00:0160 Minutes Rewind
00:06So how often do you come back here?
00:09Oh, not often enough.
00:11I always enjoy getting up here and seeing this view along this beach and down here with all these launch
00:19pads.
00:20That was your launch pad?
00:21My old launch pad there for Apollo.
00:22Must have been a lot of force on that rocket.
00:25What did it feel like?
00:26Well, when you first get off the pad, you're still lifting a lot of fuel weight.
00:32So an acceleration is very low.
00:34But in the case of the Saturn rocket, the big Saturn rocket, it had a lot of shaking.
00:40It felt like a train on a bad railroad track and shaking in every direction.
00:47And it was loud, really loud.
00:50Did you have butterflies?
00:51Sure.
00:52When you've got that much liquid oxygen and hydrogen and other explosive materials underneath of you, you're always aware that
01:07there's a certain apprehension is merit.
01:10And what about after the liftoff?
01:13I mean, you had to think at some point, before or after, that something could go wrong up there and
01:20maybe you couldn't get back.
01:21You might be stranded on the moon.
01:23Well, I suppose you think about that sort of thing long before the flight goes in the months leading up.
01:32But once you're here and on the launch pad and ready to go, you put those thoughts behind.
01:38You think positive all the time.
01:40Just try to be ready for everything that's going to happen.
01:43And having been there, do you look at the moon differently than you did before?
01:49Well, it's a little bit like you look at a globe of the world in your home.
01:56You see places.
01:57You see places you've been.
01:59After having been to the moon, you see places you've been.
02:03And you remember flying by them at a closer range.
02:06And that July morning in 1969, when you came out and you gave that thumbs up, I mean, that was
02:13a very confident view you put on.
02:16Yeah, it was a little bit of a sham, I admit.
02:20We were confident in the equipment and our own readiness to go.
02:28But, you know, the reality is a lot of times you get up there and get in the cockpit and
02:33something goes wrong somewhere and you go back down.
02:35So, when you actually lift off, it's really a big surprise.
02:41So, when you lift off on this thing, I mean, that must be, one, an incredible feeling of power underneath
02:50you.
02:50And what about the noise?
02:52The noise is enormous.
02:56It's so loud that it's not just audible noise.
03:01You feel the vibration of the sound.
03:06And it's so, and not until you get up to about a thousand feet altitude do you start to lose
03:16the reflection of the sound coming off the ground.
03:19At that point, it becomes manageable to hear the things, people talking to you over the radio.
03:24But that's about the first thing.
03:26But in the beginning, it must be hard for you to hear ground control.
03:29Very difficult to hear anything over the radio in that noise environment.
03:34You know, there's an old saying in aviation that if it looks good, it flies good.
03:38And this has to be the exception to the rule because it flew very well.
03:42But it is probably the ugliest flying machine that has ever been designed.
03:45And it looks so large from the outside, and I've always heard how little room there was inside.
03:51Yeah, there's not very much room inside.
03:54It looks large, but a lot of that volume is occupied by systems and tanks.
04:02In the end, it worked for you.
04:04And it worked for you.
04:07Gracias.
