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May 20, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:24:12

Special Edition - Apollo 11

Acclaimed British science journalist Dr David Whitehouse remembers the people and events of the Moon Landing... 50 years ago...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Unexplained.
	Well, this time a very special edition.
	We're not going to do any of the usual things here.
	We're going to get very quickly into the content of this edition because it is something very special and a milestone in the history of humanity.
	As you will hear many times from many people in the weeks that are to come, 50 years ago, in July 1969, man set foot on the moon for the first time.
	And the words of Neil Armstrong will probably be repeated by schoolchildren a thousand years from now if this species is still existing.
	One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and indeed it was.
	An amazing technical and human achievement that required a lot of expenditure, not only financial, but also human expenditure, as you will hear.
	Well, one man has decided to document the entire story of what led up to and what followed Apollo 11, that mission that changed the face of history.
	Dr. David Whitehouse is former BBC Science Editor and an old friend of mine and an old friend of this show.
	He's written a book called Apollo, The Inside Story.
	Actually, Apollo 11, The Inside Story, but as you will hear, this is the story of the entire Apollo program and the people behind it.
	Now, many of us will know pretty well the story that you're about to hear, certainly the bare bones of it, the skeleton of the story.
	What you won't hear are the anecdotes, the quotations, the accounts of the emotions of those remarkable events 50 years ago.
	And David Whitehouse has painstakingly documented those things in the book.
	I've speed read the book before we do this interview, and after we do this interview, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to start reading it in a calm and non-time-pressured way, because it's a fantastically written book, and I'm sure it will sell in vast volumes when it's released at the beginning of June.
	So that is what we're going to talk about, Apollo 11, and everything that led up to it, and those things that followed Apollo 11.
	And perhaps we'll get an idea of where we are now, as we prepare to go back to the moon, and we prepare perhaps to set foot on the surface of Mars and then even branch out from there.
	What did Apollo do for those people who are involved in those programs now?
	How were the foundations set by Apollo?
	What did it mean?
	And what obstacles had to be overcome in order to be able to get Neil Armstrong to put his boots down on the surface of that grey dust all those years ago?
	Well, let's get on now to Hampshire in the United Kingdom and speak with Dr. David Whitehouse, the author of Apollo 11, The Inside Story.
	David, nice to speak with you again and thank you for doing this.
	You're very welcome.
	So, David, I mean, this, for those of us of a certain generation, and that includes me, that's both of us.
	We both grew up with all of this, but most of us believe that we know the full story because it was, you know, we were at school, we were exposed to it constantly, but actually, we really don't.
	There was a level of blood, sweat, and tears, a level of technology, a level of politicking that ordinary people and certainly kids were not aware of, don't you think?
	I think you're right, because in those days we had no internet, obviously.
	We had no 24-hour television.
	We just had the BBC and ITN giving us little reports.
	And even during the missions themselves, the BBC Apollo news desk.
	Remember that with James Burke and Patrick Moore and Cliff Mitchell Moore?
	Yes, I mean these people were great over at Houston.
	They were great broadcasters, these people, and they were the equivalents of Cronkite and his team in the U.S. They were wonderful broadcasters.
	But that's the only information we had.
	We couldn't go and check anything.
	We couldn't follow anything up.
	So we did, you know, as you say, get a certain view of this.
	And I think as we got older and we started, you know, we were bitten by the bug.
	I've never gotten over the night Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
	We've bitten by the bug for life.
	And then as you progress through life, you learn more.
	You realize, for me, it was realizing that these people were real, that you could actually meet the people you saw on television doing this stuff.
	And some of them were quite amazing people.
	And so you then, I think, over a while, just get a different picture, get a fuller angle on all the aspects of what is...
	I can't think of any journey as dramatic, as significant, or as, I suppose, mythical in its sense as Apollo 11 going to the moon.
	And it's never left me.
	Well, you know, they were, as you say, they were remarkable people.
	They had to be.
	And that's one of the reasons they were picked.
	But one of the things that comes out from the book to an extent that I've never really been as aware of is the fact that these were not all the same.
	They didn't have a cookie-cutter approach to picking these people.
	They were all different.
	Well, in the sense that they did want to go for fighter pilots.
	They felt that traveling in a spacecraft would be...
	And then America and in the Soviet Union as well, they sat down and decided who should be the first people to fly a spacecraft.
	And America and Russia went for fighter pilots because they made the idea that they had to be cool under a crisis.
	They had to be able to handle high-tech machines.
	They were able to handle pressure.
	They had to be able to not be afraid of high speeds, high altitudes, and putting, and basically being in a very small craft in a very big space and having to rely on your own judgment.
	And gradually, they initially put together the Mercury 7, which were these seven astronauts which were paraded to the world in 1958, the answer to Sputnik.
	America is going To put the first person into space.
	And the Mercury 7, although they appeared fairly identical in the sense that they all had crew cuts, they were all from a very similar background, you're quite right.
	When they progressed through the program, you were able to see their different personalities, their different strengths and weaknesses, and how that related to who did what mission and how they were chosen for what mission was one of the things I wanted to bring out in the book, because how do you choose who's going to be the first person to fly in space, who's going to be the first person to fly in a two-person Gemini craft, and indeed, who's going to pilot the first craft to land on the moon?
	You've got your candidates there, but which one?
	And the things that they're put through, I was going to talk with you later about this, but some of the tests that these people were put through, for example, I think it's Neil Armstrong.
	Later in the book, you talk about one of the things that he was put through.
	And I can't imagine being subjected to this, and I can understand why they did it.
	They injected him with something that made his ears misbehave and made him here on Earth go into the same state you would be in if you were being spun round in a centrifuge or thrown up into space and spun round.
	Cold Walter in the ears.
	It affects your balance remarkably.
	And looking back, a lot of those tests were unnecessary.
	I think John Glenn, right, there's some sections about John Glenn and his reaction to the tests when he said they basically poked as far as they could into every opening in the human body.
	And a lot of those tests were unnecessary with hindsight.
	But of course, nobody knew anything about spaceflight.
	People had sent dogs up, they'd sent monkeys up, but they were even unsure as to whether anybody could breathe in space.
	Would weightlessness allow you to breathe?
	Could you swallow?
	What would your eyesight be like?
	They weren't 100% certain that humans could survive in space.
	So as well as gathering data from the primates, they tried to do every single test they can imagine.
	Even though after a few flights, they realized that a lot of those tests just weren't needed.
	But they had to be sure in the first instance.
	And this story of the water in the ears, you're quite right, it was about John Glenn, page 51 of the book.
	It is an astonishing story that somebody would have to go through that.
	And ultimately, they found other ways of testing for your ability to withstand that, didn't they?
	I mean, there was the centrifuge, of course, and the vomit comet and all the rest of it in later years.
	Well, yes, and they all went through it because they wanted the prize.
	With the exception, perhaps, of Armstrong, who's an interesting character, which we should talk about later.
	The Mercury 7, and Armstrong, of course, was with the second group, the group that included Jim Lovell, John Young, and others that walked upon and went to the moon later on.
	So he wasn't part of the initial great publicity Mercury 7.
	But all the Mercury 7 in particular, they all wanted the prize.
	They all wanted to be the first person into space, the first American to orbit space.
	And they all knew, in fact, two years after they'd been put together in 58, the United States announced the Apollo program as part of a way to actually gain the ground that the Soviet Union had achieved with not only with Sputnik, but also later on with Yuri Gagarin.
	You quote a 1960 magazine as saying, we are in a space race and we are losing.
	That's right.
	America, the shock that America had with Sputnik was existential.
	I mean, I put, I'm right, the 50s are a very interesting time in space flight because you have these two protagonists.
	You've got Sergei Korolev in the Soviet Union and Vernon von Braun in America.
	And what the government wants are missiles.
	They want missiles to shoot down planes.
	They want missiles to carry atomic bombs.
	And both of them realize that in order to get a rocket that will launch something into orbit, they basically have to build a missile and then convert it into a launcher.
	And Werner von Braun developed the Jupiter-C rocket.
	He could have launched a satellite years before Sputnik.
	But the American government didn't want him to do that.
	They didn't think it was important.
	Eisenhower, in particular, had his own views about this.
	And in fact, there's a remarkable instance where the government sent down to Verno von Braun a couple of miners to watch him in case he accidentally on purpose put a satellite into orbit.
	Because he could have done it.
	He had a usable satellite in the boot of his car, in the trunk of his car, and he could have put another stage on the rocket.
	And it may well have worked.
	And in Russia, in the Soviet Union, Sergei Karolev could have done it.
	And when he suggested to the Premier, we can put a satellite into orbit, he wasn't very interested.
	He said, oh, go and do it, provided the ballistic missile project doesn't suffer.
	So people did not realize what they were doing until they had done it.
	And the Sputnik shocked America.
	And then they thought they were slowly getting back.
	And then Yuri Gagarin came along, who by all rights should have been the second person in space.
	Alan Shepard should have been the first person.
	He was ready with his Redstone rocket for a suborbital hop, but still going into space.
	And just before he was due to take off, the Weissner committee, so to speak, said they need more tests on the Redstone.
	Didn't prove to be a very productive series of reappraisals of the Redstone, but the government went along with it and delayed Shepard's flight.
	And in the meantime, Yuri Gagarin was launched.
	So can you imagine how different the story would have been if Werner von Braun had launched the first satellite and Alan Shepard had been the first person into space?
	We might not have had that tension and cooperation and race that led to landing on the moon.
	Kids in school tended to see it as being Yuri Gagarin on one side versus John Glenn.
	A vast oversimplification, but it kind of tells the story.
	Well, yes, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth.
	And the way the publicity went at the time, and I remember speaking to Alan Shepard many times about this, he was the first American in space.
	But John Glenn was the first to orbit the Earth.
	And it was John Glenn that got to go skiing with the Kennedys, that got fated in the newspapers and on television.
	And in fact, John Glenn was something of a star, even in the mid-50s.
	And there's a great clip of him on a quiz show on the night that Sputnik had been launched.
	And he's introduced as a celebrity pilot, and he gives his point of view.
	Nobody knew then he would become an astronaut.
	So yes, Glenn versus Gagarin, you're quite right.
	It's not that simple.
	There's a lot underneath that.
	And Glenn was not very popular in the first stage, first flush of astronauts, rather like Buzz Oldrin was in the Apollo program.
	He was regarded as a bit of a killjoy when these other astronauts who were celebrities, who were mostly married, but for some of them that didn't make any difference, who were then given cars and celebrity status, well, Glenn said, you know, we're astronauts, keep it simple, keep it sober.
	A lot of them didn't agree with that.
	So Glenn was a little unpopular at the time.
	And it's not surprising that he chose not to go on into the Gemini project, the project in between the one-man Mercury and the three-man Apollo capsules.
	And we'll talk about the characters of the people on Apollo 11, because I think that at some point, because that is interesting as well, because they were vastly different people.
	And personality plays a huge part in all of this.
	But danger also played a huge part and continues to play a huge part in space exploration, because without danger, you don't make the achievements without risk and without losing sometimes.
	And both Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn had their moments, didn't they?
	Well, Yuri Gagarin was a passenger in his flight.
	He didn't really have much to do.
	He was chosen because he was pretty, basically.
	The backup for him was German Titov, who was probably a much better pilot.
	But they decided with Yuri Gagarin because he was a man of the people.
	Although he was a fighter pilot, he had the right heritage as seen in those days.
	I mean, you must remember he grew up in the Second World War when his village was invaded by the Germans.
	And he lived literally in a hole in the ground and a tarpaulin.
	And his brother, he had to almost rescue his brother from being strung up by a Nazi guard.
	He had a traumatic start to life, but he got over it.
	He became a fighter pilot, and he was just the right image that they wanted at the time for the first cosmic traveler.
	So Yuri Garin satisfied a lot of the, ticked a lot of the boxes they wanted.
	Glenn, of course, was pure American fighter pilot boy made good.
	So they were very emblematic of where they came from, very different characters.
	And not much is said about what happened to Yuri Gagarin after his first mission, when he literally became too valuable to fly.
	He went off the rails a bit for many years.
	And in order to avoid embarrassment, the Soviet authorities actually allowed him to train for a second flight, but he was killed in a stupid air accident in a fighter plane.
	And it was similar in some ways in the book to Neil Armstrong when he came back from the moon, having been the first person to step on the moon.
	He was regarded as too valuable to fly in space again, just like Gagarin.
	And of course, when you're fated and lauded like both of them were, in a quite remarkable way, and a way that may not happen today, who knows, it's very hard to keep a level head, isn't it?
	That's a good point, because I think sort of somewhere in the core of the book is the effect on people.
	Because, you know, when you write a book about Apollo 11, the story is generally known.
	You can write about the technology, you can write about the history or the politics.
	But I had to put those in, but it was the people which interested me most.
	And how do you cope with such celebrity?
	How do you come back to Earth, back to the ground, knowing that nothing you ever do in your life will quite be as dramatic as that?
	And this is an interesting section in the book between, I suppose, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as to who should be the first person on the moon, who would cope with that.
	And there are various stories about this, but the upshot was that NASA wanted Armstrong to be the first to walk on the moon.
	Aldrin lobbied and lobbied and lobbied and got on a lot of people's nerves because he wanted to.
	He had the idea that when an exploration, a sailing craft explores, its captain stays on the ship and the number one goes off and makes the landing and exploring.
	He had that idea for Apollo 11.
	And eventually, NASA didn't want to publicly solve that problem.
	But eventually, Neil Armstrong said to Aldrin, I'm the commander, I'm going out.
	And Aldrin never really got over that.
	And the reason why NASA wanted Armstrong was because he wouldn't become Captain America.
	He wouldn't be in your face.
	He wouldn't be glitz and glamour and showbiz for the rest of his life.
	He would be introverted, reticent, and do his duty to come out when the occasion merited, but wouldn't be on too many game shows and stuff like that.
	He wouldn't be on too many adverts.
	They wanted somebody whom they felt could handle this mantle of history with a bit of retrospection and, if you like, a bit of security.
	humility, maybe.
	Yes, indeed.
	Right, so it wasn't, it was more of a human resource.
	That's a big surprise, more of a human resources decision than a decision based on technical prowess or physical strength.
	I mean, either of them could have been first on the moon.
	Of course, Armstrong was the commander, and he was actually asked a couple of months before the flight of Apollo 11, do you want to still keep Buzz Aldrin on the mission?
	We've got plenty of other people who can be your co-pilot, be the lunar module pilot, because it wasn't the most difficult job of the three crew on an Apollo mission.
	And Armstrong said, no, I'll keep him.
	But the Apollo 11 crew were not nearly as close as, say, Apollo 12 or the other missions, because they described themselves as amiable strangers.
	I mean, Michael Collins, the one who stayed in orbit around the moon, didn't quite like Aldrin.
	He said Aldrin was more approachable than Neil, but for reasons he couldn't put his finger on, Aldrin always seemed to be probing him for weaknesses, and that made him uncomfortable.
	Other people, Frank Borman, who went round the moon on Apollo 8, that remarkable mission that first went round the moon, said that Aldrin had problems coping with light simpler problems.
	And indeed, when he came back from the moon, there were no simple problems to deal with.
	So yes, the Apollo 11 crew were not as close.
	They were efficient and they did the job, but I don't think I'd call them a proper crew as such.
	Very different people, and we can get into this now.
	We've started to anyway.
	Buzz Aldrin was described in the book, You Come Up With a Quote from His First Wife, and I will paraphrase it here, but the words are a mix of confidence, conceit, and humility.
	Yeah, he was.
	You had to have confidence to be a fighter pilot.
	You couldn't get in one of those aircraft and do what you had to do and fly in combat unless you had confidence in your own ability.
	If you doubt your own ability, I suppose you wouldn't last very long.
	So he did have that swagger, that feeling that he was among the top of the pile.
	But he also didn't have a good wave of people.
	Gene Cernan once told me that when he spoke to Buzz Aldrin at that time, when Gene Cernam was in training for a later Apollo mission, even over the water cooler, all Buzz could talk about was rendezvousing spacecraft and who would be the first person on the moon.
	He didn't seem to hit that amiable comrades-in-arms streak that other astronauts had.
	He was a bit of an outsider in the astronauts' corps.
	And I think Michael Collins summed it up before and for his life afterwards.
	He said that Buzz Aldrin seemed to be so resentful that he wasn't the first person to walk on the moon that he forgot he was actually the second.
	And both of them are great honours.
	Now, that's what we call here in the United Kingdom a shame.
	It was a shame.
	Buzz Aldrin went through many years of aimlessness.
	He was an alcoholic for a while.
	And it wasn't until he met his second wife, Lois, that he really started to get his act together.
	I remember at the time, actually, if he wanted to interview, when I was a journalist or a writer back in the 80s, and you could phone Buzz Aldrin, one time you could phone Buzz Aldrin, everybody has phone number, and he'd say, and he'd give you a quote, he'd give you an interview.
	It might not be completely on the ball, but as soon as Lois came along, she'd always answer the phone, and her negotiating skills was, well, how much?
	Because she knew she'd put him on a proper footing and get him on the straight and narrow.
	And I think she did that.
	But Armstrong was an entirely different character.
	The impression that we got through First Man.
	The impression we got through the book First Man was that this man was, you know, he knew his job.
	He knew his worth.
	He was a technician and a tactician.
	Yes.
	Armstrong was described as not the best flyer, not the best stick and rudder man, but exceptionally good.
	But in terms of an engineer understanding the spacecraft or the aircraft he is flying, there's nobody better.
	He understood so much.
	And I said the film First Man was a bit depressing, and I think it did too much of the introverted Armstrong character.
	He was introverted to the outside world.
	He did keep himself to himself.
	He found it difficult to express his emotions.
	And perhaps that's what you need on such a mission like this.
	But I don't think he was as extreme as that film showed him to be.
	I always found a great difficulty with Armstrong.
	I mean, I met him several times.
	I've been to dinner with Neil Armstrong.
	And he always seemed to never forget that he was talking to a journalist.
	He had this thing in him that switched that turned on when there's a journalist around.
	He was always more reticent.
	He was always extremely funny, but he would never open up.
	And so you can look at lots of interviews of Armstrong and they're all the same.
	He doesn't really open up, although a little bit at the end of his life he did.
	So he was very difficult to talk to, and it was very difficult to find out something more.
	This is the problem with most of the astronauts I found, with a few exceptions, is that initially when you speak to them, you get the same old story, the story they've told to other journalists, other newscasters, etc., over the years, and they stick to that story.
	And you know exactly what they're going to say, and you know what quotes they're going to use.
	And if you're writing a book about them, then you don't want that.
	You want something extra.
	So you have to be persistent with them.
	But some of them, like Armstrong, it was extremely difficult to get something That you hadn't heard before.
	Now, we just have to explain to our listener: you are sort of out in the country in Hampshire there, lovely place to be.
	It is a warm evening, and I think the window's probably open, and my listener can probably hear a little bit of birdsong, maybe a little bit of wildfowl there.
	I find it rather charming.
	I don't think it's off-putting, so we just want to explain that it's not.
	It's one of the most wonderful places I know to write, being in the countryside.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I wish I had that experience.
	I'm on the London fringes.
	But one day, David, one day.
	There is, as we said at the top of this, in the background of all of this, of course, there is the spirit of gung-ho and daring-do and all the rest of it.
	These people are adventurers, aren't they?
	When it comes down to it, when push comes to shove, they are going where no man has gone before.
	But overlaying this, or perhaps underlying this, is always that sort of substratum of danger about this.
	Now, the Russians, throughout the history of their development, and they had a moon program too, let's not forget, throughout the entire development of space exploration by them, if they had disasters in the nature of the Soviet state, they kept them quiet.
	Whereas, of course, if Apollo had a disaster, then it was on the front page of the New York Times and there was nothing that you could do about that.
	You just had to roll with the punches and the criticism and whatever else would come.
	So two very different ways of looking at this, but an equal level of danger that, for example, resulted in the terrible accident that claimed the lives of three of the early Apollo astronauts who would have been on their way to the moon but for that accident.
	Apollo 1, of course.
	Yes, that Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the capsule going through several hours of tests.
	They're on top of a rocket.
	The rocket would not take off.
	It's not that mission.
	They're just testing the capsule on top of the rocket.
	They remark that how can we get to the moon if they can't talk between three buildings?
	It's a plugged-out test.
	They're sealed in their capsule and things are not going well and they've been pretty fed up.
	And there was a spark.
	Nobody's really tracked down where it came from.
	But because the capsule was pure oxygen and because the door, the hatch, was impossible to open in any quick time.
	It took a couple of minutes to open the hatch.
	And because it opened inwards as well, that meant when the pressure during the combustion went up, they died very rapidly from asphyxiation.
	And it's one of those types of things in spaceflight where you look back on it and you think, how on earth did we think that way?
	How on earth did they think that putting them in a sealed pressure cooker and filling it full of pure oxygen?
	Now, pure oxygen is nasty stuff in the sense that things burn, metals burn in a pure oxygen environment and they burn fantastically well.
	They don't in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.
	The result is almost like an acetylene torch, isn't it?
	It's fantastic.
	I mean, it was the same in the Apollo period.
	Sorry, in the shuttle period, in the sense that after the Challenger accident, it was decided not to put commercial satellites in the payload bay of the space shuttle.
	Why risk astronauts' lives just to launch a satellite that could be put on an unmanned rocket?
	And indeed, there were some boosters put in the payload bay of the shuttle, which used liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as a fuel, a few feet away from where the astronauts were working.
	And that's the components of a massive bomb.
	And nowadays, you look back on that and Apollo 1 and others, and you think, what on earth were they thinking?
	Well, what on earth were they thinking?
	Because they would have known the science.
	The people who designed the thing would have known the science of that.
	Why would they put people in the line of harm that way?
	They didn't intend to put people in the line of harm.
	It's like the decision to launch Challenger.
	It was a stupid decision.
	It was the Apollo 1 capsule, and some astronauts said this.
	John Young said to Gus Grissom, and at the time Gus Grissom was probably the favorite to be the first person to walk on the moon.
	John Young and Gus Grissom had discussions and Gus said, this spacecraft is a mess.
	This spacecraft could be a death trap.
	And yet we're living and working inside it.
	And John Young said, you've got to go and tell somebody.
	Somebody knows about this, but perhaps the management of the astronaut corps have misled it and sort of can't see it.
	And Gus Christian replied, no, if I do that, I'm a troublemaker and I might not get a shot at the moon.
	Terrible story.
	So he paid for that reticence, poor man, with his life.
	He did.
	And, you know, somehow in some organizations, you get along railroad tracks and you don't think outside the schedule when you're going to do the schedule, when you're going to do this, when you're going to do the next thing.
	And after the Apollo 1 accident, it was a massive shake-up to the Apollo program.
	I mean, fundamental in the sense that they realized that they could not get to the moon with what they were doing, the way they were doing it.
	But they'd cut corners, they'd made mistakes, astronauts had lost their lives.
	And there was a fundamental root and branch reassessment, not only of the equipment, but of the way they were doing things.
	And it's fair to say, I think, that had not Apollo 1 happened, that tragedy, others would have died further on, and they might not have got to the moon before Kennedy's deadline at the end of the decade.
	So it's a fascinating story of triumph and of tragedy and of getting over this tragedy.
	And, you know, it's a remarkable story.
	But there were several times between 1960 when Apollo was started and then a few years later when Kennedy committed America to going to the moon before the decade is out, up to the first landing.
	There were many times when it could all have fallen to pieces.
	And in fact, in Russia, their program did fall to pieces.
	Because we tend to forget when we study these things that the Russians did have, albeit limping and faltering.
	They did still, at the same time as the Americans, have a lunar program.
	They were desperate to get to the moon, absolutely desperate.
	And the amazing thing is that when America beat them, everybody believed that Russia wasn't interested in going to the moon at all and was more interested in space stations.
	That's nonsense.
	They were desperate.
	There were cosmonauts standing, talking to their bosses, saying, I know that rocket is dangerous.
	I know this capsule is untried, but please let me have a go.
	I'm willing to put my life on the line.
	And you could say, actually, I think if you looked at America and the Soviet Union space program in 60, 61, 62, you would have had to have said that Russia would have beaten them hands down because they had much better technology.
	They were doing all the right things.
	And the reason why Russia threw it away was because the Politburo wanted spectacular after spectacular rather than a logical development of spacecraft and abilities, which what the Americans had.
	But also there was great arguments between design bureaus.
	Sergei Korolev got things done.
	He wanted to do this.
	But he had various rivals in other design bureaus who were designing rockets and capsules as well.
	And they never really sorted out the power play.
	And then Korolev unfortunately died in 1966.
	And you'd have to say that Russia stood taller than America and should have done it if history had followed a different course.
	But they threw it away because the system was not as clear-cut and as determined as the system the Americans had.
	And indeed, something I didn't know, unless I have this wrong, but the book tells me that they had a very efficient program, did the Russians, of unmanned explorers.
	Yeah, yeah, that's right.
	Thing we forget of in the 1960s and in the 70s is that a lot of unmanned craft actually landed on the moon, orbited the moon, and the Russians brought back with an unmanned craft some lunar samples.
	And then they had the audacity to say, look, we didn't want to risk men, risk people on this mission because we've been able to bring back lunar samples with an unmanned craft.
	That was disingenuous in the extreme of the Soviets to say that, considering how desperate they were to meet the United States.
	And in fact, there is a whole area, which I only touch on in the book, of the spies which went over to the United States to try and find out more about Apollo and in some circumstances tried to sabotage it.
	Really?
	That's a whole genre which Yes, they tried to infiltrate many factories.
	They tried to spread rumors at factories.
	They tried to interfere with the work-ins at Cape Kennedy.
	And yeah, they weren't as efficient as one might have thought.
	A lot of them were really rather badly cack-handed enterprises.
	But there was an arm of the Russian government which would have done anything it could to stop Apollo.
	And did the Americans do the same as far as we know?
	No, actually, the thing is, which from reading defense documents and from the military side of things, is that the Americans didn't really know a lot of what was happening in Russia.
	They had very good photographs, but it was the interpretation of those photographs of what was happening on the launch site.
	In fact, earlier in the book, you see Eisenhower's great chess game with the Russians, because I said that Sputnik was a great shock.
	And the American public said to Eisenhower at the time, president at the time, what are you doing about it?
	And they felt he wasn't doing as much as he should, and that he was reticent.
	And then NASA started and things going under Kennedy.
	Eisenhower was cleverer than we thought.
	Eisenhower had this idea that if the United States launched a spy satellite over Russia, then Russia would turn around and say, you're flying over our territory, and there might be a war.
	But if Russia launched the satellite first and it flew over American territory, taking pictures, and the Americans said, well, you've done it, we can do it, there wouldn't be a war.
	So Eisenhower was very careful and clever.
	So America had a great deal of information strategically and militarily about the Soviet Union.
	They didn't really know much about what the cosmonauts were doing.
	And that's why it was important to look at what the cosmonauts said to the American astronauts when they met on several occasions, because there was a camaraderie between them in the sense that cosmonaut would talk to astronaut in a way that their political masters would not like them to discourse.
	So it was an interesting time.
	And that's the same as soldiers, isn't it?
	Soldiers on different sides.
	They're doing the same job.
	They're just doing it for different people.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And it's different these days in the sense that the thing which comes out, I think, from talking to all these astronauts, and I'm fortunate to have talked to all the moon walkers, and indeed everybody who went to the moon over the years, and I've talked to a great deal of Russians.
	And there is a different thing.
	Before the shuttle arrived, the status of an astronaut, the danger faced by an astronaut, was very different from when the shuttle changed how people went into space.
	You could argue that many people going into space are space workers, space professionals.
	And when you talk to them, they always talk to you about the gods of Apollo, because the Apollo astronauts were different.
	Isn't that interesting?
	And maybe that speaks to the nature of the Soviet state anyway.
	The fact that in so many fields, in fact, probably in all fields, people building cars, people building houses, people working in factories, working in restaurants.
	They were just doing a job, paid whatever the state was paying at that time.
	They were not incentivized.
	So, two different systems working in a completely different way.
	It's not surprising that the kind of people they throw up and the kind of result you get are different.
	Exactly.
	I mean, a friend of mine once told me he'd studied the Soviet Union in those days, and although they wanted high production from their factories, they wanted equality.
	So, instead of demanding everybody come in at a certain time, they were a bit lax in the morning, but come leaving time in the evening.
	They insisted everybody stop and go home.
	Now, you wouldn't have that in America.
	You know, if there were things to be done, they would carry on doing it, even though it was home time.
	That's the way of private enterprise.
	It's a different system.
	But you're right.
	It was the Soviet system, not their initial forays into space technology that lost them the moon.
	And how did they come to make the final decision to give up on it and to basically leave the Americans with an open goal?
	During 1969, they were desperate to beat the Americans.
	They were trying to say, what could we do?
	They knew that July would be the time of Apollo 11 and that would probably be the first landing.
	And indeed, they were hoping to be, I think, two weeks ahead of the Americans, weren't they?
	Exactly.
	That's right.
	And they were trying with their big booster, which wasn't working, which was failing.
	There are ways they could have done it with other rockets, with a very substandard capsule, one person landing on the moon.
	And as I said, cosmonauts were desperate to say, give us a chance.
	And they could never justify— but they did not want to suffer the national embarrassment of failing in America's triumph.
	Because if it had sent a one-man capsule up there to land on the moon and the man had died, Alexey Leonov would have probably been the cosmonaut and he had died in some way.
	And then Apollo 11 landed on the moon and they came home safely.
	That would have been worse than not trying at all.
	Would the Americans, if the Russians had failed in that way, and if somebody from the Russian program had died on the moon or getting to the moon, would the Americans have gone ahead on schedule?
	Yes.
	They knew the Russians were doing something in 1969.
	They had hints.
	They had astronauts talking to cosmonauts.
	They had secret briefings from the American military as to what they thought was going on.
	But it didn't change their schedule in terms of the impressive thing about Apollo, and indeed about the Mercury, the one-man Mercury, the two-man Gemini and the three-man Apollo capsule, the impressive thing is the sequence of achievement.
	In the sense they had to learn how to travel into space, then they had to learn how to move the spacecraft, then they had to learn how to keep people alive for weeks in space, then they had to rendezvous and dock, then they had to test the command module of the Apollo system, then the lunar landers.
	And the way they did this logically throughout many years of testing, culminating with that magnificent series of missions, Apollo 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, where they first of all tested the equipment and then went round the moon testing the equipment with Borman, Lovell and Anders, and then tested more until Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.
	That is the most impressive sequence of technology demonstration, I think, in history.
	Because remember, the Saturn V rocket is one of the most complicated rockets ever built, probably the most complicated rocket.
	And how do you test it?
	The Germans, who were mainly behind it, from the engineers from the Second World War in Alabama, in Huntsville, had the idea that you built a bit of the rocket, you tested it, you built another bit of the rocket, you tested that, you added them together, you tested them together, and you went on like that.
	And a chap called George Muller joined NASA when NASA realized it wasn't going to get to the moon in time and said, you can't do that.
	It'll take forever to get to the moon like that.
	That's not the way to do it.
	And he came up with the idea of all-up testing, which is a thing he brought from the Polaris missile program, where you test everything all up at one time.
	And that culminated in Apollo 8, the first test launch of a Saturn V with millions of working parts, the first test of the Apollo capsule, and with people on board in the first test and a mission around the moon.
	That is incredibly audacious for all-up testing.
	And it worked and it saved America years and years and years.
	I bet there was some persuading of bureaucracy to do to get that.
	I think the Apollo 8 decision is absolutely astounding in the sense that they realized that they were falling behind in the schedule because the lunar module wasn't ready and it wouldn't be ready probably until January 69.
	And this was the summer of 68.
	So they decided to test the capsule, the Apollo capsule and the service module and the Saturn V, not in Earth orbit, but going around the moon, the first people to leave the Earth's environment.
	That is an absolutely adventurous, brave, breathtaking decision.
	And there's a little bit of audio anybody can seek out of Michael Collins, who was the Capcom, the Capsule communicator for Apollo 8, where they're giving Apollo 8 the instruction for TLI.
	Apollo 8, you'll go for TLI, Roger TLI.
	And then they press the button and the engine fires and they leave the Earth.
	Translunar injection.
	That is as important phrase In space history, as one small step for man.
	And yet they didn't embellish it.
	It was a routine conversation: go for TLI.
	But that go for TLI was the first time humans had left the Earth.
	I want to go back to the danger just for a second here, because there's a story in the book that I'd forgotten.
	And it's an important story, too, because if the little bit of danger that was experienced by Neil Armstrong had had a different outcome, somebody else would have walked on the moon first.
	He was nearly killed, wasn't he, in testing for the landing of the lunar module?
	This is the flying bedstead.
	The flying bedstead, yes.
	Which is, I mean, you can look it up.
	It's just a crazy device.
	And it didn't fly particularly well.
	Some people thought it did simulate the lunar module coming down to land.
	Others thought it didn't simulate this very well at all.
	But it was part of the crude equipment they had to prepare themselves for the landing.
	And Armstrong went off to fly in this flying bed, which is basically a whole heap of metal and struts with a jet engine on its end.
	And he was coming into trying to maneuver this thing into land, and he started to veer off because one of the controls had malfunctioned.
	And literally, at the last second, he ejects and he comes down in the field nearby.
	Had he thought, had he waited another second, the ejection would have killed him because he would have been too close to the ground and the flying bedstead would have been pointing towards the ground.
	And he survives that, of course.
	He's a bit shaken up.
	The only injury he has is a bitten tongue, which is evidently quite painful for him.
	But that afternoon, he was back at his desk.
	And a fellow astronaut came in and said, what are you doing at your desk?
	He said, well, I'm working at these problems.
	But you just had that accident this morning.
	Everybody's talking about it.
	You barely survived with your life.
	And Armstrong said, well, I'm here.
	I'm getting on with these problems.
	I'm okay.
	That's the mark of the man, isn't it?
	The mark of the man.
	Apollo 10.
	A funny story.
	I've never heard this.
	Maybe I had.
	It was years ago and I've forgotten it.
	But Apollo 10's Gene Cernan, the night before the flight, I think, the night before Blastoff, got arrested.
	No, that was the one we must have been talked down by Gunther Vent.
	Gunther Vent was a legend.
	He was the closeout officer on the pad, and he basically made sure the astronauts got into the capsule with the right equipment and they were positioned in the right place and that the capsule was sealed properly.
	And Gunther Vendt, they all joked, you know, where did Gunther Vent?
	But Gunther Vent actually persuaded a traffic cop just before the launch of Apollo 10 that he probably doesn't want to arrest Gene Cernan for speeding because Gene's got an important government job to do the following day.
	And he got him off.
	I don't think that cop would have been very popular had he arrested Gene Cernan.
	Well, there was something else.
	Apparently in the book, you say that Gene Cernan had a military driving license, and this apparently piqued the curiosity of the police officer, the traffic cop.
	That's right, yes.
	That was a great story, though.
	There are all sorts of wonderful stories with these astronauts.
	John Young smuggling a corned beef sandwich into space in one of his Gemini flights because he didn't like the food.
	That's astonishing.
	I mean, think of the bacteria that could have been on that thing.
	The crumbs.
	Yes, and crumbs floating around, which can be dangerous in space, I guess.
	That's right.
	But John Young was so good that he was forgiven a lot of things.
	I mean, he's regarded by many as the greatest astronaut ever, actually.
	although you'd have to argue the greatest feat of an astronaut's ever done is the landing on the moon.
	The last three or four minutes of Apollo 11, where they go for PDI, powered descent, down to the surface of the moon where Armstrong...
	The book starts at the high point where Armstrong has to take over manual control.
	Although he's actually interacting with the computer, he doesn't switch the computer off completely to find a place to land.
	That is the most dramatic bit of flying in any circumstance in history.
	But you'd have to say that in terms of overall performance as an astronaut, John Young is two Gemini flights, two Apollo flights, walked on the moon, commanded the most dangerous flight in the history of spaceflight, which was the first flight, the maiden flight of the space shuttle, and then went into space again and would have gone into space more than six times had it not been for the Challenger accident.
	Yes, they were all.
	The thing which impressed me is that they were all, in a way, bad boys, and they did things against the rules.
	But NASA forgave them because they knew they could do their job and they had confidence in them.
	There's a great scene in that wonderful film Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, the best film about space ever made, where they're in dire straits on Apollo 13.
	And the captured communicator says, don't worry, Tom Mattingly is in the simulator working things out.
	And there's a glimpse between them when they look at each other in that capsule-stricken, they're not sure what their fate is.
	There's a glimpse between them where they say, that's all right.
	We really trust him.
	We know we can rely on Tom.
	I love that moment.
	It's the same for all the astronauts.
	I love that moment and the reconstruction of how Mattingly checked out and tested every gambit that they came up with to test on Earth a fix for the problem that they had on Apollo 13.
	It was quite remarkable.
	I remember talking to the late Sir Patrick Moore about that.
	I mean, even he was completely transfixed by the portrayal of that in the movie.
	It was remarkable.
	And yes, it was because the controllers of the mission and mission control had lived and worked with the astronauts during their training, during their practicing, because the people who spoke to the astronauts on the mission were astronauts who'd been there and done that.
	There was a trust.
	I mean, you read in the first part of the book, the speech that is given by Gene Krantz to his troops.
	I'm glad you mentioned that because I was going to bring you to that right now.
	Gene Krantz, of course, the man that we all remember from Mission Control, the guy with almost a shaved head, a cropped cut of hair, tighter than any that I've seen in my life.
	And he did give a speech.
	Which is wonderful.
	Today is our day.
	This is our place.
	I only paraphrased it here for my notes, but he says on a private communication channel, so not everybody heard this, but the important people who needed to hear it heard this on the beginning of the day.
	And he said, today is our day.
	This is our place.
	And we will remember what we do here forever.
	There was a bit more in it than that, but that's impactful stuff.
	What was in it was trust.
	He said, do your jobs.
	I've got confidence in you.
	And whatever happens, I'm behind you.
	That is leadership.
	We don't see much of that these days, do we?
	In so many ways.
	Okay.
	You know, one of the most, and we'll get to the actual moments of the touchdown on the lunar surface and the way that that was executed.
	But one of the moments in the book that impacted on me most was the way that you described the perfect way, technically, the separation of the command module and the lunar module was accomplished on Apollo 9 before the actual lunar landing.
	Or was it Apollo 10?
	It was one of those late missions.
	I think it was 9.
	Apollo 9.
	It was 9.
	Apollo 9, yes.
	I mean, that was remarkable because there was a demonstration of everything that they'd prepared for.
	And it was also the first time in the history of spaceflight that an astronaut was in a separate spacecraft orbiting the Earth, and the spacecraft he was in could not enter the Earth's atmosphere.
	He could not return home in that spacecraft.
	He had to leave that spacecraft and go back to the Apollo main capsule and command module and service module in order to come home.
	Had there been an accident and he was not able to do that, he would have been stranded in space with no way home.
	Apollo 9, of course, after the flight around the moon, before the rehearsal and everything but the landing, Apollo 9 was the most technical mission, I think, of all Apollo missions, to test out everything, the lunar lander, the lunar module, ascent and descent stage in Earth orbit.
	And that mission was dangerous, it was complicated, it was long and technical, and they did superbly well.
	But there was a time when, you know, they knew that if something went wrong in the next 10 minutes, one of them would die.
	There's nothing like that for focusing your mind, is there?
	Oh, boy.
	And of course, you mentioned Apollo 8 before that.
	That was the one where we got, didn't we, the command module going round the moon and we got this Earthrise view.
	I think I'm right saying that.
	That's right.
	Although you're right, that was the picture of Earthrise, which shook everybody and started the environmental movement, it said.
	And remarkable picture it is.
	But actually, there was one taken by a lunar orbiter, an unmanned orbiter, which was scouting for lunar landing sites in 1966.
	So a good pub Chris question is, when was the first picture taken of the Earth-right Limb?
	It's not Apollo 8, it's Lunar Orbiter 1.
	Okay, well, we'd all have said, I'd have said Apollo 8.
	Because I think it was Christmas, wasn't it?
	It was a Christmas present to the world.
	Yeah, I remember reading about that and seeing the picture, which, you know, is one of the, apart from the picture of Armstrong on the surface of the moon, is one of the great pictures of our time.
	So Apollo 11 is coming into land.
	The lunar module is coming into land on the surface there.
	And it really is down to the pilot then.
	It is down to your piloting skills.
	You have a limited amount of time.
	You have a limited amount of fuel.
	And then they discover that the surface that they seemed to be or hoped to be heading for is not quite what they expected.
	Too many boulders.
	And they have to act.
	They can't land there.
	And this, as I said, this period between your Gopher PDI, Powered Descent, and the landing on the moon, they're flying for their lives.
	It is the greatest feat of flying in history, the way Armstrong took over and navigated.
	Of course, he had next to him Buzz Aldrin.
	But Buzz Aldrin, in those days, you must understand, the technology was pretty crude.
	And Buzz Aldrin's sole job on going down, most of the time, was to read out the dials in front of him.
	He said later, if it wasn't on the dials, he wasn't looking at it.
	He didn't look out the window.
	He didn't look at Neil.
	He looked at the dials and he was calling out, you know, four forward, drifting to the right, so and so, you know, 10 down.
	He's calling out their rate of descent and their altitude.
	And that's all he's doing, because that's so important for Neil Armstrong to understand that.
	Armstrong's got his hand round two joysticks.
	One is the thrust controller, and the other is the attitude of the lunar module.
	And he's playing with both of those to bring them down.
	And as you say, the landing is not straightforward.
	These days, if you had a landing craft like that, you'd probably have a heads-up display.
	And Buzz Aldrin's role would be redundant because the information could be put straight in front of Neil Armstrong's face.
	But it wasn't in those times.
	And it really was the most amazing.
	As you say, they were running out of fuel.
	Bob Carlton in mission control called 30 Seconds.
	And they knew they had a little bit extra, but not much.
	In fact, there's a funny story.
	It was told to me by Jim Lovell, who was Sitting next to Charlie Duke, who was the captain communicator during the landing of Apollo 11.
	And next to him was, I think, Fred Hayes, because he was backup lunar module pilot.
	And Charlie Duke was trying to talk them down, talking to them, giving them information.
	And Jim Lovell prodded him in the ribs and said, hey, you're talking too much.
	Let them do their jobs.
	And then he realized he had to talk a bit less.
	And I think I spoke to many people who were in that room at that time.
	And they all held their breaths.
	They all looked at their consoles.
	They were all monitoring.
	They knew that it was tense.
	It got tensor during the landing because in the beginning, Charlie Deep said, this just looks like a simulation.
	Everything's going well.
	And apparently at that point, according to your book, everybody breathed a sigh of relief at that point.
	That relaxed the tension a bit, didn't it?
	That's right.
	It relieved the tension a bit.
	Then, of course, they had the alarms, 1202, 1201 alarms, which were not important, but they didn't know that.
	They had not come across those alarms in the landing simulator.
	In fact, there were people who said before Apollo 11 took off, they hadn't spent as much time in the landing simulator as they should have done.
	But it was enough.
	And spotting that boulder field and traveling a little bit further and landing with seconds of fuel to last was just the most remarkable fate.
	Because remember, if this thing had crashed in some way, if it wasn't almost upright, they couldn't get back off the moon.
	Even though it had to be sitting pretty much flat on the terrain, otherwise it was impossible to lift off.
	That's right.
	There were some landings.
	I can't remember which one it was, when the engine bell of the descent stage was actually buckled quite badly because it came down.
	It's a good job they didn't need that to go back into lunar orbit.
	But you're quite right.
	There were very strict parameters.
	And here's another pub question.
	The first words spoken on the moon were contact light because each landing leg, three of them out of the four, had a probe which would switch on a light when it touched the lunar surface.
	And that's, you know, they touched the lunar surface, Buzz Aldrin said contact light.
	And then they fell the last few feet and the compressible struts in the legs took up the strain and they were down.
	And it is the most, even today when I listen to that audio, I just can't get over it.
	It's just so, I listen to it in the car.
	I listen to it at home because it is just so amazing.
	We have no audio of Columbus finding the new world or whatever.
	But we've got that wonderful audio of Armstrong and Aldrin landing on the moon.
	And then, of course, Aldrin goes quiet for a while.
	Armstrong says we're going to be busy for a few minutes.
	And Armstrong is safing the spacecraft because they have to make a big decision at T1.
	If you listen to the ground controller's room, they're saying, ground controllers, prepare for T1.
	Are you ready for a go-no at T1?
	Which means that everybody has to assess the state of the spacecraft.
	And if one person thinks it's dangerous to stay, then they make that decision after one minute of landing, T1.
	Everybody thought T1 was okay and they were go for stay.
	And Aldrin, at that time, took communion.
	He had a little vial of wine, some wafers which had been given to him.
	And quietly, and you can't hear this in the audio, because he doesn't say anything, he takes communion on the wine.
	And of course, there is the controversy of what did he say when he put his first foot on the moon?
	Did he include the A?
	And because of the audio quality, and because it's a little fuzzy, it's actually hard to tell, isn't it?
	Whether he said one small step for a man or one small step for man.
	And if you, it just sounds like he's saying both.
	He's saying one small step for a man.
	So who knows?
	You can get yourself into the mindset where you can, you know, it's so mesmerized.
	You hear what you want.
	It's audio pereidolia.
	That's right.
	For me, he didn't say the A. Whether or not he intended to.
	In fact, some people said that because Armstrong was so reticent, they were not surprised that he said something profound.
	But some of them said they were surprised he said anything at all because he was so introverted and reticent.
	But he'd thought about this.
	And if you listen, in my mind, if you listen to it, he says, one small step for a man.
	It's a fur, not a fora.
	But who would argue?
	I think that debate's going to go on for another 50 years.
	So a remarkable book and a great work.
	How long did this book take you to write, David?
	Well, actually, I didn't want to write a book about Apollo 11.
	It was my agent which convinced me because, as you know, it's the anniversary, the 50th anniversary.
	And of course, there are loads of books being published about Apollo 11 and documentaries and such.
	And one thing an author doesn't want is competition, you know, because everybody who buys a book about Apollo 11 from somebody else is not going to buy your book.
	And you don't want to have all the comparisons.
	You know, some people are going to love you, some people are going to hate you.
	That's the nature of what we do.
	That's right.
	So I didn't want to write it initially, but my agent said, look, you know this stuff.
	You've got all these interviews.
	You've met everybody.
	Just write the thing.
	And I just wrote the thing, and she managed to find an excellent publisher.
	And then I realized when I was writing it that I wanted to write it in a different way.
	You know, you can go to, you can pick up Andrew Chaikin's book, Man on the Moon.
	It's an excellent book, and it's got loads of technical details.
	But when you come to write a book yourself, you don't want to write somebody else's book.
	I have to convince myself that the book you're writing is going to be different and it's going to be somehow your take.
	This has got the style of a work of fiction to it.
	Well, you're quite right.
	I'm glad you said that because I wrote it almost as a screenplay in the sense that I include lots of quotes from the people who were there doing the thing.
	And I thought, well, if they are there doing the thing, you get, and they're using their own words, you get more of a sense of a character in a movie that they were involved in.
	they can say what they're doing a lot better than I can paraphrase it.
	So I'm glad you said that.
	Thank you.
	No, it's a very different kind of book, and I think it's excellent.
	And I love the photographs as well.
	They're very kind.
	Thank you.
	Photographs must have been, well, you know, some of them are the ones that have been around for years, but not all of these photographs, I'm looking at them now, would have been easy to source, I wouldn't have thought.
	That's right.
	You see, when you write a book like this, you've got to satisfy several audiences.
	First of all, you want to satisfy yourself, and then you've got to satisfy people who know the subject, who might want to read it just to see how you've written it.
	And you've also got to satisfy people who don't know the subject and who are new to this type of thing.
	So you've got to give them a book that satisfies.
	So you've got to give them the pictures that everybody expects, plus a hint of what's not in other books.
	Because it's important when you write a book like this, it's not what you've got in common, it's what you've got different.
	And that's why I treated it the same way, because I wanted people to get in the minds of the astronauts in particular, when there was the Apollo 11 crisis, when they were deciding who would be the first person to walk on the moon, and when the Apollo missions were cancelled.
	I think the best for me, the most emotional and best part of the book is right at the end, which I call the melancholy of all things done.
	What do you do when you've walked on the moon?
	What's next?
	And what do you do?
	Dreams.
	You try and cope.
	YOU JUST TRY AND COPE.
	They didn't get a bonus.
	In fact, they didn't get a bonus for going to the moon.
	There were no public relations.
	That's astonishing.
	I was the first voice on a BBC local radio station years ago, and they gave me a bonus for that.
	And that wasn't landing on the moon.
	And there were no PR people.
	There were no human resistance people.
	They were left on their own.
	In fact, there's a wonderful thing you can see on YouTube of Bob Hope and Neil Armstrong entertaining the troops in Vietnam.
	And Neil Armstrong has got a fantastic sense of humor.
	And somebody from the audience, some GI, says, how much did you get paid?
	Did you get a bonus for going to the moon?
	And he said, well, I got something extra for going to the moon.
	But first of all, it was, you know, $49.
	And he said, well, they took a third of it away because he was in government accommodation.
	And they took a third of it away because he was eating government food.
	And that was it.
	These guys were left on their own and they suffered the problems of celebrity, of professional come down.
	You know, these guys had been the top of their league, the top of the game when they were Apollo astronauts.
	And then they're not.
	It was very hard on Buzz.
	It was very hard on Neil Armstrong, who tried to be a normal college professor teaching engineering.
	But that was never going to work.
	I mean, you've got Neil Armstrong's giving a lecture on orbital dynamics and compressible flow.
	The corridor was full of people wanting to watch him.
	You know, he walked from, if it was the University of Cincinnati, he walked around and he was mobbed and he could not find a normal place.
	Gene Cernan said it well.
	He said that the people who went to the moon, and especially those who walked on it, had broken the familiar matrix of life and they could not put it back together again.
	And that somehow, having been to the moon, they will always be different from the rest of us.
	There will always be something between them and us that can never be changed.
	And I think Armstrong felt that pretty strongly, that things were different.
	And what do you do?
	It's a problem, you know, almost unique to these astronauts.
	You come back home and you're no longer walking on the moon.
	You're no longer sleeping in a capsule.
	You're back to your own bed.
	You're brushing your teeth in your bathroom.
	You're sitting in front of your fire having done this thing.
	I once asked Alan Shepard, who walked on the moon in Apollo 14, and who was the first, as we said, the first American to go into space.
	I once asked him how he coped with that.
	And I said, when you go to sleep at night and you close your eyes, do you go back to the moon?
	And this intrigued him because it wasn't the normal type of question he got asked.
	And he paused for a while and he said, yes, when I close my eyes, I'm often back on the surface of the moon.
	And he said, when I wake up, I cry.
	With the knowledge that he's back here.
	Yeah, the knowledge that he cried on the moon when he looked at the earth.
	And he just cries because it is such an emotional thing to go through, to train to walk upon the moon, to go through the mission and get back home.
	You think you spend the rest of your life trying to get over it.
	And there are very few astronauts who became in any way near normal.
	Armstrong tried.
	Michael Collins did better than most.
	He became boss of the great museums in Washington.
	And he wrote the best book about spaceflight by any astronaut.
	It's a marvelous book, if you can get it.
	But a lot of them had alcohol problems.
	A lot of them divorced.
	A lot of them didn't know what to do.
	And it is, as you hinted earlier, a different world now.
	Nowadays they would have consultants and therapists and people to help.
	And nowadays it seems to me that NASA is much more protective.
	If you try, which I, you know, I have some contact with them doing this.
	Getting access to people, even senior staff, not necessarily astronauts, is not easy.
	They've got gatekeepers in place.
	There seems to be a procedure.
	And I would assume that the experience of the Apollo astronauts helped to shape the way they deal with these things now.
	That's right, because they had none of this.
	Armstrong had a part-time secretary who came into his home one day a week, I think.
	And they sifted the mail into three sections.
	And he had an awful lot of mail.
	One was the professional invitations, most of which he declined.
	One was the complete and absolute loonies who wrote to him, which were put straight into the bin.
	And the other was the invitations from Boy Scouts and letters and stuff.
	He went for years signing the graduation certificates for Boy Scouts until he stopped because he felt that it was becoming too routine.
	So yes, he had no help.
	Everything, he had no money.
	These Apollo astronauts frequently left the American Space Program with literally no money.
	And the money they'd been paid during their service was very small indeed.
	They didn't have contracts and endorsements on their side.
	Many of them got given a car, a nice snazzy sports car.
	But a lot of them faced severe financial pressure.
	And a few of them had to sell their homes when they stopped flying to the moon.
	How astonishing.
	And find their own way.
	I think there is something more to be said about the problems and the trauma and the strain that many of them faced when they came back to Earth because it was a different time in those days.
	They were completely on their own.
	And sadly, we've been losing them in recent years.
	I was lucky enough to speak with Edgar Mitchell.
	He's the only astronaut who went to the moon that I was able to speak with.
	But these people, like Edgar, are sadly leaving us.
	And Neil Armstrong.
	It's that's right.
	Yes, it's 50 years since, as you know, as we see, since all this happened.
	And one's natural lifespan is taking them away from us.
	And there will soon be a time when there is nobody alive who walked upon the moon.
	I hope that will change in the future, but I can see that happening.
	It's going to happen in the next few years.
	And that's very sad.
	And it's also what Apollo has also given us is a reflection on mortality.
	Because these astronauts, when they went to the moon, they were in their late 30s, early 40s.
	Armstrong was 39.
	And they were in the peak of health.
	They were magnificent physical specimens, mentally and physically superb.
	And yet they carry that image with them, as perhaps we all do, as you get older, as you get infirm and frail and cannot do as much.
	And it was interesting to see the dignity and the human perspective that many of these astronauts carry when the picture they see of the astronaut walking on the moon is them 50 years ago.
	Well, Ed Mitchell was very philosophical, I thought, about it.
	And of course, he became a bit of a champion of the cause of the earth and exploring space further and those sorts of things.
	Yes, these people, while they are still among us, have an insight and a philosophy and a wisdom that nobody else has.
	And we should cherish them while they're here.
	Well, you've distilled an awful lot of it in the book, David.
	It is an excellent book.
	And, you know, I did something that I don't normally do.
	I speed, pardon me.
	Oh, boy.
	I speed read the book.
	And I speed read the book for a reason.
	Because I knew that close to the anniversary, if I have a bit of time off, I'm going to go through it in detail.
	And I'm going to really enjoy it the second time.
	It's a great book.
	The one thing that surprised me is it's called Apollo 11, The Inside Story, but actually this book is the story of Apollo.
	That's right.
	I felt that there are various other books.
	I'll tell you a secret.
	If you're an author and you're writing a book about Apollo, you have friends who have friends who have spies who tell you what other authors are doing.
	Because one thing you don't want to do is to write a book similar to anybody else.
	So you sort of somehow, without thinking about it, you tend to steer away from what you know others are writing.
	And I knew a few other authors, excellent authors, who were ending their books at Apollo 11.
	And that's a good way to end the book.
	But I wanted to, as we said, go into how the astronauts and the moonwalkers fared after Apollo 11, after the Apollo mission finished.
	So I got a chance to write about the other missions up to Apollo 17 and what, you know, the drama of Apollo 13 and the remarkable, the later missions, 15, 16, 17, are different from the earlier missions.
	They are truly stupendous.
	And so I got a chance to write about those and then what happened to these characters afterwards.
	So you're quite right.
	Every Apollo mission is in there.
	And I think that actually I put somewhere in the foreword that, you know, I've never forgotten that night when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
	You're watching BBC, you know, the Apollo news desk.
	And on the other side, ITN had a variety show.
	I remember Lenny the Lion.
	And who was the magician, Nixon?
	David Nixon, yeah.
	Yes.
	Because the ITN thought that they'd have too much science, they'd have a bit of variety in between.
	And the space expert was Peter Fairley.
	Ah, Peter.
	Oh, yes.
	Peter, yes.
	And it was fascinating.
	My father wanted me to go to bed.
	No way.
	And I've lived through that and I've never gotten over it.
	I've literally never come to terms with what happened that night.
	And I have grown-up kids Of my own now, and I look at their lives and say, What is their equivalent of the first landing on the moon?
	And you look at today's kids, what is there that has that import?
	I can't think of anything, can you?
	Nope, I can't.
	I really can't.
	Our generation has let them down in not providing something like that, I think.
	So, yes.
	In giving them something to shoot for, I think that's it.
	In this generation, you know, well, survival is the thing we have to shoot for now.
	Well, we have to learn to appreciate science better.
	I'm sure that's the case.
	And we need something in the future that is hopeful in a way that, you know, in the 1960s, everybody knew that things were building up to a landing on the moon.
	NASA is trying now to get boots on the moon by 2024.
	I don't think they'll succeed.
	But at least it's part of a dream which we can sort of try and latch on to.
	Because for so many years, NASA and the Russians and everybody else have half-heartedly played at going back to the moon, have started something, have stopped it, have cancelled it and done it again and again.
	If we can do something that lasts, at least there is, you know, the dream.
	I imagine a school kid in a school in 10 years' time looking, getting a lesson via the internet, a lesson delivered by an astronaut on Shackleton Crater at the south pole of the moon, explaining why they're there and what they hope to do.
	That would be so wonderful and inspirational.
	Well, let's hope we do it.
	Let's hope we do it.
	Let's hope we do it because right now, I think people need something to focus them, to give them hope.
	And at the moment, what have we got?
	We've got politicians who are flawed, who let us down, who we found to be flawed and transparent, or rather, not transparent if you see right through them.
	They're transparent in that sense, but not transparent in other senses.
	We've got a planet that we're being told is heading to some kind of ecological catastrophe.
	So that there ain't much.
	Let's hope that something like this focuses the attention of another generation.
	Last question, David.
	You covered all the missions up to 17.
	At the end of 17, what was it like, not for the astronauts, but for the people who had to turn out the lights and go away on that last night when 17 was done?
	Well, of course, they were then building up to the Apollo-Soyuz test project, which was going to be, used a lot of Apollo hardware, and Skylab used Apollo hardware to create the first space station in orbit.
	In fact, many regard Skylab as better than the current space station we've got.
	So there was still onward momentum with these programs and these people, but a lot of people left.
	We are now no longer able to launch a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V. And you're right.
	There was great sadness.
	It was, what do we do now?
	And I think that the American government didn't do very well.
	Because part of the reason why Apollo was cancelled was because NASA's publicity, and you'd see NASA's very good at publicity, had failed.
	Because after Armstrong and Audrey and Collins came back and attended a function at the White House, President Nixon held up a glass and he tipped the glass to make a noise and he said, I want to give you a toast.
	Here's to Apollo.
	It's all over.
	Oh boy.
	And the astronauts looked at each other and they said, what do you mean it's all over?
	They didn't understand that to a politician, America had beaten the Russians and that was it.
	The way had not been prepared further.
	Spyro Agnew, who fell out of favor, lost his influence.
	He wanted people to go to Mars in 1984.
	But the politics wasn't right.
	Vietnam, poor people's marches.
	And President Nixon tried to chain, still maintain the drive and the hope and the dream by saying a nation that can go to the moon can cure cancer, can do these other things.
	But it didn't work.
	The science of curing cancer wasn't there, wasn't there to be exploited as much.
	So they lost something.
	Yes.
	And they lost a big dream.
	In the 60s and 70s, America achieved greatness, as great as any civilization our world has seen.
	And you're quite right.
	We can have long debates about why they turned their backs on it.
	Another subject for another time, but I love this book.
	It's Apollo 11, The Inside Story.
	And it's Icon Books, the publisher, isn't it?
	It is indeed.
	Out on June the 5th.
	David, thank you very much for that.
	You're very welcome.
	And Dr. David Whitehouse's book, Apollo 11, The Inside Story, is available now through Icon Press.
	And I can only heartily recommend this book.
	I think it is just an incredible account of events that most of us, probably all of us, are aware of.
	But the backstory, the inside story, the detail, the emotion, it's all here in this book by Dr. David Whitehouse.
	More great editions of The Unexplained still to come here as we go through 2019.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	I am in London.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, by email through the website theunexplained.tv, stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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