Ep 190 | 'We Faked It?!' Apollo Legend DEBUNKS Moon Landing Theories | Charlie Duke | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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The Apollo space program folded 51 years ago.

Nobody has walked on the moon since.

Weirdly, a growing number of people don't even believe moon landings actually happened.

This belief is growing more and more with each generation.

The list of reasons range from the bizarre to the confusing, and many of the moon hoax landing debunkers have been caught doing some fabricating of their own.

So, on this episode of the Glenbeck podcast, I'm going to go straight to the source, one of the only remaining men who actually walked on the moon.

He served in five of the seven Apollo missions dedicated to landing on the moon.

The BBC has called him one of the most historically important voices in America.

I want to keep this episode in our vault.

Odds are that

you might know what his voice sounds like because you've heard it before.

He was Capcon during Apollo 11, he'll explain.

He's the one who talked to Buzz Aldrin and Armstrong when they landed on the moon.

It was to him that they were talking to when they said, Houston, the eagle has landed.

He played a huge role in getting the astronauts of Apollo 13 back safely.

Only 12 humans have walked on the moon.

Today's guest was the 10th.

He walked on the moon when he was 36, making him the youngest person to leave footprints on the lunar surface.

He's one of the four living men who have done that.

He made it...

I think he made it absolutely fun.

He played a big part in the image of an astronaut being cool, intimidatingly smart, yet sparse with his words, his brilliance, tucked into a southern drawl.

He saw more in 10 days than most people will see in 10 lifetimes.

Please welcome a real-life space cowboy, Brigadier General Charlie Duke.

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Charlie, thank you for being here.

Delighted to be with you again, Glenn.

Thank you.

So I have been struggling with something for a while.

I think that there could come a time

that people are convinced that Americans never went to the moon.

Everything, our history is being so discredited, our country's being discredited now.

And there is a growing number of people that say we never went to the moon.

And

I fear that in 20, 30, 40 years,

China or Russia will be the ones that were known to go to the moon.

And so I collect an awful lot of stuff, as you know.

Some of your stuff is in our collection.

And I wanted you to come on and A, talk about your experience on the moon, because it's amazing.

But then I also want to I want to hit you with some of the conspiracy theories.

And I'm not looking to,

I'm looking for a scientist's

answer to some of the things that are said because I think some of them are ridiculous and some of them I don't even understand.

I don't know.

So we'll go through those.

Okay.

First of all, Sputnik sitting behind you, that's one of the prototypes of Sputnik back there.

And 1957, that went into space.

How old were you?

I was in flight school.

Just started flight training at

Moultrie, Georgia, Spence Air Base.

And

it lifted off,

I think, on the 4th of October, which is the day after my birthday, and I turned 57,

that would have been, I was 22.

So

22 years old, the world changed.

This is the beginning of the space race.

You being a test pilot, what did that mean to you when Sputnik was...

Well, I wasn't a test pilot at the time.

I was just beginning flight training.

Okay.

And I was...

at Spence for six months, did well, sent me off to Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Texas for

not advance training, but got my wings there, then back to Moody.

And by

September of 58, I had my wings.

And

by the April of 59, I was ready to go to my first assignment, which was a fighter interceptor squadron in Ramstein, Germany.

So I was in Ramstein from 1959 until 1962.

And during that time,

1961, Uri Gergarn launched

the Americans.

Of course, Alan Shepard followed a couple of weeks later.

And a few weeks later, Kennedy announced the El Apollo program, which we all laughed at him.

You know, 15 minutes in space, and he's going to commit us to the moon in

eight and a half years.

But the remarkable thing about it, I look back now, was that

eight and a half years later, or eight years and two months later, I'm sitting in mission control talking to Neil Armstrong when he lands on the moon.

Because you were, what was it called?

Cap Capsule.

Capcom.

Yeah.

Capsule communicator, that stands for.

Right.

And so Neil Armstrong asked you to be Capcom and everything went through you, right?

Well, I didn't make the decisions.

The

flight director, but the

communications all went through me, yeah.

So you had to do it right.

You had to put it in

technical language that the crew understood.

And I had done the same job on Apollo 10,

and it was the same group of

flight controllers and director, Gene Krantz.

And so we just moved over.

They did.

And I wasn't supposed to be there because they had another crew.

But Neil said,

I'd like Charlie to do that for us since he'd had that experience.

So when they said

Houston, it would be your voice that would answer?

That's correct.

Yeah,

doing the descent.

You know, mission control shift work.

So there are different shifts.

So when they landed and we secured the spacecraft, our shift went off and another shift came on.

So Bruce McCandless was the flight,

was a Capcom when he actually stepped onto the moon.

Wow.

And

there was, I mean, landing it,

there was a lot of worry.

Didn't something happened.

What happened?

We were doing a good job until we started the engine on the descent and the wheels started coming off, if you will, that expression.

We had communication problems to start with.

And the mission rule was if you lose, if you lost communications for 30 seconds, you were going to abort the mission.

So we reoriented and got some new antennas pointed at the Earth and they came back.

Then the computer started overloading.

We were getting these 1201, 1202 alarms.

Which is what?

Well, it was a mean, the Apollo computer had a compute cycle at, let's say, 0.75 milliseconds.

And it queued up the jobs.

So the guide the spacecraft, direct the spacecraft, control the spacecraft.

And then below that was these accelerary jobs.

Well, if it got to the end of the

if it's compute cycle and it hadn't finished that queue, it would give you a warning, I'm overloaded, I'm flipping back to the top.

And so that was what it was.

So it wasn't a control of the spacecraft, it was just this we had it doing too much.

And one of the p reasons was the radar landing uh radar uh landing switch was I mean the radar rendezvous rendezvous radar was switch was on and it shouldn't have been on because it now the computer is trying to find what it's supposed to be looking at and anyway we went through that we were trained and Steve Ails and Jack Garmin knew what to do we were go and we kept having that situation Then at 7,000 feet, they pitched over and looked down and Neil says, we can't land here.

So he had to level off and fly across the surface of the moon for several miles till he found a suitable landing spot.

Well, that used up all our spare gas.

And so now we start down and now we're minimum fuel.

And we got to the call.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Beyond minimum fuel or minimum fuel

for takeoff to return back up.

Well, the ascent engine fuel is not used on descent.

It's just there.

And the engine's not used.

When I say minimum fuel, we had a minimum amount that we wanted to have when if we aborted, we'd still use the descent engine to start us on a positive trajectory away from the moon.

Then we would abort stage and light the ascent engine.

And

so that was what the, and the minimum was like, if I remember 4%.

And when we got to that 4%,

we called 60 seconds.

And 60 seconds meant he had another, at the present fuel, present engine power, he had 60 seconds before we would call an abort.

So we got to 30 seconds, and I said, Eagle, 30 seconds.

And you can imagine the tension in the room.

Oh, my gosh.

And so

about 13 seconds later, Neil reports, not Neil, but Buzz says, contact engine stop.

And they're on the moon.

And we just erupted with

the excitement and

and so we didn't have to get that abort call

I'm convinced that Neil had the final say

and if we were 20 feet off the ground and we called an abort he wouldn't have done it say again Houston

and he was gonna land at that point yeah because

they

they had kind of an unspoken

agreement, didn't they?

Yeah, well, he was in charge, and he could see the we just knew he was 20 feet above the moon.

And we didn't understand.

Everybody couldn't see the situation that he sees and Buzz sees out the windows.

And they're 20 feet off the ground, and they still got 5% fuel left or 4%, whatever it is.

You're not going to abort because of that.

And he's going to land at that point.

Did there come a time where they worried if they could get back up to the

capsule, right?

Yeah.

Get back up to the capsule and go back home?

No, that wasn't the ASEN, as I said earlier, the ASEN engine provided that propulsion.

And the fuel, it's not used at all.

during the descent stage, during the descent.

So you have full tanks, you have all electrical power, everything ready to go.

So if you had to abort

from the, once he landed and shut down that engine,

if there was a leak in a NASA engine tank, for instance,

we would have

aborted immediately and got them back into orbit.

So you were still Capcon when he said Houston the Eagle has landed?

That's correct, yeah.

And then you had a switch, you had a shift change?

No, we had a

it was later, about an hour later.

After they landed,

it was our job to make sure

the spacecraft was secure, safe, we could stay.

So we had a series of stay, no say decisions.

Stay, no stay.

And so one was like three or four minutes later, and we were stay.

Then as we got safer and safer and more secure with the status of the vehicle, finally after, I don't mean 30 minutes maybe

or a little bit more, we were saying, okay, we'll stay for

your stay.

And

then we changed shifts.

So

did you even know what the surface of the moon

really was like at the time?

We'd had surveyor land and several surveyors and they analyzed it and they could see it was basically very, very fine dust.

And we knew.

Can you describe that?

Because I hear the dust from the moon is unlike anything we've seen here on Earth.

Yeah, it's like talcum powder.

And

it's very

adhesive.

If you fall down, you get dusty and you can't get it off your suits.

And it's so your suit...

Our suits, after three days, turned from white to gray.

And mostly light gray, I should say.

So the dust was very, very fine.

And when you got it back in when you got back inside the spacecraft.

Vacuum it, right?

Didn't you have to vacuum it off?

We didn't have a vacuum for that.

We had a brush, but it didn't do any good.

And so we got back inside and we cleaned up as best we could, and

especially the seals where the holes be.

And then but we just decided that it wasn't going to,

it wasn't going to get, it wasn't going to hurt.

And so

we, and then we had some loose dust that we tracked in and I picked it up and it was very, it was not gritty at all.

It was very, very fine.

And it was very dry.

And what I think happens was it was so dry, it picked up the oils.

on your skin

and that gave it gave a

graphite feel to to it.

And he smelled it.

It smelled like gunpowder, but there's no organic material on the moon, so it's very strange.

At least that was my feeling.

That smell.

So

Neil and Buzz were on the moon for two hours?

No, they were...

On the surface?

Less than 24.

They were on the surface.

Yeah, walking around.

Yeah,

sure, two to four hours, something like that, yeah.

And when you went up, you were on the moon, on the surface for 20?

We were on the surface for 20 total of 72 hours on the moon.

But we divided that into three 24-hour periods.

And so we had an excursion, longest was like eight hours and every day.

And then we got back in on the last time and

got ready to lift off, kicked our backpacks out the door.

trash and didn't want to lift off with that stuff and and so uh we got ready to lift off and right on schedule we were off.

What is that like?

Lift off or what is that?

No,

walking on the moon.

Well, it was an adventure, of course.

And you felt right at home.

You recognized

the major features at your landing site that you'd studied from photographs and

simulations.

And so we had this feeling of belonging, but it was the excitement and the awe and the wonder.

I'm on the moon.

You could never get over that point.

Nobody's ever been here.

What is it like to be on the moon the first time you turned around and saw Earth rise?

Well, we didn't see Earth rise.

A day on the moon is

two weeks.

Oh, my.

So did you see the Earth

from the moon?

We were in the middle of the moon,

which put the Earth right overhead.

So in an Apollo suit, you look up and you look at the top of your helmet.

So we very rarely saw it.

We had a telescope, not a telescope, but a periscope on our antenna, and you could look through that and point it at the Earth and get it centered up.

And there you could see it.

But it was

occasionally I'd bend back like this and hold onto the car and look up and there it was.

It was beautiful.

Half Earth.

We were a half moon.

and blue and white.

It's just, there it is.

The rest of the sky was just black.

You can't see.

Why don't you see stars?

Because

the sun, basically it's the same as daylight here.

You don't see stars that they're there.

But because of the sunlight, you don't see the stars.

But at night,

you see the stars come out because there's no reflection from the moon, the sun.

Well, same on the moon.

So

the sun's always shining on you

when you're there.

And so you look out at the horizon and there's this very distinct horizon and you just look up and it's just black

except for the earth, which is, in our case, you couldn't see it really goodly.

So it was,

we didn't want to come home.

We have so much fun.

Oh, I bet.

I hear you try to do a set a record for a long jump and that didn't go so well.

Well, it was a high jump record.

High jump.

Yeah, it didn't go very well.

What happened?

Oh, well,

I went down here with all my equipment on.

I weighed 363 pounds up on the moon, 60 pounds.

Wow.

And so the backpack, the life support system, weighed as much as I did.

So I got a 150-pound pack on my back, and you got to, on the moon, you have to walk bending over to keep your center of gravity right.

So when I jumped, I straightened up and go up.

And when I did, that took my center of gravity backwards, and I I went over backwards and that was scary.

It was probably the only time I had fear in a whole time and

but fear is not a bad emotion if you don't panic.

And so I had this thought, roll right.

So I rolled to the right

and as I was going down it broke my fall on my right hand and my right leg and bounced onto my back and my heart was pounding.

Glenn, I'll tell you.

But I checked the pressure and it was well.

You could hear the pumps running and

the suit was good.

So

John Young walked over and ran over and looked down and said, that wasn't very smart, Charlie.

I said, you're all right, John.

Help me up.

Well, I was the first to try it.

Somebody had to try it.

So we and he'd been jumping too.

So

he...

probably set the record.

Let's say we set the record.

And when I got up and I was behind the rover, and I got up and looked at, and the TV camera on the car was pointed right at me.

And Mission Control was very, very upset with our moon walk.

I mean, my moon jump.

So that was the end of the Moon Olympics.

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Because it wasn't just

you, your property, really, your hope and despair.

If you do something stupid,

you kill yourself.

Really?

I learned a very valuable lesson.

Never do anything on...

in space that you haven't practiced on earth.

When you practice, you practice underwater, et cetera, et cetera.

Space station,

and we had one or two little exercises we did underwater, but

on the moon you got gravity.

So we did a lot of zero, we did a lot of 1.6 gravity training in the airplane where we'd do parabolas.

And they had a car, so we practiced getting in and out of the car, and we practiced doing this and that and the other, and then drilling our

doing experiments in 1.6 gravity.

So we didn't do much underwater stuff.

Were you a God-fearing man when you went out?

I claimed to be a Christian, but it was a mental accent and not a hard accent.

And so

I don't know

where I would have stood at that point.

I know I wasn't walking as a Christian.

I was going to church.

We were fateful church goers

since we got married.

But it was

later on after the moon flight.

I was 36 when I landed on the moon.

When Apollo was over, I was 37.

And the thought occurred to me, I'm 37 years old.

What am I going to do now with the rest of my life?

And I had no peace, and my marriage was falling apart.

And so things were pretty bad until 1975 when my wife became a believer after a faithful live weekend at our church.

And so she changed.

I watched her change sadness to joy in two months.

And it was real.

Two years later, I made that same decision.

And that began a healing in our family and a healing

in our marriage.

and saved our marriage, Jesus did.

And

so we've been walking with the Lord.

And I know now it's a hard day.

So that,

in 78, when I made that decision,

and Jesus came from my mind to my heart, I experienced peace.

And it was just incredible.

And I knew that, I knew that, I knew that I made the right decision.

So we've been walking with the Lord ever since.

And we have a Christian ministry called Duke Ministry for Christ that

helps with the finances, but it doesn't,

it's not a big organization.

So

we told the Lord, he said, if you keep giving us invitations, we'll keep going.

But we don't go advertise

for invitations.

So, Charlie, my dad was,

it might have been his 70th birthday.

And he told me when I was young that he was born in 1926, I think, 23 or 26.

And he said,

we never, we never even considered going to the moon.

That just wasn't even real.

He said, you know, that might have been later movie stuff, but nobody ever really thought about going to the moon.

And

one of his

biggest days was just watching

the moon landings.

And he never got over that.

And on his birthday,

it happened to coincide with a meeting that I was having with

Buzz Aldrin.

And so my dad and I went out to lunch with Buzz.

And

afterwards, he said,

I said, how was that, Dad?

He said, that was one of the saddest things I've ever experienced.

And I don't know Buzz, and I have so much respect for him, but

he said,

it's as if he never

could

find

something

bigger than the moon.

And I don't know how you would do that.

I mean, you go as a young man, you do something that, what, 12 people have done?

12 people have gone on the moon.

How did you get past?

I'm on the moon.

I was on the moon.

Well, it was like I said, it was no peace.

I just kept working at NASA for the.

So is that what you were feeling with the no peace?

Well, you know, what am I going to do now?

You know, how do you top a walk on the moon?

You don't.

It's like every party somebody says, you know, hey, just got back from France.

You win every time.

I walked on the moon.

Yeah.

So it was, you know, and working on a space station, not space station, but space shuttle wasn't the same.

NASA and Apollo was so dynamic.

The decisions were made

instantly.

If we had to change this spacecraft, this system,

you could convince the

spacecraft manager or the Apollo manager that this was necessary, bang, he did it, and it was done.

That's how he got to the moon in 10 years or eight.

But the space shuttle was,

well, we'll have another meeting next week or next month.

And we arguing on the coefficient of drag, and we argued over this and that and the other.

It just was boring to me.

So the dynamics of Apollo just faded away in those days in shuttle.

So when I left in 75,

early 76,

that was the state of shuttle.

And it was five more years before they got the shuttle flying.

And I look back now and I say, well, I wish I'd have stuck it out for another five years and flown the early shuttles, but that was past.

And so

even working on shuttle wasn't giving me that peace that I needed.

And

so basically I took my eyes off the moon and put them on money, saying, Well, maybe money is the answer.

Because we weren't, you know, astronauts don't make a lot of money.

Well, you make, if you're a colonel in the Air Force, you make what every other colonel in the Air Force makes or whatever.

So

anyway, I tried business, and

that was very successful, but I didn't have any peace until 1978 when

Jesus came.

And now

I see I can do whatever I do, and

I

hopefully bring glory to the Lord and whatever I do.

You know, back to your dad.

My dad was born in 1907, three years, four years after the Wright brothers.

And he watched his son walk on the moon.

Wow.

What an amazing time from 40 feet.

with the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in

70,

what would have been,

less than 60 years.

My father said that.

He said, son,

look what's happened in my lifetime.

He said, we went from no running water, no electricity, seeing the first car, the first motion picture, all the way to where we are.

This was about 2005, all the way to where we are today.

He said, never before has this ever happened like this.

And

he said, but we haven't grown as people.

We haven't grown philosophically.

We're still asking the same questions generation after generation and still coming up with the same answers.

He said,

where has the growth been?

That kind of dynamic growth in our spirituality.

You know, I see pockets of it around around the world as revival here and there.

But

it seems to me in our society today,

Christianity

is basically

too rule-oriented.

How can you possibly tell me what to do?

So people are rejecting it.

Fortunately, our families,

kids, grandkids are still pretty solid, but they're facing, our grandkids are facing an

onslaught of

negativity.

I can't imagine being a kid now.

Just raising my kids.

My youngest is now 17.

And

it's a different world.

It is a different world.

My grandkids now are youngest is

Libby's 14, and I've got a great-granddaughter that's a year old.

And

so we're doing a lot of praying for them, and that

they get it right, if you will.

And so I'm optimistic, but

sometimes you see what's all going on in the schools, and what they're teaching in the schools is totally crazy.

Especially with this new thing about that it's not about merit.

I don't know, if I'm going to the moon, I want to know that everyone behind me

earned that position because they were the best mind we could possibly find.

And we're not doing that now.

And

that doesn't put a man on the moon.

No, but

I see a lot of

in the astronaut corps and the people working on the program have a lot of dedication.

That doesn't bother me.

It's just the

things I see in our kids that are facing in high school, you know,

that gender stuff and

all of this stuff that's

biblically unsound.

And so

it's crazy to me.

And so

we got to pray for them.

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Something I've struggled with a lot lot is Operation Paperclip.

And you knew Wernher von Braun.

I think if it wasn't for Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun, we may not have been able to go to the moon.

It was man in space that Walt Disney did with Wernher von Braun that first lit the imagination of,

yeah, we can put a man in space.

And he had a huge part of it.

But as I read read about Werner von Braunen, I don't know what to believe.

I don't know what to believe.

There are some that say he absolutely had to have known what was going on in his own camp when he was over in Germany.

You knew him personally.

So let me separate you first from what you personally know about him.

And just say, because we brought hundreds of scientists over here, medical professionals.

Did we do the right thing after World War I

by saying their knowledge

beats the character or what they were doing for that knowledge?

Well, you mean World War II.

I'm sorry, yeah, World War II.

Yeah, sorry.

Those,

as I can see, they had a job.

They were knowledgeable, all of the scientists that worked on the V-2 and the German rocket program.

And

I think they

said, you're going to work on this program whether you like it or not.

And that was just the way Germany, these people were commanded.

And so I think when the war was winding down and von Braun

was convinced he didn't want to go to Russia because he saw what

they were like.

So he knew that the U.S.

was a better choice.

And they came to the U.S.

and the Army put them to work in the Missile Command.

And

I think their allegiance to the U.S.

was always

good.

And they changed over, and they were...

They were very

the ones I met of his upper echelon, Kurt Deebus and

Struhole and the others at Marshall that worked for Von Vaughan were outstanding citizens and they loved America and they loved the space program and they wanted to

commit to

the

once NASA was formed to the peaceful exploration of space.

Prior to that, they were working for the Army Missile Command.

But providing us expertise because

those missiles were being developed anyway, and so why not take advantage of the knowledge they had?

What did you do with, how did you know him?

Well, Stu Russa, in the astronaut office, when we first got there, everybody was assigned sort of an additional duty.

You monitor the spacecraft development.

You monitor the lunar module development.

You monitor the Saturns.

So Stu Rusa and I got put on a

that was our job and was to go and monitor the development of the Saturn rocket and then report back to the astronaut office.

And so monthly we would fly to

Huntsville, Alabama at the Marshall Space Fight Center and attend Werner von Braun's monthly management meetings.

Wow.

And we just sit there and we didn't have any input into it, but he welcomed us in and we became friends.

And

I was very

impressed with his management ability and

his insight into knowledge of

the problems.

And they did a tremendous job with the Saturn V.

We never had a failure in a Saturn.

Not a catastrophic failure.

We maybe lost an engine.

I think only one engine was lost

in the Saturn V.

And is that because of Werner von Braun and his team?

Yeah.

And his team.

And

so

they developed this massive rocket

that was

until the

Space Launch System, SLS, is about to launch.

It's more powerful than the Saturn.

I mean,

it was a tremendous machine, and Vern Braun was behind it and his team and they did a fantastic job not only to

monitor the design and the changes but also to launch it.

Kurt Debus at Kennedy Space Center was one of Vern Braun's original team and they were responsible for the launches and did a fantastic job.

Why do we stop going to the moon besides disinterest?

I mean, it's such a...

It wasn't disinterest.

I think it was a

disinterest from the people, I think.

We got used to people going to the moon, it seems.

Yeah, well, that's true.

I mean, you know, Neil,

every second was covered by Walter Cronkite in the news.

And when we went,

ho-hum, you know, it was fifth landing on the moon, and

nobody's interested anymore.

I remember your launch.

We would remember it.

The launch would hit the papers.

The landing would hit the papers.

But, well, they were out again, and this time it all,

they were successful, but it was never on the TV.

And

so my family

was able to go to mission control into the VIP viewing room and sit behind the controllers and watch

us on the moon.

A funny thing happen that I found out later.

We were on the moon and I have a twin brother, an identical twin brother.

And he's,

we're up there on the moon and you could see us bouncing around on the moon.

Well the flight surgeon invited my brother's a doctor and invited him to come into mission control.

So the door opens and in he walks

and they said it was a showstopper.

Everybody looked and they looked at me.

Who is this?

I thought he was up there.

No, maybe that's the thing.

That's coming from Hollywood.

Yeah, maybe that might be the origin of one of the conspiracy theories.

When you hear people talk about conspiracy theories about that we never went,

how do you feel?

Well, I'm perplexed because the evidence is overwhelming.

If they would investigate the evidence that we have that we landed on the moon not once, but six times,

you can't deny all the evidence.

We have photographs from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that's taken pictures.

You can see the descent stage, you can see the car, you can see the experiments package it all on our landing site.

And every Apollo landing site

is documented.

And for 400,000 of people to keep it a secret for

50 years, it's pretty remarkable.

We faked it.

And I told one of the NBC

something,

I said, if we faked it, why did we fake it nine times?

You know, if you go fake something, do it once and shut up.

Right.

But we went nine times to the moon and landed six successfully.

And so with the equipment we left, the science that's come back, the rocks are totally different than the Earth rocks.

And

all of the evidence is we landed on the moon, there's no question.

Somebody said, and I don't even understand that, there's a radiation belt in between Earth and the moon, and they say you can't get through that that's a Van Allen belt it's high intensity radiation but you're going through it at 25,000 miles an hour so it's seconds you're through it's like an x-ray yeah mm-hmm so uh

it it was uh that that's that was no problem in Apollo you're you're

you're below in Earth orbit, you're below that, but when you leave for the moon, you accelerate to 25,000 miles an hour and then you're through those belts within minutes.

Were we concerned about that belt the first time we went through?

I don't remember any concern.

What they were concerned about was the radiation on the moon and

and if we had a solar flare, how would we protect the crew?

And

then

the big

not misunderstanding but the biggest

unknown was

you know if the moon is three billion years old it's been collecting dust for three billion years and will you sink into the dust

and a lot of the scientists thoughts that so we landed surveyor

to make sure we weren't going to sink out of sight when we landed.

And there was surveyor sitting right on the top of the moon.

And I mean, surface.

Well, I mean, it might be dust, but it's going to be compacted or something.

And it's true.

I shoveled, I had a shovel and I dug a trench

near where we landed and as the flight plan called for.

And I got down to, I could only get three feet.

But as I shoveled, it was still dust.

But it had a great bearing strength.

It was actually pulverized rock, and when you analyze, look at it on a microscope, it's jagged.

And interlocks.

Yeah, it interlocks.

And so you step on it.

We never made footprints deeper than maybe

an inch or two inches at the most.

So I've heard two things on that.

I've heard that the footprints, you don't make footprints on the moon.

You don't make footprints in the moon.

I don't know who these people are that come up with this or what they're using, but you can make footprints in the moon.

And then I've also heard that the footprints aren't deep enough.

Well,

they

they would

it depended on your weight, I guess.

If you weighed 500 pounds, you know, you're going to make a deeper footprint than I do at 300 pounds in my suit.

But you always left your footprints.

And we drove the car,

Glenn, and we never worried about getting lost on the moon because the tracks were always there.

You just did a return and follow your tracks back.

And so you can see that.

You can see the tracks in the photographs from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

And

so it's

evidence is overwhelming.

What do you didn't we leave

like a measuring mirror or something on the moon?

It was a

yeah, now you got me a mental blank on that.

it was a

reflector.

Right.

And you could beam a laser on and get a reflection from this object.

We didn't leave one on our flight, but several before did.

Can you still hit it with the?

Yeah, they can still hit it with

the lasers.

That would seem to be kind of important.

I think it was 14, two before yours, that

left an altar on the moon with the lunar Bible on it.

Is that correct?

No, it was supposed to be on 13.

Right.

Yeah, and it was microfilmed.

And when the first 13 brought it back, they put it on 14 and they left it there.

Right.

And some of it was

one or two copies were brought back, and it's been distributed around the world.

Yeah.

Because we had

Jim Irwin on Apollo

15.

After he got back,

he

became an evangelist and had High Flight Foundation, Colorado Springs.

And he quoted scripture on the moon.

And Buzz Aldrin had communion, Christian communion on the moon.

And then Apollo 8 quoted.

from Genesis on that first TV back of the earth.

So there was some spiritual input, but I didn't never had any, I didn't feel like I had a time

to

philosophy or to

laughter.

Yeah, it was to laughter.

Yeah.

And so it was, I was busy

the whole time with focused on the

on the procedures and the you got to get this job done, you know?

Yeah.

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One of the things that people say, I'm just going through the conspiracies because I want you to leave record.

Moon landing hoax conspiracy theories.

Who shot the footage?

He's walking out on the one giant leap for mankind.

He had a TV camera.

Where?

It was in the, as he walked down, as he walked down the lamb,

he pulled a handle that deployed what was called a MESA, the modular equipment assembly, modular equipment storage assembly, storage area, or whatever it was.

And in that was a camera.

And so when that came down, they flipped it on and the camera was pointed right at the landing.

And so as he came down the ladder, this camera was taking his picture.

It's a TV camera.

It's grainy, but it was in that assembly.

And then once we got off,

they took the camera and put it on a little tripod, if I remember, but on our flights, when we had the car,

we had a camera

in the same area and we deployed the car and then I took the camera and stuck it on the car.

So

as we drove,

we took pictures ourselves.

because the TV, the antenna was going like this as she bounced across the moon and it couldn't point it at the earth.

So when we stopped, we pointed the antenna at the earth, turned on the TV,

and then they controlled it from mission control.

There's a guy sat there,

he could change the focus, he could change

everything.

He could tilt and move it around, and we just turned it on and they took all the pictures.

People say the flag is a dead giveaway because it's waving, and

there's no way a flag is waving.

Well, the flag was vacuum-packed, Glenn, for six months.

And when I unfolded it, I couldn't get the wrinkles out, and they didn't give me an iron.

So I pulled on the flag and got most of the wrinkles out and stuck it up.

It looks like it's waving, but it's not.

And I took a picture.

Once we got the flag up, I took a picture and then 72 hours later, I took another picture in the same wrinkles

the same waviness and it's held out by a curtain rod or aluminum rod and so it's all of these things that they say like this are just easily explained but nobody wants to believe it they they got this thing you know

And now the Earth's flat, you know, and all that stuff.

I can't believe that.

Me either.

People are saying that.

How do you feel about

the mission to Mars?

Not the government, but now all these private companies.

I'm all for it.

I think that was one of the greatest things that

as

a giant leap, if you will,

for the space program was

SpaceXs and Blue Origins and all getting involved.

You know, NASA never made a thing.

We always put a proposal out.

We need a lunar module, we want it to do this and that and the other.

And so we hired the companies that built it for us, Grumman and North American Rockwell and Rocketdyne and all of the people that were manufacturers and we gave them contracts.

And so we ended up with a spacecraft.

What happened with SpaceX and Blue Origin, they came to NASA and said, this is what we got.

You want to buy it?

And NASA says, yeah,

we'll buy that and we'll buy this.

And they're really good at making changes and low overhead.

And NASA said, basically, it's giving them

three or four of them

big contracts to...

So SpaceX has been the most successful.

Blue Origins coming along.

And then another one with Boeing

to help.

So NASA gave them the seed money.

I mean, they put their money in and developed what they thought was going to be the future.

And sure enough,

I heard somebody say just a couple of weeks ago, there was a launch of Tesla and it blew up.

And

the immediate response was, really?

We went to space.

We could do this in the 60s, but we can't get it right with today's technology.

And my first thought was,

it's not easy, or everyone everyone would do it.

Why does it seem that we have

we're not using,

it seems like, we're not using the technology that, like the Saturn V rocket that we know works and is dependable.

What's the difference?

New rockets and new designs

are

can be difficult.

And so this big one that blew up at Boca Chiga

in Texas was

just a failure.

But they have had tremendous success.

SpaceX has launched astronauts in their SpaceX capsules, and they've even recovered the booster.

That's incredible, isn't it?

And so the technology is a lot farther along than we did.

I mean, we threw everything away.

as we used it in Apollo, you know, first stage, and it came back in and some have survived.

I think

Bezos found five of the Saturn V S-1 engines 12,000 feet down on

and

they've been restored and

debarnaclized or whatever you want to call it by

Space and Rocket.

No, not Space and Rocket Center, the Cosmosphere out in Hutchinson, Kansas.

They're tremendous

restorers of space artifacts.

Do you believe in

UFO's alien life?

No, I don't believe in alien life.

I believe that

there are, God showed me a specific answer to two prayers, that they're demonic and that they're

demonic beings that make an appearance

and appear to be real, and they are real.

The Bible says angel,

Satan can appear as an angel of light.

So

they can appear, and so

nothing human can make a 90-degree turn at 3,000 miles an hour and survive.

And so they have these, and I think the purpose is to draw you away from

the real

God and say, look at us, and this this is where you ought to be, because we are superhuman, and we can do it.

So that's my fear.

People laugh at me generally, but I'm not going to be,

I don't care.

I love you.

I love you.

Yeah, God is,

he's answered prayers,

my prayers specifically.

And so I said, and I get laughed at when people say, well, that's what God told me.

So I'm going to be, say that they're demonic beings, and there's not any

extraterrestrial.

I mean,

super, not superhuman, but

other civilizations out there that are farther away from us.

It's a distraction from

God.

Last question.

I don't understand.

I've been trying to get a spacesuit, an American spacesuit.

I want to keep it in the museum.

I could buy a Russian spacesuit.

I could buy a Chinese space.

I could buy a dozen of those.

I cannot buy an American spacesuit

for any price

from any time period.

Why?

I don't know.

I can't answer that question.

My flight suit ended up in the South Carolina State Museum.

Your flight suit.

I mean, your...

No, no, my helm, my

suit I wore on the moon.

Yeah.

It's in private hands.

No.

No.

It was in the South Carolina State Museum.

It was on loan from NASA.

But then NASA took them all back.

And they're now...

Why?

Because they were deteriorating, and they were historic artifacts.

And so we're going to put them in a nitrogen environment and we're going to keep them

forever.

But nobody gets to see them.

To me, it's crazy.

The things that were deteriorating is not the exterior, it was just the

inner pieces, the rubber and all of that stuff.

So anyway, they took it back and now they're all at the Smithsonian.

But I think you can, I've seen

suits that are what I would call

training suits

from Apollo.

I'm just looking for things that have actually been to space.

Well, that might,

that's difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you can,

I've got things, and we were able to keep,

which after a big fight, we were able to keep some artifacts that we brought back from the moon, but there's nothing like a spacesuit that we.

What'd you bring back from the moon?

Well, we had some of the stuff that we used on the lunar surface,

the shovels, the rakes,

those kind of things.

And then you could, once the spacecraft was used up in the lunar module, you could take the netting awry off of it and some of the checklists and stuff like that that we'd used.

And we just brought it back with us.

Not only did we use it to help debrief

the missions, but then

we were able to keep that.

But it turned out Congress finally, there was a big debate well it's the government property but Congress finally passed a law that says all the Apollo artifacts or that were brought back or the the that are in the hand private hands the

the astronauts have the authority to keep them so

and

and when you go yeah they'll probably take them back

Charlie thank you very much thank you very much Glenn it's been enjoyed being with you likewise Respect you a lot.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Likewise.

Thank you.

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