'You're Full Of S***!' Piers Morgan Takes Down Moon Landing Denier | Artemis II Debate
Piers Morgan Uncensored tackles moon landing denials as Bart Sibrel claims CIA faked Apollo using a one-foot Earth model and lethal Van Allen radiation myths. Professor Brian Keating counters with Soviet probe data and the logistical impossibility of deceiving hundreds of thousands, while astronaut Charlie Duke calls denial willful ignorance. The episode concludes by contrasting these absurd theories with the genuine risks of the Artemis II mission, reinforcing that scientific consensus and international cooperation validate humanity's lunar achievements over conspiracy narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Faking the Moon Landing00:15:00
The most powerful government in the world falsified their alleged greatest accomplishment.
They did indeed fake the moon landing.
I want to treat Bart as a colleague, maybe not as an equal, but if you would let me teach you some physics, then you can make your argument stronger.
Charlie Duke is an Apollo astronaut, the 10th and youngest man to walk on the surface of the moon.
What do you feel about the conspiracy theorists who think the moon landings were all invented?
They never happened.
They're fake.
You're willfully ignorant if you don't believe that we landed on the moon.
What is the mindset of somebody who said, well, it didn't really happen?
That's like the denial of humanity.
These crazy individuals shouldn't have our attention.
Given this is the furthest that NASA ever sent a rocket, presumably you think this must be fake too.
The Artemis II mission to the dark side of the moon will be the furthest human beings have ever traveled from Earth.
It's the precursor to a full return to the lunar surface and perhaps even reaching Mars.
But for this trip, historic though it is, there will be no landing, no walking, no flags planted.
Very much unlike the Apollo mission of 50 years ago.
In a moment, we'll talk to the man who says he's on a CIA hit list because he blew the whistle on what he says are the original moon landings being fake.
But first, let's talk to the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the Into the Impossible podcast.
Welcome to you, Professor Keating.
How are you?
Good to see you again, Piers.
Well, good to see you.
I'm obviously about to talk to Bart Sibral.
He's made himself pretty infamous by ending up being punched by Buzz Aldrin for questioning to his face that he'd walked on the moon or being part of that, of course, that first immortal trip.
Before we get to him, what is your view of people that just don't want to believe this has ever happened?
I think it's something we need to take very seriously, but not literally.
In other words, there are reasons.
You could say there could be reasons why NASA and maybe the U.S. government, maybe even the CIA would want to put a whack on Bart, as I've heard him describe it.
Perhaps, you know, there are some mistruths that our government tell from time to time.
But in order to believe the moon landings in the 1960s and 70s were fake, you need to believe a whole host of things that not only require vast conspiracy numbers involving hundreds of thousands of people, you need to suspend your scientific reasoning and your ability to search for truth.
You know, Piers, we live in an age that's sometimes called post-truth or post-fact, where you're entitled to your own, you know, ideas and theories.
But in reality, what worries me more is not that people get facts wrong.
I mean, that happens all the time.
It happens to me all the time as a scientist, but it's that we undermine the process of truth-seeking that no society can withstand.
So I'm hoping to talk to Bart.
You know, he knows about me.
I've invited him to chat on my podcast and he's turned it down for reasons that I don't understand.
So I'm eager to talk to him because I think it's instructive for the public to see not only the great triumphs, but why we know for certain that these things happen and why it speaks to not only American exceptionalism, but humanity's exceptionalism.
Well, you know what, we'll come back and discuss Artemis specifically in a bit.
But given you've teed this up very nicely and we have Bart Sybral waiting, joining me now is Bart Sybral, who has been what many view as a conspiracy investigator about the moon landing, saying they're fake.
He even confronted, as I said, Buzz Aldrin.
Let's take a look at what happened then.
You got to keep cheating, man.
Okay.
Well, you can put it on your shoulder.
Don't be shy.
Just come with me, Buzz.
You're the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn't.
Calling the kettle black.
If you ever thought of it.
Say nothing.
You misrepresented it away.
You're a coward and a liar and a thief.
Well, Bart Sybrill joins me now.
Welcome to Uncensored.
I've actually met Buzz Aldrin.
All I remember is he had one of the hardest handshakes I've ever encountered on any human being ever.
So you were quite courageous there, Bart Sybrill, albeit, as you were calling one of the great modern heroes, a coward.
Why are you so obsessed about branding the lunar landings fake?
Well, because one of the most historic events in human history isn't putting a man on the moon.
It's that the most powerful government in the world that hypocritically claims to represent truth and justice falsified their alleged greatest accomplishment.
They did indeed fake the moon landing.
And Brian, first time I've ever seen you speak, he's obviously highly intelligent and a very reasonable person.
Unfortunately, people want to believe a tantalizing lie like their team ran or won the Super Bowl.
What he's, you know, he claims I'm denying scientific reasoning, but actually he's doing that because it's never happened in the history of the world that a milestone technologically occurred, like let's say flying across the Atlantic in 1927 or breaking the sound barrier or splitting the first atom.
It's never happened in the history of the world that more than 50 years later, no one could accomplish it.
Absolutely what happens today.
Well, you know, let me, let me, I'm up against, we've heard your side of the story for 57 years.
I would love to just comment on that because I have actual experience with an event that happened and it was separated by 60 years.
I reached the South Pole twice in 2007 and 2009.
Do you know who the first people to reach the South Pole were, Bart?
Well, Admondson Scott.
Yeah, that's right.
And do you know who Admundson was for Norway?
Hold on, hold on a second.
Admondson was the first person.
Norway reach it.
And we didn't go back for 50 years until 1964, Bart.
We didn't go back for 50 years exactly like what happened.
Was it harder?
Have I never been to the South Pole, Bart?
I don't know.
I mean, I presume that you have to...
I have video evidence of me there.
So here we are with six.
I'm not denying that.
The fact is we have to...
You just made a claim that nothing gets easier unless it's technologically true.
Well, I can offer you that.
I would like to offer my own contribution.
Well, hang on, Bart.
I'm not getting much time to share my story.
Bart, hang on.
I'd like to offer my own contribution to that debate because I personally went on the last Concorde flight, which was about 20 years ago.
And we have gone backwards in the speed of passenger air travel because it now takes twice as long for me to get to New York as it did 20 years ago.
So there's another example.
The question is, are there aircraft that fly higher and faster than the Concorde?
And there are passengers.
Well, people are on board.
There's no commercial plane.
There's no commercial plane that can get to New York in 19 and a half hours.
Whereas Concorde did it in 2058.
So the premise of your argument is flawed because you've already heard one example from Brian.
You've heard one from me.
I'm sure there are a myriad other examples.
But I'm just keen before we get too far into the weeds on that part of it.
You said here about the lunar landings.
In order to appreciate the full absurdity of the lie, it bears repeating what both the US government and NASA claimed in the 60s.
On the very first attempt to an all with one millionth the computing power of a cell phone, they've been able to send astronauts to orbit and land on the surface of the moon, a distance that is 1,000 times farther than they can achieve with human spaceflight today.
To buy into your conspiracy theory about this, and it never happened, the sheer volume of people who must have signed up to this conspiracy, right, is overwhelming.
Why has none of them?
Why have none of the people that were part of the lie, why have none of them broken ranks to say this was all faked?
Well, first of all, you're incorrect.
I spoke to Eugene Krantz, flight director.
He said that someone in the command center cannot tell the difference between a quote rehearsal flight and a quote a real flight.
Just because there's 400,000 bank tellers at Bank of America, what a bank teller knows about corruption in the bank and what the CEO knows are completely different.
There's only three eyewitnesses to every program.
And who knows where they're really going?
The fact is we did have someone come forward.
Two people came forward.
Betty Grissom, the widow of the man who was going to be the first man to walk on the moon, I interviewed her for four hours before she died.
I bet Brian did not do that.
She told me that her husband called her on January 26, 1967 from NASA and said, Han, for some strange reason, the CIA is over the launch pad today inspecting the equipment.
I've been here eight years, never seen them before.
Why did they show up?
That never happened.
That never happened.
Even your own testimony is that.
Betty Grissom's a liar.
Allow Brian to respond to that, please.
Brian.
She never said that.
He interrupted me.
Allow me to say that.
I want to do you a favor.
I think what you do is important.
I think, as I said originally, I think it's important to question things.
Certainly the government lies to us.
Oh, thank you so much.
Hold on one second.
But what Betty Grissom said, she said they were all over, the CIA was in the mission command center.
She never said that if you go back and look at your own transcripts, she said, didn't say they were on the launch pad.
No one had access to the launch pad because it was full of rocket fuel.
So they wouldn't even let the technicians near it, as you know.
But Bart, I think you have much stronger evidence.
And I don't know why you're leading with the things that are most easily deflated.
I'd love to talk about what you claim is strong evidence that we could tell.
I interviewed Betty Grissom for four hours before she died.
Did you say I've read your transcripts?
I've read transcripts by you and by her.
I'm asking you if you interrupted me.
She did say that there were CIAs.
She never said they were crawling over the launch pad.
And does that prove that the moon was drawn?
You weren't even alive at the time.
That's what she told me.
And it's where I interviewed you.
Let me ask you, Brian.
I'm not doubting that.
Bart, let me ask you.
What is the most convincing piece of evidence you had that it was faked?
Well, I have the crew of Apollo 11 faking being halfway to the moon using a one-foot model of the Earth.
And I have the CIA on a third track of audio telling them to fake a four-second radio delay from Earth orbit.
And then we have the eyewitness testimony of a deathbed confession of Cyrus Eugene Anchors, who saw them film it at Cannon Air Force Base in 1968.
He even confessed to killing somebody to cover it up because the NSA asked him to do so.
That's a strange thing to be saying.
You've also claimed, I'll come to you, Brian, in a second, but you've also claimed, you've described what you call as anomalous shadows that are not parallel, suggesting multiple artificial light sources in the studio rather than a single distant sun.
So these photographs that we're looking at now, you think are indicative of fakery?
Well, let me also say I went from being the biggest fan, greater fan than Brian.
I had a shrine of Apollo pictures in my house for decades.
And a filmmaker's job is to make fake scenes look real.
Go back to the picture and look how shadows should be in sunlight.
The sun, it's a million times bigger than the earth in volume.
It's 93 million miles away.
It's going to cast shadows in the same direction on the earth or the moon.
There's two telephone poles about five feet apart.
The shadows are parallel.
Here's a picture that claimed was taken on the moon of objects five feet apart.
The astronaut shadows at 12 o'clock, the rock five feet away, the shadows at nine o'clock.
That can only happen with the close electrical light.
We just proved with one photograph that they faked the moon landing despite what anybody says, despite what the corrupt federal government says.
That picture cannot be duplicated in sunlight.
It can only be duplicated with the lightning.
So let me get you on Earth or that means they didn't go to the moon.
Okay.
I'm sorry to bring you the bad news.
No, no, that's your claim.
Brian Keating, your response.
Well, again, I want to treat Bart as a colleague, maybe not as an equal, but I want to treat him fairly.
And I want to say, Bart, you have much better evidence than I've heard you talk about with our.
Oh, thank you.
Well, I don't think you're a trained scientist.
Bart, I mean, if I go to my Wikipedia page.
I don't think you're a trained cinematographer either.
That's not right.
When I go to my Wikipedia page, it says...
Okay, Bart, when I go to my Wikipedia page, people can see that I'm listed as a professor of astrophysics with 40 years of experience.
When they go to your page, it says conspiracy theorist.
So I don't want to say that we're equal because we're not.
We're not in the same league.
I will treat you like a peer.
I will give you an expert review of what you're talking about.
But what I want to tell you very much.
No, I want to use your own words.
I want to treat you very seriously, Bart.
I want to say that you have talked to Candace Owens on her podcast, and you described what she later called the firmament, the asteroid belt, and then later the Van Allen belts.
This is one key piece of qualitative but quantitative evidence that you have presented, which I think deserves attention.
You've acclaimed the Van Allen belts are deadly and they are not survivable, and NASA knew that themselves.
Correct or incorrect, Bart?
Well, show the clip.
What clip number is it here, right?
Let's hear it in NASA's own mouth.
Well, we've got the clip.
Hang on.
Hang on.
We've got the clip.
Let's play the clip.
So the Van Allen radiation belts, you've argued the radiation surrounding Earth is so extreme, it would have been lethal for any human to pass through, making the journey impossible.
So let's take a look at that.
Let's take a look.
We're going to play the clip.
Okay.
My name is Kelly Smith, and I work on navigation and guidance for Orion.
We are headed 3,600 miles above Earth.
15 times higher from the planet than the International Space Station.
As we get further away from Earth, we'll pass through the Van Allen belts, an area of dangerous radiation.
Radiation like this could harm the guidance systems, onboard computers, or other electronics on Orion.
Naturally, we have to pass through this danger zone twice.
Once up and once back.
We must solve these challenges before we send people through this region of space.
We must solve these challenges before we send people through this region of space.
We must solve these challenges.
Surviving Van Allen Belts00:11:32
So that's your claim, Bob.
Professor Keating, what's your response to that?
Well, it's not my claim.
It's NASA's claim.
He said, we must solve these challenges before we send people through this region of space.
Meaning the radio.
He doesn't know what to do.
Okay, but very carefully.
He doesn't say because we've never done it before.
He never says Professor Keating was telling me that.
Do you interrupt because I'm not in the same league as you and you're better than me?
No, we just played an extended kit that you produced about a certain theory.
So Professor Keating would not respond.
Right.
So a whiteboard sketch by some NASA engineer who is, to my knowledge, not sketching the exact schematics of the trajectory.
He shows, and he describes the Van Allen belts are deadly.
And you're right, Bart.
They are deadly, and NASA knew that because who did Van Allen work for?
John Van Allen worked for NASA.
So, in order for us to believe it, and he testified that the Van Allen belts, if traversed safely, were no threat to the astronauts beyond getting a few chest x-rays, which you and I probably do every year, right?
So, I have a model of the Van Allen belts here.
Here's a plasma globe which has electron plasma in it.
That's what that is.
30,000.
Hold on a second.
Now, you're not letting me present scientific evidence, okay?
There are electrons in here that are at 30,000 degrees Kelvin, far hotter than the temperature of the melting point of aluminum, which you talk about in that documentary, which I've seen many times to debunk it.
Inside of this plasma globe, the reason I don't get melted is because the electron density is tiny.
It is anisotropic.
If you go at different regions through the Van Allen belts, it's completely safe.
And one last thing that NASA engineer mentioned, he said it could be dangerous to the navigation systems, the electronics, correct?
That means that, according to you, we never even sent electronics, telemetry, anything through the Van Allen belts.
But you know who else agrees that we did?
The Soviets.
Our arch nemesis, Piers, you may not know this.
The same day that we landed on the moon, the Russians had a probe that they were trying to return samples from the moon, like this moon rock that I have here, and they were trying to return it to Earth to beat us.
And they ended up crashing that spacecraft on July 21st, 1969.
They failed to reach it, but they agreed to coordinate with NASA so they didn't hit the Apollo lander because they agreed that would be a much worse thing.
Now, Piers, can you imagine us coordinating with Ayatollah Khomeini right now?
And he's going to congratulate us tomorrow or tonight when the Artemis mission lands.
That's what goes around the moon.
That's exactly what happened.
So the best evidence, Bart, doesn't come from America, even.
It comes from the Chinese, from the Indians, from the Russians, who are our nemesis at the time, proving that we went there with their own images, data, and scientific evidence.
So that's the way we should do things as a scientifically literate society.
And your theory is quite a bit of facts for scientists.
One of the facts you're ignoring is that, what is his name?
Rotagin Dimitri.
He was the former commander of the Soviet equivalent of NASA.
He said as soon as he retired, the moon missions were fake.
And then I have a friend who works at the Chinese Space Agency.
He says that they're blackmailing NASA in exchange for technology that Congress forbid them to receive.
So we have retroactively to the Soviet Union, which doesn't exist anymore.
He has, wait a minute, we have the Russian space director saying the moon missions are fake, and we have an employee of the Chinese space agency saying they know the missions are fake and are being blackmailed by the United States.
And your theory, your theory, Bart, about motivation, your argument is that they were faked to ensure a Cold War victory for the U.S. over the Soviet Union.
You contend that NASA was under immense pressure to fulfill President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 60s, but they lacked the ability technologically to do it.
According to you, the risk of high-profile failure and subsequent national humiliation led the U.S. government and the CIA to stage the events in a studio instead, to which my obvious question would be: hey, look, full disclosure, I don't believe a word of it.
However, let's just assume for a moment your theory is correct.
Which studio, where?
Where did they do this?
Well, I guess you weren't paying attention when I said they filmed it at Cannon Air Force Base, June 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 1968, according to an eyewitness who confessed to killing a co-worker to cover up the moon landing fraud.
Hang on, sorry, I did hear what you said, but there were a number of lunar landings.
So you're saying it was all done in this one studio.
No, we know we know that the first one, the TV images, were filmed at Cannon Air Force Base, according to an eyewitness who confessed to a homicide that was investigated by the military police, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, and the FBI.
And when they investigated, they asked him why did he kill this co-worker at Cannon Air Force Base in 1968?
He said to cover up the moon landing fraud.
He took an oath by the NSA for secrecy.
His co-worker was going to tell the public, and he killed him to keep it a secret.
And back to whether the radiation belts are lethal or not, don't take my opinion, don't take Brian's opinion.
Go to sabrel.com and read Van Allen's opinion, his document that he published after sending probes up into the radiation belts in 1958 Scientific American article, and he says they are 250 times a lethal dose.
So when they say we have to...
That is, depending on how you go through it, Bart, if you go through a rainstorm through the eye of a hurricane, it's much different than going through the outer outskirts of it where it's a nice light London fog, perhaps.
It's very different.
The Van Allen belts are highly anisotropic.
I want to teach you some physics.
Bart, if you would let me teach you some physics, then you can make your argument stronger, perhaps.
Okay.
There's multiple Van Allen belts.
There's an inner Van Allen belt.
There's an outer Van Allen.
Teach me professor who parents back.
I've heard you refuse to debate me.
Bart, this is my only chance to debate you.
You refuse to debate me on Joe Rogan.
You refuse to debate me on Dick Mexican.
I never received an invitation to debate you.
Yes, you said you received the invitation on Danny Jones' podcast, and you said you don't want to debate me because I'm a victim, much like pedophilia victims.
It was so bizarre.
I want to take an opportunity.
He asked me if I wanted to debate you, and I said no, because you're a victim.
You have Stockholm syndrome.
You're defending the people who are deceiving you.
You're not the perpetrator.
Did the Russians, did the Polypuro, did the Polybure that testified that they ran what happened on the moon?
Wait, wait, why did the Russians do that?
Bart, do you mind if I just cut to the quick here?
Do you think you're just full of shit, mate?
What's that?
Do you think you're just full of shit?
No, I don't think he does.
Is it all just a scam just to make money, raise your profile?
Well, I'm spewing such obvious bullshit around the world about something that everyone knows happened.
And you make yourself well.
Let me boil it down for you.
You insulted Buzz Aldrin to the point he punched you.
I'm sorry if the truth about corruption is insulting to people who are flattered by it in a fallen world.
The fact is, JFK's relatives say with 100% certainty he was killed by the CIA.
Robert McNamar on his deathbed said they started the Vietnam War and killed 58,220 of their own people on a CIA fabrication.
So they're killing tens of thousands of their own people.
So presumably...
So they're not going to have a problem faking a TV image.
The only problem is that it's a positive lie.
Okay, but just to be clear, to extrapolate your theory, given this is the furthest that NASA have ever sent a rocket to the dark side of the moon, presumably you think this must be fake too.
Oh, no, I hope they are able to do it.
The issue is how do you do that?
So do you believe the optimist rocket is going to be a genuine mission or a fake?
Does it have to go through the Van Allen belt?
I would assume it's going to be genuine.
How does it get through the Van Allen belt?
Why is it?
Listen, the issue.
Hang on.
No, how does it get through?
How does he get through the Van Allen radiation belt?
I can't do people not letting me finish the sentence.
How does he get through?
The issue is, the issue is why is it with six decades of better technology that cannot do 20% of what Apollo did?
So do you accept that?
But do you accept now that rocket space rockets can get through the Van Allen radiation belt?
Unmanned ones, and maybe they have protection.
We know they didn't have protection as of 2014.
He said we must solve these radiation challenges before we send people through this region of space, which means anything prior to 2014 did not leave Earth orbit.
He said so himself.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
So do you think Elon Musk is in the middle of the Bart?
Do you think Elon Musk is deceiving himself?
Well, he knows the moon missions are fake.
He's playing ball.
He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him.
So he's all part of the conspiracy, is he?
It's not a conspiracy.
It's simply they perpetrated a fraud.
They did a counterfeit.
They cheated.
Elon Musk says to return to the moon, they're going to need 15 fuel launches first.
I got a clip here.
Number five, a guy who works for NASA says it's going to take 30 launches of fuel in order to have enough fuel to go to the moon.
So how did Apollo do it with 1 30th the amount of fuel?
I mean, the truth is right there in front of you.
Final words to Professor.
Technology, and they can only do 20% of what they claimed it did with 1 million.
Okay, Professor Keating.
Can't even land.
Professor Keating, final word to you about the Armatis II mission.
Well, I just want to say, first of all, to fake the moon landings would have been much more cost-prohibitive, difficult, and involve a much larger conspiracy than actually doing them.
We have evidence from around the world, scientific work.
Scientists are the most likely people to want to shoot that experts, Bart.
This is where I feel like you're not taking advantage of me as a collegial engagement because we're the most interested in proving things wrong.
That's what we do for a living, Bart.
But on the topic of science, what Artemis is going to do, Piers, is perhaps pave the way for us to extend our consciousness, our civilization, into the solar system, into the universe beyond.
Because what happens if a large meteorite, a huge asteroid impacts the Earth, God forbid, or a global pandemic happens again?
And all those reasons, by the way, are reasons that Bart should support the mission of NASA, which has provided such a great deal of technology that has enabled him, if he's ever been on a commercial airliner, I used to work for NASA working on aviation safety.
NASA does a whole lot more than just landing on the moon, as amazing as that is.
And they do it all, Piers, for a budget that's equal to what women in America spend on makeup, about $20 to $25 billion.
Most people think it's 10 times higher.
It's a very low amount of money.
We're going to go there.
We're going to build telescopes.
We're going to explore habitation there.
We're going to build rockets because the moon is full of ice and its craters that are shadowed.
Ice is hydrogen and oxygen.
You know, I think it's going to be great.
And I love all this stuff.
And I think the answer to the whole thing is that when they actually send people to walk on the moon again, they should send Bart up there.
Bart, you should get on the rocket.
Let's do a debate there, Bart.
Yeah, and we can continue the debate on the surface of the moon.
And then, Bart, my opening line would be, see, told you.
Roger Twang Tranquility00:04:07
Got to leave it there.
Thank you all very much.
Bart, thank you.
Thank you.
Professor Keating, thank you very much.
Thank you, Piers.
Thank you, Bart.
Well, let's turn now to too many.
Most certainly no fact from fiction when it comes to space travel.
Charlie Duke is an Apollo astronaut, the 10th and youngest man to walk on the surface of the moon, a legendary actor and part-time astronaut.
William Shatner, sometimes known as Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise, particularly by men of my generation who were weaned on that glorious character.
Welcome to both of you.
Charlie Duke, what an amazing thing to have walked on the moon.
Just we've got some footage of you, which I'll just show my viewers to remind them of your great moment.
Let's have a look at this.
Hey John, while you're sampling here, you might look around and see if you see any of the sick of the thought.
It's one of them we're looking for.
Good show.
I told them you were.
Okay.
Well you see that one went all the way in.
Back right.
Now my first thought watching that Charlie was a couple of months ago I tripped and broke my hip and if I'd been in an airless environment like that I probably would have escaped without injury.
So I'm very jealous of the fact that you were falling over there in such conditions.
But to be serious for a moment, you were 36 when you walked on the moon, the youngest to do it at the time in 1972.
Just a basic question, what was it like?
Well, it was one of the most exciting adventures that I've ever had in my life, of course.
We enjoyed every moment of it.
We had three excursions out onto the surface.
We had a tremendous opportunity to explore the lunar highlands for three days.
And John and I didn't want to come home.
We were having so much fun.
But they said, get back inside, guys.
It's time to come back.
So anyway, we did a great job, I thought.
Corrected 200 pounds of moon rocks and did a lot of good experiments and left a lot of experiments up there to operate.
So it was a tremendous opportunity for us.
You also had another extraordinary role in the first lunar landing when you famously responded to Neil Armstrong saying the Eagle has landed with the words Roger Twang Tranquility.
We copy you on the ground.
You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.
We're breathing again.
Thanks a lot.
Which was fantastic.
I was so excited that Tranquility came out Twang at first.
And so I corrected myself.
Neil had told me that he was changing the call sign to Tranquility from Apollo 11 or whatever, Eagle.
And so I was prepared for it, but it was so exciting a moment there.
You know, we landed with maybe 20 seconds fuel remaining.
And so there was a lot of tension.
And when Neil said, well, Buzz said contact engine stop and we there on the ground, it was just excitement got me and Twang came out instead of tranquil.
William Shatner, welcome back to Uncentered.
Always great to talk to you.
You obviously went to space recently and you were very emotional, I remember, about the experience.
Understandably, how much would you have liked to have walked on the moon like Charlie?
And how envious are you of this latest mission, which is the precursor potentially to people doing it again?
Visionary Space Exploration00:04:31
Well, these guys, like test pilots and explorers and people who venture out into essentially the unknown, enjoy it.
Like it's a thrill.
Like, I mean, falling, like you described, you fell on the earth and you had difficulty, you broke your hip.
He falls on the moon and there's nobody there to help him up.
Right.
And he's got a pack on his back.
It's awkward.
He's alone.
These explorers, these test pilots, these astronauts, they get off on the adventure.
We ordinary people have to imagine what it's like to see flame going past your window, wondering whether the shields are going to hold or not, whether 20 seconds of fuel is enough to get back up.
And there's this whole exploration mentality that requires, I mean, it's insanity, really, to want to do that.
And they're insane in a great way, furthering us.
But these people going up in Artemis, they're in the same tentative position.
They don't know whether that shield is going to hold.
They don't know whether the hydrogen is going to explode.
And I, when I went up, and I, on my way up the gantry, I passed by the off-gassing.
I said, what's that?
They said, it's hydrogen.
I said, hydrogen?
That's one of the most explosive, elusive gases we have.
They're dealing with the unknown.
They're dealing with exploration.
They're dealing with death.
Have they come to grips with what death is?
What's on the other side?
All those enormous questions are...
I don't know whether the astronauts are sitting in the Artemis thing right now, but you can imagine them leaning back, looking up into the sky, waiting for this explosion under them, wondering whether they're going to live or die and see their children and their loved ones again.
I feel exactly the same way.
I just want to show viewers a clip of you in space because it was great.
Let's take a look at this.
No description.
This is nuts.
Oh, God.
This is Earth.
Holy hell.
I mean, amazing experience.
And like I said, you got emotional after this.
But I do remember very vividly, because I was born in 1965, and I remember watching the original series of Star Trek, which I think there were three series, weren't there, of the original television show.
Three years, yeah.
Three years.
And, you know, it was the mission statement was to boldly go where no man has gone before.
And what I just remember being struck by, and particularly now I look back on it, was how kind of multicultural the Starship Enterprise was.
You had Mr. Sulu, Chekhov, Uhuru.
This was a real visionary thing that you guys were putting on TV.
It was.
It was a visionary television, but it reflected what the visionary was happening on Earth.
That was the time when things were being built and the concept of going into space was new and exciting.
This shot, this thing, this Artemis thing, I think is even more precarious than any of the others because there's so many unknowns.
These are ships that haven't been flown that way before.
There's technology that hasn't been used.
There's four inexperienced, trained, but inexperienced astronauts.
The trepidation on this thing that's happening in our lifetime and in our present day Ranks with Shackleton and Scott and exploration of the South Pole, which I was at and I sat on an ice cap that was a desert.
Precarious Artemis Missions00:09:12
There was nothing around.
There was nothing.
Imagine nothing around you.
You're forlorn.
We have a man sitting here still, Charlie Jew, who can not only imagine it, he was on the moon on his own.
I know.
So you need to explore that mind, that mindset.
When he fell over, did he think I'm going to die?
Well, let's ask him.
Let me ask him.
Charlie.
Like a turtle.
Like a turtle on his back.
Well, let me ask the man himself.
He's not unable to get up.
We can ask him.
Charlie, what did you feel when you fell over?
Well, when I fell down, I said, I got to get up.
We practiced and practiced and practiced.
We'd been in a zero-g airplane.
We've done that on bed.
I've fallen on my back.
I've dip this.
And we'd practice all of that.
And so we were prepared for these unusual eventualities, but it wasn't like it was something that we hadn't thought about.
Yeah, but it's one thing.
How do we get up?
It's one thing to practice for it.
It's one thing to practice and practice and practice.
And somebody says, are you okay?
Yeah, I'm okay.
I'm practicing.
It's another thing to be forlorn on a planet that there's no way out.
You're fallen and you can't get up.
I mean, that's just one of the things.
20 seconds of fuel.
You got to get back up there and rendezvous.
I mean, the things are extraordinary.
I mean, on that point, Charlie.
I miss a great point by Bill.
I mean, Charlie, obviously, this goes.
Wait a minute.
We had.
Well, the question I was going to ask you was: it obviously carries enormous risk, obviously.
And this Artemis II is the most powerful rocket that NASA have ever fired up.
And it's going the furthest distance to the dark side of the moon, literally, that we've sent people in relation to the moon.
So this carries with it enormous, obvious jeopardy.
How do you, when you were doing this, how do you deal with the potential of not coming back, of just something terrible going wrong?
We never thought about it.
I can't believe that.
I can't believe.
Charlie, I can't believe that.
Okay.
That was an answer.
We had never thought about not coming back.
We had trained.
If you got caught, if it exploded, it exploded.
We had an out an escape system on top of the spacecraft for liftoff if the thing exploded.
I mean, NASA had thought about all of those things.
Do you just know that if it was going to happen in some way and the suit split open or you got hit by a meteorite, it just wasn't your day.
Yeah, but you're not going to make it.
You've got to remember the challenger.
The challenger is before us all.
Those of us who haven't trained and have your mindset think Challenger and Artemis, and if Artemis fails, what a psychological blow that would be to the space program.
I mean, there's so many complex things happening here to those of us who don't have your ability to deny the potential of death.
Do you remember Apollo 1?
Apollo 1 blew up on the pad in a training accident.
It caught fire.
They were killed because of some, all right.
But it didn't stop us.
We said, we got to fix this thing.
We got to fix it and do it right.
And so it took about your frame of mind.
I mean, the Challenger set back psychologically the space program for a long while.
If Artemis fails, what a psychological blow that is.
If Artemis is successful, what a glorious thing for the space program and progress to the moon.
Well, let me tell you, if it fails, we're going to try again.
We're not going to stop.
That is just the attitude of the space program, attitude of the United States of America, and an attitude with the astronauts.
We're going to make it successful.
It might not be right away, but we're going to make it successful.
It's something that we're committed to, and we're going to do it right.
If it doesn't work right, we're going to fix it.
Just like we did on Apollo after Apollo 1 caught fire.
Just after a couple of others that almost didn't make it back.
Apollo 13, mission control and the crews came through and made a spacecraft that was built for two guys for three days, made it last for four guys for, no, three guys for five days.
So, I mean, there's just a way, Charlie, as you're talking about it.
As you're talking, Charlie, all I can think is to Bill Shatner, you know who would be 100% in agreement with everything Charlie's saying?
Captain James T. Kirk.
He would have exactly the same mindset.
Because actually, it's the never stop dreaming, you know, boldly go where no one's been before.
It's that that motivates people.
I mean, Charlie, just to ask you, I mean, if we do get back on the moon, what advice would you give for the astronauts who make that next amazing?
Drink a lot of water.
Drink a lot of water.
Well, if just they haven't, the first landings on the moon, whatever Artemis that is in a couple of years, I hopefully have a chance to be around to give them some advice if they want it.
And it's just train, be prepared.
That's what we did over and over and over again.
It was like doing it in your sleep.
We had trained so much.
We'd work with mission control.
We'd work with the crew.
We'd work with the rover.
We trained and trained and trained.
And so that is the motivation behind Apollo crews and what Artemis is.
Those guys, they're not just going out into the ether with no training.
And Charlie, out of interest.
You're going to be well prepared.
Out of interest, what do you feel about the conspiracy theorists who think that all the moon landings were all invented?
They never happened.
They're fake.
Well, the evidence is overwhelming that we landed on the moon.
You're willfully ignorant if you don't believe that we landed on the moon five, six times.
And the evidence is there.
We left experiments packages.
Every landing spite has been photographed by the Lunar Encounters Orbiter.
You can see the descent stage.
You can see the experiments package.
You can see the cars on the last three missions.
And the experiments have been operating or they operated for five years and got tons of data.
We've got 600 pounds of moon rocks.
Where did they come from?
They just to these brave individuals and all the taxpayers' money that went to making that happen.
What is the mindset of somebody who said, well, it didn't really happen?
I mean, that's nihilistic.
That's like the denial of humanity.
These crazy individuals shouldn't have our attention.
It's absurd.
Charlie, do you have any of the moon at home?
Did you keep a bit?
No, they gave me a moon rock after 40 years, but I had to give it away.
So I gave it to my prep school down in Admiral Farragut Academy.
Two moonwalkers graduated from there, me and Alan Shepard.
Oh, amazing.
Alan Shepherd first, and then me.
That's amazing.
So I have a watch with moon dust on it.
Fascinating Moon Dust00:01:39
Really?
Fantastic.
I've got a Captain James T. Kirk baseball cap.
That's all I can contribute to this debate.
Gentlemen, what a fascinating time talking to you.
All I can think of looking at both of you, I know your ages.
I don't need to repeat them.
But I hope I have half the vitality for life and curiosity and excitement about what we don't know, as you two guys have.
You are an inspiration to all of us mere 61-year-olds.
So thank you very much indeed to both of you.
Thank you for having us.
It's great.
It's great to see you, Charlie.
Bye-bye.
I hope I'm still around when we make that first landing in that next meeting too.
That would be very much for having me.
Charlie and I will walk hand in hand to greet the that would be brilliant, wouldn't it?
I would love that.
Can I come too?
Yeah, you may.
Thank you.
I told NASA.
I'm still at 90.
I'm still physically qualified to go into space.
Really?
NASA says, don't call us, we'll call you.
So I'm not expecting a call.
Great to talk to you both.
Thank you both very much indeed.
Pleasure.
Thank you.
Pleasure to see you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you, Pierre.
Thanks, Charlie.
Take care.
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