system could support people are in an outside environment outside the spacecraft so we needed them needed to demonstrate their space walking now with life support systems that were certainly a step above just being connected to the us based care system we need to demonstrate some self contained systems and i we approach that and also experimented with the potential of the maneuvering it's a debate and backpacks it was one of my great disappointments not to be able to fly that day air force astronaut maneuvering it

and i certainly yeah my big regret is that i wasn't able to convince people that i knew it i was doing well enough to be able to activate the fact that you know i thought it was really kind of sad that nasa can select a major experiment and the last mission driven or twelve jim bob and i were able to demonstrate their very successful use of put restraints and to others and other things to be able to vote to do difficult tasks that a spacewalk sir people are like oh well what if it was all understand well i ride and buzz aldrin was a scuba diver and he had experienced are working with the currents that tend to move you in a direction that you may not want to move and you have to go

with the current and you don't try and fight the current you can get very tired pushing yourself against something and then i became convinced that even though your body as a big massive you on a movement you moved very slowly and very delicately and if your honor i position you just don't let that get disturbed and you make sure that you have good leverage before you try and exert some kind of moment you're twisting and last week he was in the bill well no i think certain things come naturally you you decide that you're going to move in a certain way and in the leverage so you've you just dont align yourself to get out a position home it's very easy to get frustrated because you can see what you're doing and i think in one peso other guy's gut all worked up because he was trying

to move the visor was very easy when things aren't quite working to get frustrated and try and you know impatient because the time is ticking on and try to do whatever it is and you just figure that well if it exert a little bit more effort maybe i can get this thing done that that's the sourcing you need patience and you need to move slowly and of course at the same time that they're that i was experiencing the advantages of underwater training and neutral buoyancy why we were developing to put restraints and and we convinced ourselves that velcro on a bomber shows was just not gonna work as it could be twisted and torn off and just little hopes your fate could slip out even if you can get them at an angle so that you like riding horseback in which a fetus when and nine butcher heels and gives you some kind of leverage then in as an example of using this small our leverage to keep you from slipping you're welcome

i guess i felt that there was a piece of cake outside just moving very slowly there was no challenge to it as long as it i took my time and and could see what i was doing harm visibility is very important and that the space suit is rather cumbersome and it tends to obstruct your vision and if you try to find something with bulky gloves and you can't quite get that can be frustrating to run again you need them you need to understand that it may be floating around somewhere still hanging down and you know that just takes a little bit of patience and understanding and get your phd thesis or us law i went to mit as a as a fighter pilot because i am felt i needed more than just great skills as a pilot i was a good pilot

certainly well above average are shut down to make swallows in korea and i was on a gunnery came with ed white and i could shoot gunnery as well as he could and he got into the astronaut program he was a test pilot but i figured well you know it needed a little bit more but education my father dead and his doctors to be a mighty so that was an option than for an air force graduate program and they offer courses and astronautics and the instrumentation but in one a specialized in the electronics of feedback control systems and instrumentation so i selected the astronautics really the only difference was that we had a more interesting navigation in the celestial environment of going between our one object in space and a new orbital mechanics the year equations of motion that that derive the iconic trajectories and then from there you did go through mechanics and mathematics and of course i'd been done very

well in high school in montclair new jersey that prepared me very well for west point i stood at the very top of my class especially not back so that game rather easy for me to understand it and then all that appealed to me in a sense that you know i felt that the idea of understanding navigation in celestial environment what was significant for things would be happening in the future i came to this background at mit with astronomical guidance there and computers but i was a fighter pilot and then i understood intercepting other aircraft four different types of fighter pilot maneuvers so i put all of this combination together and looked at some options for me to study and specializes in three things came to mind one was paella control of re entry spacecraft that have a lot of

problems with it because of the big gas floated guest dynamics of heat exchanger and heat country that was very complicated and sweetly see where a person in control ought to have good could exert that much difference or two to bring in a guidance trajectory for upper safe landing in and the re entry environment yeah i saw another option now that i could study which would be landing people on the moon we had decided to do that by that time where it looked like we would i couldn't see where the air force had a significant mission and landing on the moon so i thought well there's so many uncertainties about that i will worry about that but certainly the idea of joining together spacecraft is going to be something that we need to do and it's

like an interceptor and maybe if i try and understand how that is being studied now and and then put my approach to it that that could be of significance to me and i mean and when i look back on it and then realize that in nineteen sixty sixty one when i looked for subject to decline and that's what i chose i i really couldn't have picked a better area to become someone see the pension expert and that's what was its having an understanding of the motion of one object relative to another as they go around the earth and then as they go around the earth in one revolution the motion has a sinusoidal effect and it repeats itself and if you can understand if you get to play and spend and one is out of plane with the other is going to go back and forth relative to the other afterwards going to go around this could

go down below one of lebanon up above and back and repeat itself or if it's underneath the skin to catch up and move i like that everything is a combination of all of those three basic motions and you have to try and separate them and try and understand that because the president is well below the population and in order to understand how you can have an an impact on the computer solution for around or do you have to break it into its essential parts and and we worked and of course i wrote my thesis on how one could have line of sight guidance and make minor corrections and brother unsophisticated way a little girl inside that could make us some some calculations and corrections inherent in understanding the nominal trajectory an end so i could see where you

could apply these two corrections when you observe that it's not the interceptors not going as you planned its dvd away from a collision you can put it back on a collision course with a possibly change direction and that's called midcourse corrections really are once you establish an approximate intercepted them may make corrections