![]() The Air Force already had somebody in mind and so I decided to retire, and I was left, for the first time, with a very unstructured life, and frankly, things began to come apart. My inclination was to return back to the Air Force that I came from and be the commander of the cadets at the Air Force Academy. All three of us decided not to participate in the crew rotation after Apollo 11. Well, that was the unattractive portion of being on the first landing. Well, what happened then when that capsule came back to Earth and splashed down in the ocean and you guys were picked up and taken around to great parades and great celebrations and then some time passed? What happened then, when it quieted down for you? ![]() You can do some silly, clumsy things if you're daydreaming, or thinking of things premature. We were obsessed with doing the best that we possibly could so that we wouldn't be premature, celebrating, jumping up and down, and while doing that, trip over the wire that goes out to the TV camera that's recording all that we're doing. Neil didn't even think of the words he was going to say on stepping on the moon until we were well into the mission. Why would we be doing that before we go there? You just get over-awed, you set up a series of expectations, and you're bound to get disappointed one way or the other. You weren't thinking about it as history at that point? We were rather confident that unless something went wrong that we hadn't trained on, that we'd be able to carry out the mission, but we were just not positioning ourselves as a point in history. Feeling that in some ways, all of human progress was pointing to that moment and it was going to fall down to you and Neil Armstrong to take the next step. That summary of human history, that must have been quite an awesome thing to have on your mind in the few years before the Apollo 11 mission. And as a result of that challenge, two guys managed to walk on the surface. What a bodacious challenge confronting people on the surface of the Earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |