The Infinite Moonkey Cage

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Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

Welcome to a special extended edition of the Infinite Moon Key Cage because Radio 4 insists on a pun if it is available.

This is recorded on the 16th of July at Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Now, 50 years ago today, this beach, just a few miles from Kennedy Space Centre, was packed with thousands of people as they watched Apollo 11 lift off on its journey to the moon.

Joining us to look back on the Apollo program and to discuss the meaning of Apollo 50 years on for our future in space and indeed for our future here on Earth, we have a distinguished panel and they are.

I'm Jerry Griffin.

I was a flight director on Apollo 11 and Mission Control in Houston and

At Tower Clear, when the base of the rocket cleared the top of the umbilical tower here at the Cape, we assumed control in Houston.

But we were with them every minute here during the countdown and exciting day.

And I can't believe it was 50 years ago.

And I'm Rusty Schweikart.

I was the Apollo 9 lunar module pilot.

Apollo 9 was the first flight of the lunar module, the third flight in the Apollo series.

I got the incredible privilege of not only checking out the lunar module itself, but also I was the first one to fly with the new Apollo spacesuit and go outside with it on a spacewalk or an EVA.

And I also had the backpack on, which made me an independent spacecraft, really.

I had all of my life support and everything on my back,

which was obviously necessary on subsequent missions so that my friends and neighbors could run around on the surface of the moon without dragging an umbilical cord from the lunar module all the way across the surface.

So, I'm the Apollo 9 lunar module pilot, and we'll get into some of that and what it all meant in a bit.

I'm Jan Aldrin,

daughter of Buzz, light year.

Oh, I'm Andy Aldrin.

Jan's my sister, so I guess that means Buzz is my dad.

And I was just watching on TV.

And this is our panel.

We're going to start off because this is going out initially on Saturday morning on Radio 4, we still have to do a newspaper review.

So I've got the Daily Telegraph first of all from Monday, the 21st July, 1969.

They lead with America's first men on the moon, Eagle touchdown on Ash Grain terrain.

It's also the day that the show jumping chief resigns, but people don't remember that as well.

The Daily Mirror leads with Man on the Moon and the message from Earth.

We're breathing again.

And its page three angle is: It's good country for golf.

You could drive a ball 2,000 feet.

Verdict on the moon by Spaceman Neil.

So they're very much playing to the golfing audience there.

And the Daily Mail, they lead with Man on the Moon, but on page two, of course, they deal with other big issues such as woman in the supermarket.

Or would you go shopping if your husband was about to land on the moon?

Some women knit in times of tension.

Others do the washing.

Mrs.

Joan Aldrin, wife of Moon Man Buzz, goes shopping.

After all, when there are three children to feed, the cooking still has to be done, even if your thoughts are 250,000 miles away.

Some things are unchanging.

So

going over to you, first of all, Jackie.

Well, that's, apart from obviously your trip to the supermarket, which I imagine is a very strong memory arguing for Cheerios or Lucky Charms.

What were your memories of just that day, the build-up throughout that day?

Of the day of the landing.

Well, it was at night.

It was very exciting because we were permitted to stay up quite late and we normally had to to go to bed at like 9.30 or something.

So I think I was in my pajamas, you know, not when they landed, but maybe when they were walking.

Sitting in front of our,

we had one of the first color TVs in the community.

Our 26-inch, I guess, RCA.

It was an RCA.

Yeah, I don't know.

Anyway, yeah, we're just sitting there watching this crazy, grainy picture that, you know, I was like, wait a minute, we have a color TV.

Why isn't it color?

You know?

so yeah it was it was very exciting I have to give kudos to my mother she protected us from feeling any trepidation or fear about that anything could go wrong we were brought up in that community so everybody all of our friends were in the program in some way they were either support or they were actual astronauts all around us so we never thought that anything could go wrong and it wasn't a fearful time for us as kids at all

rusty you were you were there weren't weren't you?

The official.

The astronauts who were not flying at the moment almost always took turns visiting the homes of

the guys who were up so that if any unusual thing happened or if there were was terminology used

in the broadcast and there was curiosity, what does that mean or what's going on there, we could easily answer it.

So, I was over at Buzz's house with Andy and Jan and

their mom, and I guess probably your grandfather, and I'm not sure who else was there at the time.

I actually just saw a picture, and I found out who was in the room.

Oh, and remember, I showed it to you.

Right.

We didn't know.

There was two gentlemen sitting on the floor, and nobody can figure out who they are.

Maybe you can, but I know Lerton Scott was there.

So, yeah.

Yeah, so that was

fun to be

with Buzz's family at the time to be there for the walk.

And you have no special feed or anything.

You're just watching the television pictures with everybody else.

Well,

the families also had a squawk box, what we call the squawk box, which was connected directly to mission control.

So you could also hear the voice coming in and the conversation back and forth that way, in addition to anything that came directly across on TV live, yeah.

I still love the fact that the TV industry managed to really up the the sales of colour television for something that was broadcast in black and white.

That is a great moment of capitalism in action, isn't it?

Do you remember, I mean, this morning I walked out onto the beach and just looked across where Saturn V, where it would have all begun on this particular day we were recording.

Do you remember that sensation as well, of actually that moment when your dad was leaving the Earth?

Well, yeah, but we weren't there.

We were at home.

Russell, I don't think you were there for the launch, but

there's millions of people here.

There are 20 people in our room.

So it was a different crowd.

Mostly I was kind of torqued that we weren't at the launch.

And for 40 years, I carried this grudge with NASA that they wouldn't let us be at the launch.

And then maybe it's 45 years, because the last reunion, the kids were getting together, and we were all talking about it.

And I said, you know, it's really kind of...

Kind of annoys me that NASA wouldn't let us go to the launch.

I mean, I get it.

They don't want the kids there.

Something bad happens and all this kind of stuff.

And they said, no, it wasn't NASA.

It was our moms.

And so I thought, wow, that's that's actually kind of cool.

And then this year I just found out that actually the Armstrong kids did get to watch it on like a barge or something like that.

So I've got like a renewed respect for my mom, but I'm still kind of

torqued that we didn't get to watch it.

And Jerry, you would have missed all launches then, because you were in Houston for everyone.

Yeah, I was in Houston.

I didn't get to see a Saturn V launch in Apollo.

I actually got to see the Skylab launch later.

Boy, what a thrill that was.

And,

you know, in Houston,

it was

a neat day when they launched and when they landed.

We had been out to the moon twice already, once on Apollo 8 with just, you know,

the command module in orbit.

And then on Apollo 10, right before 11,

we did everything but land.

And so we had a kind of a dress rehearsal on 10.

But I can tell you, the day we launched Apollo 11 down here,

the feeling in mission control was different.

It wasn't, nobody was talking about it.

Nobody was scared or anything like that.

It was just that we knew we were going to try to go all the way this time.

Yeah, and it was

actually meeting the Kennedy goal or not.

Yeah, or not.

Yeah.

But

we were all so young that, you know, we didn't think about things like that too.

Just get it done.

Right.

You know, do it.

Yeah, what was the average age in mission control?

It was below 30, wasn't it?

Yeah,

we actually calculated it pretty closely at the end of the Gemini program.

We were about 27.

By the time we got to Apollo 11, we were closer to

probably 29.

I was 33 years old, and

we had one flight director, Glenn Lunny, who was a year younger than I was.

And the oldest flight director was 37.

Yeah, I was 33 when I flew.

I think I was probably the youngest one, but nevertheless, I mean, yeah, we were a bunch of young people, and I think of the responsibility that we had,

and boy, was it fun.

It was.

It's the way we were wired.

I really think the people,

the astronauts, the guys in mission control,

and it was all guys in mission control

then, we liked the challenge.

That's what made it fun.

And

it wasn't easy, but it was not an ordeal for us.

We enjoyed it.

Did you find, I mean, I'm fascinated because having spoken to somebody,

you're thinking so much about the technology, you're thinking so much about the immediate requirements, and so emotion is in another place.

But did you find sometime afterwards there is this sudden surge of going, wow, we did that.

It's a separate part, which is once everything else is detached, once everything else is achieved.

You know,

I don't know about the crew, but I know in Michigan Hole,

When we finished 11, we jumped immediately into 12.

We didn't have a break.

And I didn't, I can tell you,

I didn't understand the historical impact it would have.

I knew we were doing something very unique, very important,

but sitting here 50 years looking back, I had no idea that we would be celebrating this the way we are right now.

I went to Jan and Andy, because you presumably grew up, your whole lives to that point would have been in this environment, from Gemini, I suppose, through Apollo.

So did you, was it entirely normal for you to be in this environment with these things happening?

Did you have a sense of history?

Absolutely, completely and totally normal.

I mean,

everybody's dad's an astronaut, right?

I mean, literally, our house was at the end of Occult-Asac, so it had a sort of pie-shaped lot, and there were five houses along the back.

Three of them were astronauts.

You couldn't swing a dead cat at our school without hitting an astronaut's kid.

And Jerry, I'm interested.

You mentioned in the introduction that there's this handover.

So just seconds after launch, the SASM V clears the tower and then over to you.

How is that handover moment?

Because I suppose you're tempted to, you're watching the launch, I suppose, and you're watching the monitoring it.

But you have to be ready on the second, just about what is it, six or seven seconds after launch?

Yeah, and of course we had, as I said, we we had followed the countdown

very detail.

And we were actually reporting before liftoff.

The flight director actually reported to the launch director here.

So

he asked Mission Control for a go-no-go for launch.

The flight director responded.

And

so when it came right down to the end and ignition occurred,

we normally didn't have a picture in the control center of that.

And the reason was we didn't want our guys staring at TV.

We wanted them looking at the data,

Which was true for most of the flight, except for the EVAs on the surface.

We put it up there.

Well anyway, what you're looking for is

the CAPE had an observer that was actually wanting to make sure that the rocket didn't drift into the Launch Umbilical Tower.

In fact, there was about a degree and a half or something like that offset that actually thrust it away from the tower.

And as soon as it got clear, there was a call made by the guy watching here at the Cape, tower clear, very loud.

And at that point, we knew then, up till then, if there had been an abort called, it would have been done by the launch director here at the Cape.

After that, any abort call coming from the ground would have been made by the flight director.

In Houston.

In Houston.

And at that point, the Cape's job was essentially over for the flight.

Of course, all that fire burns everything on the pad, and they have to go out and clean up.

And so their job wasn't over either.

But in terms of the mission, the flight itself, that's why you see them turned around in the firing room.

If you look at pictures, they're turned around looking, watching

the rocket go out that big window.

Because that job is their job.

Now it was our job in Houston.

Yeah, then they're observers, you know, they're fans.

But the thing that a lot of people don't get,

Brian and Robin, is that what Jerry just described

has gone on for a year before, six months to a year before, with the crews themselves, probably hundreds of times.

I mean, we do so many launch simulations.

And

one of the really pleasant and sometimes even surprising things about the actual launch is that nothing's gone wrong.

I mean, you've had almost no launch up until that time where things have gone right.

So in every simulation.

Yeah, every simulation they're trying to kill you.

We called the simulation supervisor, he had a call sign called Sim Tzu.

that we he was diabolical.

You know, he could throw in failures and we would have to board or make a decision not to and all that.

And it was a little bit like a marathon runner running on a beach with combat boots on and then taking them off for a flight and getting on a hard surface.

It was easier.

The flights were mostly easier than the simulations.

Oh, always easier.

Could you...

Well, not quite.

Apollo 12 was a real challenge.

Yeah, that was good.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

I have to.

Sorry, that was an out of the blue.

I better say something.

I was on duty for that one.

I was the flight director.

Yeah, well, you know,

lightning strike.

yeah.

Anyway.

Well, but no, we ought to tell.

We're talking about.

Apollo 12 went off and it went up into a cloud and there was some electricity in the cloud, you know, it was some motion in it.

And the result was that they went up into a cloud, disappeared, and then what all of us down here at the Cape saw was this lightning bolt coming down out of the cloud and hitting the launch pad where they had just left.

And it was pretty obvious to anybody that the other end of that lightning bolt had to be them, you know, and it was.

And essentially, what it did, that incredible pulse of lightning inside the spacecraft, knocked everything offline.

I mean, every warning light and master alarm and indication went totally fluey to the point where it was like this was the worst possible simulation in the world, right?

Everybody thought we were going to have to abort.

Yeah, everybody thought we were going to have to abort.

Well, luckily, the launch vehicle, you know, the rocket itself had independent guidance information and everything else, and it had no effect at all.

So it was doing its happy job, you know.

It was primary.

And the spacecraft was secondary.

But Jerry and the crew on board Apollo 12 were trying to figure out, you know, flipping switches, whoa, do this, try that, you know?

And he finally got it right.

But before that happened,

You have to understand the crew, which was Pete Conrad.

Yeah, Pete Conrad and Al being.

Al is over in the right seat where I sat during the launch, you know, and he's got all the electrical system and everything in front of him, trying to figure out what in the hell is going on here.

And finally, Pete, who you had to know to understand, started laughing.

I mean, literally, it was so completely ridiculous.

It was like Sim's soup went nuts, you know.

And so the whole crew, after a while, just started laughing.

It was so ridiculous.

And of course, the launch vehicle was still doing its thing, and everything was fine.

And finally, these guys figured out what to do.

Yeah, and it's funny that the guy that

made the call, finally, it was John Aaron who made the call on one switch that made the difference.

See, we had no data in Houston either.

But I mean, we could have easily aborted that mission right there, you know, for no reason, as it turned out.

And it was my first time as the lead flight director, which really,

I was worrying about that

You know, I once, this won't get broadcast, but I once spoke to Al Bean about that, and I said to him, What were you thinking?

And he said, We thought, we're going to the moon.

Right.

I've realised I definitely do not have the nerves to work for NASA.

I just listen to it, and the adrenaline I can feel just thinking of these.

Right, I think we're going to make the right decision.

Let's say that just to me is such a remarkable part.

But listen, it's interesting.

I wanted to ask you both, Jan, and were you aware, were you asking those questions?

There was no sense of fear instilled in us from our parents that anything could go wrong.

And then

when things did go wrong, you know, in Apollo 13,

I honestly didn't know about Apollo 12.

I knew that there was one launch where there was lightning strike, but I didn't know which one it was.

So now I know.

So I learned something.

But Apollo 13 was...

really scary.

I just could tell that the tension was really, really high with my mother and all the the people that were gathered in our house and at various other aspects you know at the levels and everything

but honestly you know when you're a kid you just don't have that sense of of failure you know that that you know that it's an option so to speak But I'll tell you, when the Challenger accident happened, I was

working as an executive for a department store, and they made an announcement.

I was in in a meeting.

I was so overwhelmed emotionally with that, I had to leave the room.

I just, you know, and so it's like all of that tension for all those years just kind of

descended on me.

And I, you know, it was like I had to literally like cry it out for quite a bit.

It was so disturbing.

So I think if it's just the difference in age, you know, I think that's a lot of it.

And the way we were insulated, you know, by our parents.

Andy, in terms of that moment of a human being first standing on the moon, as you're watching that, what happened in the room?

Was you sitting there?

And I watched it again, and I just thought, this is such a

no other, you know, no human being's ever stood on an organic object beyond the planet Earth.

And so that, and that to me, every time I re-watch that moment, is remarkable.

And I just wondered, you know, that second.

I'm sure you remember the intimate details of it, right, Andy?

No, but I do remember the big stuff, right?

So I'm 11 years old, and there are,

I don't know, 600 million people watching on TV, but most importantly, you know, my 200 classmates, right?

And so dad's on the moon and

he's bouncing around.

And I know why he's bouncing around because we've talked about this

because he's just trying to figure out the best way to locomote.

on the moon.

But there's this cable going out to an instrument or something like that, and I'm absolutely convinced he's going to trip over the cable he's going to end up flat on his back like a bug in front of my 200 classmates right

so like the only salvation is the middle of the summer and maybe by September they'll forget this stuff but I mean these are the things that are going through an 11 year old's head that's just amazing again because you know in my head I'm imagining you're all leaping on the sofas and you're going dad's on the moon but you're actually there going I hope dad doesn't show us up while he's on the moon that isn't incredible That's a beautiful thing.

Get yourself in our shoes, right?

You got it?

Yeah.

We're focusing on what's important.

It's no different on board.

What you're thinking, I mean, I'm sitting in the right seat during launch, and the main thought that's going through my head, aside from sort of rehearsing, you know, the different abort mode things, the main thing you're thinking is, if this thing blows up or something, let it not be my fault.

I don't want to screw up.

That's the main thing.

It's like the night before a play.

I hope if somebody forgets their lines, it's not going to be me.

I wanted to ask you actually, because you're the only person here who's ridden flown that rocket.

And we were talking, actually, before the show, and everyone seems to have a different memory of what it felt like to launch on a Saturn V.

So what's your memory of those few seconds?

Yeah, it is interesting, Brian, that the memories that...

You know, I have my own story.

I've been asked a thousand times, you know, what it was like to fly.

But every once in a a while, I hear somebody else, you know, one of the other Apollo guys asked the question and answer, and I'm thinking, I didn't feel it that way.

I wouldn't go out.

What I remember, my memory of the Saturn V launch was that

right at the countdown as you get to zero or liftoff, first of all, you barely get off the ground.

I think it's like 1.1 G or something like that.

So you can't even, you hardly distinguish, you know, that you're literally off the ground.

But

there's a very, there's sort of a very solid, if you think of balancing a broom on your palm of your hand, you know, you're going to move your hand back and forth to keep the broom vertical.

And that's exactly what the engines at the bottom of the Saturn V are doing.

They're moving back and forth to keep the thing going vertical.

And you can kind of feel that, but it's a very solid.

sort of feeling.

It's like a well-done train, you know, you're in a sleeper car or something.

You can sort of of feel the motions, but it's not a rattle or anything like that.

So you feel that for the first eight or ten seconds or something like that as you're going up past the tower.

And the noise that you're hearing, and you can hear the pretty loud noise, is actually the rocket exhaust bouncing off the ground, the noise from it bouncing off the ground and coming externally up to the spacecraft at the top of the stack.

But again, as soon as you're above the launch tower, now you're talking hundreds of feet, rapidly going to thousands of feet, and the noise drops off to virtually zero, is my memory of it.

And then from there on, once you're 20 seconds into flight, my memory of it was it was very smooth until

staging,

you know, when all of a sudden, you know, you think about it, you got this hollow aluminum tube, which now is empty because you've used all the fuel, and you got seven million pounds of thrust on the bottom of it compressing it, and then they cut off the engines.

Well, all of a sudden that thing expands like six or eight inches or a foot or something like that, and you get thrown forward inside.

And Mike, or rather, Dave Scott and I had both loosened our shoulder straps because we wanted to have a little more mobility.

And so when the staging occurred, Dave and I went flying up to the instrument panel and we stopped about an inch from from it, you know.

And it was like, oh my God, we looked at each other.

It was like, we got to tell our buddies not to do that.

And then they measured, bam, yeah.

Jerry, could you give us a bit of a sense of a lot of people, I suppose, have seen some amount of narrative about what it is to be an astronaut, but to be a flight director, what is the, can you give us the starting point, for instance, when you said you went straight into Apollo 12?

You know, where does that start?

Where's the first meeting?

What is your responsibility from day one?

A flight director is like the conductor of a symphony.

You don't play the instruments anymore.

All of us did, had some other role until we were plucked out by a guy named Chris Kraft, who

said, I want you to be a flight director.

But I think the biggest thing you had to do is

you couldn't panic.

The whole room was was built that way.

The astronauts were that way as well.

You had to take everything that came to you and just deal with it and not get all bunched up about it.

We had very few,

I don't think I can remember anybody that got fired to leave the control center, but we had several guys that self-eliminated themselves.

It just was too much pressure for them.

And

so the flight director was the guy that really had to set the tone in the room as well.

And it was a super job.

I mean, it was fantastic.

I was 33 years old, you know, and you could move a carrier task force from one position to another to get under the

re-entry.

It was pretty heady stuff.

And

what a ball.

it was it was an honor to uh to do it let me mention one other thing the astronauts in mission control got a lot of the credit and and

probably deservedly so but we couldn't have done any of it without this giant amount of support we had underneath us we had the contractors that were manned during our flight so that if we needed them, somebody that built the spacecraft to run a test force, they would do it in an instant.

We had

engineering organizations

at not only in Houston, but the other centers here even at the Cape that monitored throughout.

And if we felt they could provide what we needed, we called on them.

So it was a huge effort.

I mean, it was not just the astronauts and the people you saw on TV in Mission Control.

It was a giant effort.

And I suppose as we're talking about this, it's worth remembering that this is all

10 years previously, nobody had flown in space at all.

So it's invented this whole structure from the ground up, from nothing, essentially, in

less than a decade,

which is a remarkable thing.

And I want to move on actually to the legacy of Apollo and the future.

As we do, looking back now, 50 years after Apollo 11, what do you think the most important

factor, I suppose,

the most important part of the Apollo effort was

I think the first thing to me that comes to mind, I think the legacy of Apollo is that it proves what you can do if you commit yourself to it

and don't take no for an answer.

This country did that.

Now we're doing it internationally,

I think, much,

and it's okay.

That's good.

But in that timeframe, the country committed to it.

We had a bold young president that set the goal.

And yeah, we were in the middle of a Cold War.

Frankly, in mission control, I can tell you, we didn't talk about the Soviet Union.

We were working toward Kennedy's goal.

That was our push.

And,

you know, it's kind of like a baseball team or a football team or something.

You don't worry about what the other guy's doing.

You worry about what you're doing.

Let's make sure we get our signal straight.

And so I really think the legacy is that it was a great, I think it'll be, it'll go down as the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century.

I think historians will one day put it in that category.

And some of them do already.

I really do think that

it was the fact, though, that you commit to do it and do it that

Apollo made Apollo happen.

Yeah, I've heard many people say actually that's Kennedy's political vision to give a very simple goal and the timeframe on it was used many times.

We had a Congress that worked together across the aisle too.

Yeah we all felt it

very strongly.

Brian,

I faced this question, anticipated your question, I guess I would say, last fall,

thinking ahead here to the 50th anniversary of Apollo coming up, and all of this stuff is just happening right now.

And I basically asked myself, you know, that very question.

What do I think is really important about Apollo?

And of course,

you know, no matter who you ask,

there are many different answers to it, and all of them are valid.

I mean, the Cold War race with the Soviet Union and all of that,

technology, advancing technology, a jobs program, science.

You know, there are 100 answers for 100 people.

But

what I thought about for me, because I happen to be kind of the big picture sort of and philosophy sort of person.

And so for me, looking at it from that perspective,

I got thinking, what really is the long-term picture of what it is we're doing here?

What's happening?

And actually my experience on Apollo 9 triggered that to a certain extent because I had five minutes when I was outside on the EVA when because of a camera failure I had nothing to do.

And one of the things that happened when I was out there and just said, okay, I want to be a human being for this five minutes, not an astronaut.

And so I'm looking at this incredible scene.

And, you know, one of the many questions that came in was,

what's really happening here?

How How did I get here?

What does this mean?

When I say I,

what do I mean when I say I?

Am I me or am I us?

You know, looking at life and the earth.

And so

I thought about that for a number of years.

And the result of that was that I began to see the whole process that we're involved in as cosmic birth.

as Mother Earth and we as kind of up until this time a fetus, you know, being nurtured by Mother Earth and but at the same time we're growing and demanding more resources and we're producing more and more waste and just like in a in a you know human birth

you know a 12-month pregnancy is pretty ugly you know you want at nine months mom can't provide it anymore and so it's time to be born and here we are Apollo 8 you know going out to the moon and looking back and seeing the earth and all of a sudden it's like wow

that beautiful earth is where all of life is.

That is mom.

And here we are on Apollo 8 looking back from outside the birth canal and seeing mom.

And if you think about life in general, it's after birth that you have a love relationship, not just a dependency relationship with mom.

And right behind this two-way love relationship for the first time, think environmental movement, for example, right behind that comes responsibility.

You know, like,

what is my role for,

you know, in this process going forward?

And you got to, you know, one of the things you got to do is take care of mom, you know, you know,

she everything to you when you're a kid, right?

So,

and ultimately, you learn to, that you have to depend, you have to grow on your own.

You know, so as we look forward, it seems to me that what we're talking about is

having left the Earth, not leaving it behind, but rather grown out beyond the Earth.

Mom will always be mom.

The Earth is always going to be home.

But at the same time, the future of humanity, future growth, as in all biology, is to continue growing and expanding and surviving.

We're going to do that using space resources.

I mean, this is Elon Musk and becoming a multi-planet species, etc.

So to me,

the real legacy of Apollo is that, and probably elsewhere in the universe, not just Earth, but

the universe evolved from the Big Bang up through atomic physics and then chemistry and then eventually biology.

That's a magic thing when biology came into being in the cosmos because up until that, I mean, I say physics and chemistry don't give a damn about anything.

They just are.

But biology wants to live, wants to survive.

That's really an amazing introduction in the evolution of the universe.

And here we are in our little corner of the universe, the manifestation of that.

And now our responsibility, because we're such powerful actors in this drama, is we're going to be shaping the future evolution of life in our little corner of the universe.

That's a hell of a responsibility.

So to me, that's what Apollo did.

Apollo

made us realize that's what's happening here, and this is our responsibility.

What's the, I just wanted to ask this to all of you, in terms of the significance of that Earthrise image, and many people have said they believe it's the most significant photo that has ever been taken by a human being.

What do we need now?

What do we need in terms of to reignite

that passion, as you said, the environmental movement, the whole Earth movement, all of those things?

Is there something that we can see?

Is there something that can summarize what is required of human beings for the ambition that you're talking about?

Something that can reignite that?

Well, I don't know that there's any single thing.

I think everybody has their own way to

exercise their sense of responsibility.

I mean, all of us can turn out the lights, you know, and stop using too much water and things like that.

And those are important,

frankly.

My own particular manifestation of it was to say, hey, look, one of the existential threats that we can do something about, that I can do something about, frankly, is to help prevent asteroid impacts.

Dinosaurs got wiped out.

You know, well, that can wipe us out too.

So that's, you know, that would end this great experiment.

So one of the things I can do is help develop a capability for the people of the Earth to prevent asteroid impacts in the future.

And when you stand back and and think about that, by the way, we can do that, you know, we can predict impacts and we can prevent them by deflecting asteroids.

When you think about what that means, humanity has the capability, and in my view, the responsibility to very slightly redesign the solar system to enhance life on Earth.

We can change the orbits of asteroids so that you know, we adjust the solar system itself a little bit to enhance long-term survival.

That's amazing when you think about it.

But everybody didn't have that opportunity, you know, but everybody can turn out the lights and do whatever else.

Do we need to send the politicians into space, the world leaders, and when they look back at Earth, if we feel that they haven't had the correct reaction, they keep going out.

Well, that's what I was thinking.

We can measure their emotional reaction and go, not good enough,

and they keep drifting off.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that

humans

are wired to think exploration.

Anything unknown

doesn't stay unknown too long.

People try to find the secret behind it.

I think the future depends...

Apollo was just a baby step.

a little teeny baby step to do what you're talking about, getting away from the Earth in a multi

environment of maybe there's other places to live.

Mars is still a baby step away.

But we've started the process.

And I think

somebody, some human, group of humans are going to explore interstellar space.

Don't know the time frame exactly, but it's going to happen.

And

if we don't do do it, we being

the countries that we all know

and work with closely, it'll be China or it'll be somewhere that somebody is going to take another step, which will also be a tiny baby step.

Yeah.

Even 10, you know, we're celebrating 50 years after this launch.

10,000 years from now, As long as we don't wipe ourselves out, our progeny 10,000 years from now are still going to remember this day that happened 50 years ago because that was when we first did it.

We first moved out from the planet for the very first time.

And that to me was, you know, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 specifically.

But, you know, in general, that was this moment that we're all living in history.

Was it Bill Anders on Apollo 8 that said we went to explore the moon and discover the Earth?

Discovered the Earth, right?

Jan,

that question about you've lived with this your whole life, essentially, with Apollo 11, I suppose.

So, what do you feel the legacy is today,

with particular

a view to how we move forward?

Well, I definitely think that if the funding hadn't stopped with Apollo, I mean, or slowed down so much, you know, we could have been to Mars a long time ago.

We had the technology to grow it and make it happen.

believe that

that's our first next baby step, as you guys said.

And it's certainly something that my father has championed, and then that's his mission, is to get us to Mars.

So that's the legacy.

And Andy, I know this is your field.

You're very active in the future of space exploration.

So

what's the legacy?

These are lots of really big questions, and I'm impressed with

Jerry and Rusty and the massively huge view that you guys have.

That's great.

So, to me, the legacy

is a whole bunch of the leaders of today

look back at Apollo and they say, this is what changed my life.

This is what made me do what I'm doing today.

I'm a little concerned that most of these leaders are sort of my age, or maybe a little bit younger, not a lot younger, but we're kind of running out of them.

And we need other things to inspire.

The other thing about Apollo 11 is it was a really unique moment in time, and I'm not sure you can recreate it.

I mean, remember, after Apollo, what happened?

The budgets got cut in half, and we barely scraped up the money to get the shuttle program limping along.

And

in some ways, what happened is

the normalization of space.

So space became a part of the overall sort of national, if you call it, governmental infrastructure, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

And I think very much what we need to be doing at some point we will have inspirational moments like perhaps the realization that we really do have to do something about planetary defense.

I mean, I think Russia is absolutely right.

That's kind of the crisis that will face us at some point in time.

And we will respond, not just as a nation, as a globe.

I really believe we'll respond.

But in the the meantime, you know, we've got to kind of lay the bricks and mortar of a foundation in space.

And I think it probably gets driven more by commerce than it does by governments.

And that's,

it's a challenging transition.

And when that happens, I think we need to be building things in space, whether we're building them in Earth orbit or we're building them using lunar resources.

That's sort sort of where we're going to build the foundation for space.

Because I think it was von Braun,

maybe it was Sielkovsky, I don't know, who said, you know, you get to Earth orbit and you're halfway to anywhere, which is not energetically exactly true, but it's pretty close.

And so

in the meantime, until the next great inspirational moment happens, we need to be building infrastructure.

We need to try and be sensible about it.

We need to be cooperative about it.

And that's not just other nations, but industry and government.

And do do all of the good smart stuff that we know we need to be doing.

It's very interesting that as you all speak this there seems to be there's a clash of ideas.

I suppose frontiers always produce a clash of ideas don't they?

But you're essentially saying that you have to normalize space, you have to commercialize it, as we have partly done as you said, weather satellites, communication satellites and so on.

But at the same time it also represents the ultimate inspiration.

and the ultimate philosophical challenge.

So, and I forget who it was.

I thought it was Arthur C.

Clarke, but I have not found the quotation, so I'm going to make it up anyway, and I hope somebody smarter than me actually

made this quote.

If it wasn't Arthur, it's going to be Andy.

If I try and take credit for this one, I'm going to get in so much trouble from somebody.

But anyway, the quote was something along the lines of: the Cold War created an artificial salient in space, led by governments.

At some point, commerce needs to fill in that salient, and otherwise it'll collapse.

And I think we're sort of in the midst of that process.

One of the really important things about commerce is you don't elect businesses, right?

And one of the challenges we face in the United States, in particular, is with every administration change, not necessarily, you can have a completely different program, specifically on the manned space side, human space flight side, but

we do suffer in any government, in any government program, from the sort of political tides.

Commerce doesn't have that.

I mean, there are indeed economic tides, but it's much more consistent.

And if we find a way to go to the moon and make money, we will continue being on the moon making money for as long as we can make money.

And so, you know, that's the stable foundation that Arthur C.

Clarke or Heinlein or someone was talking about, besides not Andy Aldrin.

That's where we need to get to.

What does that mean in terms of Mars?

Because Mars is the only other planet we can visit.

Right, it's the only other.

In terms of

it's not going to be a commercial effort.

You're not going to make money going to Mars or being on Mars.

Unless you can kind of conjure up this notion, I'm going to be on Mars, I'm going to mine asteroids, and I'm going to do this stuff, and it'd be a great base for my, I don't know, Rusty, maybe that works.

I just...

In the long run, I think it works.

How we get there, I mean, it's a little like making sausage, you know, you don't want to watch it necessarily.

You don't.

But you're going to get there, and people are going to enjoy the sausage.

I was going to say that the only thing,

I think Mars, besides the science value that you might get from it,

is going to be a learning.

It's going to be learning how to

move

in interstellar space and inhabit

and operate it.

from the mothership, from the mother planet

at that distance.

It's going to be a learning.

I think it's going to be almost like training

how to go into really deep space.

Jerry, you need to explain that because it's the speed of light that makes that such an interesting challenge and a learning experience.

Because

it takes a long while, depending on what the relationship between Earth and Mars, it varies.

But you're talking minutes between

a conversation.

So that whatever, whoever ends up at Mars has got to be much, much more self-sufficient than we've been in space up to this point.

John Young, I think I've got this quote right.

John Young said, you're a long way from a can of beans on Mars.

Didn't he also say on the first shuttle, though, we're not too far away from the stars when he landed.

Jan, I wanted to just ask you the same question, really, about this.

the future and this balance between inspiration and

I suppose the the inevitability that we're going to have to leave the planet and the shifting consciousness, as Rusty's talked about, that seeing the planet from space has given us.

What are your final thoughts?

Well, you know,

I have a son and

three grandchildren, all young boys under the age of seven.

And

I think about them and I look at how excited they were last night to be at the Atlantis and see that giant airplane, that's what they called it.

And I just dream for that generation to be the ones that

do the

interstellar travel and learn about the engineering, become all they can be, and then, you know,

reach for the stars.

That would be great.

Brian, I want to pick up on what our two aldrons said here.

I mean,

Andy mentioned the criticality of fuel,

and Jan just introduced three pieces of fuel, which are her

grandkids.

If you

all you have to do to appreciate

the existing fuel that's around today is to watch a SpaceX launch on SpaceX.com, and every time

something

successfully happens, you got a bunch of 20-somethings who have put this thing together yelling and screaming and hooting and hollering.

I mean, that's the way NASA used to be.

You watch that, there's the fuel that's going to send us onward and outward.

That is the great thing, I mean, about this anniversary is it's not just about looking back.

It is igniting ambition.

When you're mentioning fuel,

did Charles Lindbergh visit Apollo 8, the Apollo 8 crew, I think, might have been?

And he said, oh, I've just realized that in the first second of the launch, you used 10 times more fuel than I needed to go all the way to Paris.

And then I was thinking of something, Charlie Duke, when we had him on the show.

And he said to his father, who'd seen, you know, knew of the Wright brothers, he was alive when that happened.

He couldn't believe a human being would sound on the moon.

To his son, yeah, it was no big deal.

And hopefully, you know, in 50 years' time, there are going to be things that we have not imagined that we think that is beyond our imagination.

And the grandkids will go, yeah, that's just what happened.

That's cool.

Thank you very much to Jan Aldrin, Andy Aldrin, Jerry Griffin, and Rusty Schreikot for joining us here in this site.

And for Radio 4 listeners, the question I know they are still asking is: this is all well and good, but what did Juran Duran think about landing on the moon?

Fortunately,

Nick Rhodes and the rest of Juran Duran are attending the 50th anniversary gala, where they're going to be playing.

So we went backstage and asked Nick Rhodes about his memories of sitting down in his lounge in Birmingham and seeing that first moon landing.

Nick, what are your memories of the Apollo 11 moon landing?

Well, I was quite small and I was living in suburban Birmingham with my mum and dad and we were so excited about the

moon landing that my dad went out to buy our first colour television.

We had this quite nice big black and white TV and he came home very excitedly with a quite small screen, but it was colour.

And then of course the broadcast happened in black and white.

So,

absolutely no difference.

No, none whatsoever.

But

it was incredible, wasn't it?

It had taken over

the entire world, really.

I think it's one of the few events in my lifetime still that pulled everybody together and focused everybody on one thing.

I can't think of anything else, of course, as sporting events that do certain things, but nothing like that, like the moon landing.

Yeah, we just

just talking to Rusty Schweiger actually earlier, Pollo 9, and he said that Mike Collins had told him that everywhere he went in the world, people went up to him, so he was in, you know, in Europe and everywhere, South America, and ran up and said, We did it.

We did it.

So everybody felt part of it, for sure.

But

I don't know about the Russians, but I don't think they went.

I don't know if they did do it.

Did they do that?

I think the Russians were there already, but it's all been covered up by the CIA.

Yeah, do you not know?

Oh, sorry, that wasn't the question.

I'm I'm so sorry.

I went to a David Icke meeting and everything seems to have changed my mind since then.

I wanted to know about,

for a band whose, you know, name inspired by one of the great science fiction movies of the 1960s, Barbarella, obviously, you know, Bowie plays a part in that kind of musical growing up.

When does the Durand Duran fascination with science fiction turn into science fact, into you know, into space exploration?

Well, yeah, we

when we were kids, obviously the Apollo missions were the hugest thing.

And And the Bowie song Space Oddity, we were all enormous fans of David's,

and Starman had an enormous effect on all of us when we saw Bowie on Top of the Pops, too.

So if you add those things together and mix in a bit of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroda and

the whole punk rock movement, that's what we came out of.

And the space thing was still really important to us.

Our first single was Planet Earth,

which was certainly space-inspired.

And it's always been a theme within

our music.

The reunion album that we did

in 2003, I want to say, was called Astronaut.

So it never really goes away when you love science and space and exploration.

It's fascinating.

Who wouldn't love it?

And what do you remember about that time leading up to Apollo 11?

So, you know, Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve, 1968,

the first Earthrise photograph.

What do you remember about being at school and that atmosphere of excitement building?

I remember very little about NASA and the whole space program before the Apollo 11 mission.

I was really, really young.

I would have been seven.

And I got to stay and watch this thing.

And everybody was transfixed by it.

Everybody at school was talking about it.

It was the biggest thing that had happened in the world at that point.

I mean, the biggest single news story.

So you couldn't even escape it if you wanted to.

But I kept everything.

I've still got sort of the Sunday Times front cover from that weekend

when they published the photos.

I told you I wasn't the edge of order.

I just wondered, one of the great missions, after the Apollo missions, I think something that still caught some of the public imagination was Voyager and the golden record on Voyager.

And I wonder if I could say if there was a new, you know, I suppose now it would be a much simpler, just be a USB and it would have as many things on it.

What would you choose as your Duran song to send up to be the first

communication with extraterrestrials?

And what song of someone else?

Well, I think actually, it's the I'd have to say the song that we've sort of rearranged for the opening of the show tomorrow, because we've sort of got about a 40-minute space-themed part of the show at the beginning.

And it's opening with a song called The Universe Alone, which was on our last album.

But we've got a 40-piece choir and a 16-piece string section and 300 drones provided by wonderful artist Studio Drift.

And so I don't know, I think it should be quite epic.

And I'd like to deliver that up to say, hey, this is what we've got.

What do you got?

Match that.

Pardon me.

I know you've got to go and rehearse, haven't you?

But thank you.

It's a pleasure.

No, no, I mean

it got me out of getting up early tomorrow.

I got very worried about this because I thought, you know, Brian's going to see you.

He's going to want to play this.

It's going to be a classic all-about-eve moment where he gives you some kind of pill.

I'm looking too poorly.

Are there any keyboarders?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, he's quite handy, you know, he's quite handy.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thanks very much for listening.

We're back for a full series in the autumn.

Goodbye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

So now, Nice again.

Eagle Hits and you're a go for landing over.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

A story of breathtaking ambition.

I thought that he was a little premature on making an announcement just in 10 years since we hadn't even gone into orbit.

A story of incredible innovation.

I'm in charge of this stuff called software, but nobody knew what software was.

A story of amazing human endeavor.

It was the lack of fear.

It wasn't the lack of knowing it was risky, but just weren't afraid of it.

A story of triumph over adversity.

As they pitch over and see the moon for the first time, Neil said, We can't land here.

A story where we all know the ending.

That's one small step for man.

But not necessarily the beginning.

The dramatic story of the Apollo moon landings in a podcast from the BBC World Service.

We're about to do something that nobody has ever done.

Told by the people who made it happen.

We were able to do this impossible thing.

That's 13 Minutes to the Moon.

We did it.

We did it.

Just search for 13 Minutes to the Moon wherever you found this podcast.

The Eagle has landed.

landed.

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