Buzz Aldrin Remembers the Moon Landing (2010) — Transcript

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1. 0:00how do you get over fear in your life uh
2. 0:02you suppress it
3. 0:04yeah somehow uh you never
4. 0:07think thinking of what you need to do
5. 0:11to be alert to handle anything that's
6. 0:14clouding your mind see i grew up with
7. 0:17fdr
8. 0:17uh right the only thing the fear is fear
9. 0:19itself yeah yeah you got it
10. 0:21your father was a a pilot he wanted you
11. 0:23to be the first man to walk on the moon
12. 0:25isn't that the truth
13. 0:26my father really didn't understand the
14. 0:28rocket business all that well
15. 0:30right i mean he thought that uh you
16. 0:32ought to be able to rescue somebody
17. 0:34at the moon by sending another rocket
18. 0:37and people to
19. 0:38get there and bring them back right well
20. 0:39there was just no way to do anything
21. 0:41like that
22. 0:42did you feel disappointment no you
23. 0:44weren't a little
24. 0:45embarrassed you were in front of your
25. 0:47father no because it was no
26. 0:49no because he he was talking to people
27. 0:52that
28. 0:52uh when he didn't really understand the
29. 0:55background
30. 0:55let me he embarrassed you because when
31. 0:58he was lobbying and carrying on you were
32. 0:59like
33. 1:00he shouldn't have been in those offices
34. 1:04right now when president candidate he
35. 1:07said may 25th
36. 1:081961 yes i believe that this nation
37. 1:11should commit itself before the decade
38. 1:13is out
39. 1:14of landing a man on the moon he was
40. 1:16right
41. 1:17and returning him safely a lot of people
42. 1:19don't understand
43. 1:20wait a minute he didn't say anything
44. 1:21about going outside the spacecraft and
45. 1:23walking around on the moon
46. 1:25he said to land a man on the moon and
47. 1:28bring it back okay that clearly people
48. 1:31in the space
49. 1:32business who understand the progression
50. 1:34of exploration know
51. 1:35that the very most important uh
52. 1:38contribution
53. 1:40of apollo was demonstrating the ability
54. 1:43to land on another object
55. 1:45now uh we didn't have space
56. 1:49walking until the russians uh had leonov
57. 1:52go outside the vashgod and almost not
58. 1:56get back in again
59. 1:57so we trained my very good friend from
60. 1:59west point ed white
61. 2:01to do the first spacewalk on gemini iv
62. 2:04with a maneuvering gun
63. 2:05and and we had to really convince him to
64. 2:08come back in again it was so
65. 2:10successful uh being outside the hatch of
66. 2:12the germany uh four
67. 2:14mission were you confident that nasa
68. 2:16knew what the hell they were doing when
69. 2:17absolutely absolutely yeah do you like
70. 2:20those guys they know what they're doing
71. 2:23when the president says we're going to
72. 2:24the moon we didn't know how to get there
73. 2:27we really didn't werner von braun wanted
74. 2:30a
75. 2:31uh a nova rocket which wouldn't have
76. 2:34been ready until
77. 2:35way past the president's deadline uh
78. 2:371970 or so
79. 2:38right we had a saturn 5 under
80. 2:41construction
81. 2:42but his calculations brenda von braun
82. 2:45was that we needed two of them
83. 2:46to join up the stuff go to the moon
84. 2:49directly and come back
85. 2:50it was an engineer but weren't you
86. 2:52nervous that this was just
87. 2:53theory that they were rushing too fast
88. 2:56into this that they weren't
89. 2:57in other words because kennedy said we
90. 2:59got to get a man on the moon now that
91. 3:00they were just going to rush
92. 3:01and who knows this whole thing could
93. 3:03have blown up i mean you must have been
94. 3:05a little nervous about that
95. 3:06well they did test the rockets
96. 3:10and other people felt that
97. 3:14you could turn around and come back at
98. 3:16many times
99. 3:18during the mission right and you might
100. 3:20have to do that
101. 3:21like apollo 13 before you got a chance
102. 3:24to get to the moon
103. 3:26so we figured the chance just
104. 3:30unofficially the three of us on apollo 1
105. 3:32that it was about 60
106. 3:34that we would be able to successfully
107. 3:37land right but
108. 3:3895 that if we weren't able to land that
109. 3:42we would be able to come back
110. 3:44safely