.. count on to help out with the print costs. >> craig o'hara. >> july 20th 2009 marks the 40th anniversary to the apollo mission to the moon. craig nelson talks about the first moon landing and the people who accomplished it. it's 50 minutes.

>> not only is it a dream for going to the library of congress and working with documents but it's a dream with the warm welcome you get when you come back -- when you come out of the caves of research and your book is actually on the shelves. so it's fantastic to be here. four years ago i realized the apollo 11 anniversary was coming up and i grew up in houston around the corner from the astronauts, and i was an eagle scout at the national jamboree when neil armstrong said hi to us. i said i want to read the book of the big history book that tells you everything about it that explains the science and takes you behind the scenes and shows what happens. and i went out and although there are an incredible number of wonderful books and fantastic archives and great magazine articles and things like that,

no one had really pulled all of this material together into one coherent book and i decided that's what i would do and about a couple of years into doing this i went to kennedy space center to see a shuttle launch from the same launch pad that apollo 11 used and any of you who haven't been, run. you have got to see a launch at kennedy. it is one of the most incredible things you will ever experience in your life. you get to see ways of vibration coming around you. you sees clouds around the rocket thinking something terrible has happened and this roar greets your ear. there's a difference what you see and what you hear. anyway, while i was there i was having a pretty tough time both with this book and in my personal life and i was wandering around kennedy and i saw this strange little place here at kennedy and i said well,

what is that? they said that's launch complex 34. i said well, what's launch complex 34? well, that's what the apollo 1 fire where three astronauts lost their lives and we've left the ruins of this as a memorial to them. when you go up closer to this you can see they have a black and on this plaque is a little latin phrase that said. [speaking latin] >> which translates a rough path leads to the stars. everything that was going on with this book and everything that was going on in my life at that moment and i just couldn't believe it because the thing that really shocked me in researching this book was how tremendously difficult how dangerous, how unbelievably dangerous it was. so to illustrate this, i would like to talk about three times that we know while one guy

almost got killed and his name is neil armstrong. the first time mr. armstrong almost died was when he was working for nasa when it was still called the nasa. and he was still out in the antelope valley valley in california and you heard all about this. this is where chuck jager broke the sound barrier and neil was flying an arm and he was working with a lot of other people. in this moment he is copiloting that b29 up there and they are faring another pilot in that skyrocket down below. in this picture the skyrocket has already been released. at the time i'm talking the skyrocket is still attached to that b29. and armstrong and his copilot noticed that one of the propellers is going wonky. now, for those of you who don't fly, it's very upsetting to a plight when a propeller starts going wonky because if the propeller comes loose it becomes a flying chainsaw and the pilots

told this guy that he had to be jettison and the guy said you can't jettison me i'm having valve problems and they said we're really sorry you're going down and they jettisoned him and right after they did that propeller came loose and came into this flying chainsaw and first it sliced right through the bay where that skyrocket was sitting and then it sliced right through two of the other four engines so the skyrocket had to come down with valve problems. this giant b29 had to land on one engine and everyone made it home okay. the second time armstrong very nearly died while working at nasa was on his catastrophic gemini 8 mission where because of the way they decided to go to the moon, astronauts had to learn how to rendezvous and dock in space and they tried to dock and rhonda view and dock and they failed. this was the first time they

docked and almost immediately after docking these two craft begin spinning and they undock thinking it would solve the problem and it got worse and the little gemini landed. the two pilots could be rendered unconscious and the ship could be spun out of control. and finally they had to abort the mission and use all of their power to come on home and it turned out it had been a little short and one of the thrusters had gotten stuck and it was firing over and over again and causing their ship to spin out of control. it took that little thing to almost destroy the crew and the third time mr. armstrong was almost killed he was actually training for apollo 11 in something called the llrv. and this was -- as you can see a giant iron bedstead and you sat on top of it and you had a rocket motor underneath it and you would practice landing on the moon. and in this case mr. armstrong's

21st attempt landing this a wind shear caught it and it started crashing out of the ground and the thing exploded in a fireball and he got out with two fifths with a second to spare and he took off his uniform and went back to his office. and a number of astronauts had heard that somebody had almost died practicing this but they couldn't figure who it was because neil armstrong was sitting in his office and a couple days later they asked him well, what was it like when you almost died? well, it's almost a sad day when you lose a machine. so that shows you the incredible difficulties. and besides the fact at how incredibly dangerous the space race was, the other thing that was incredible about it was the technology. and here is wernher von brunn and you can four of the five of

his masterpieces. and even though we had the finest rocket team in the world it took them seven years to make these engines because the engines kept blowing up. and, in fact, you actually want engines to blow up because basically when you fly a rocket, you're flying enormous bombs with explosions pointed in one direction. only these explosions were not pointing in one directions they were blowing up in different directions so that's why it took seven years to make these engines and the other incredible thing about these engines is that if you look at a lot of the history of rocketry, you see the rockets crash into their launch towers a lot which is a problem you don't want to crash into your launch towers. these rockets have gimbles. they can slightly tilt these enormous motors of gimbles that slightly tilt so that you can slightly tilt your rocket away from your launch pad and avoid hitting the side of your controller. and the other thing about them is so incredible is that the

team had these arms to keep the rocket from rising a little bit until these enormous motors achieved power and it would release the rocket and it would rise into the air in a stable flying fashion which is something you're looking for when you're buying rockets. so really he created this staggering masterpiece and one of the most beautiful things to me is going to kennedy and seeing the whole way it works. nasa actually manufactures very little of what we see when they take off. they hire subcontractors and if you add up everybody who worked for nasa that made men go to the moon it, took 400,000 americans to do this. and, in fact, i dedicated my book to them because my favorite part of doing this book -- of course, i like hearing about the astronauts and the famous ground mission control people we all know about but my favorite part is hearing about people we never heard about which is those 400,000 people and they're everybody from women who are weaving memory cords for the

computers to plumbers and things like that. it's an incredible thing. but here you can see the vehicle assembly building on the left, which is the famous 500-foot high building where if they don't leave the air conditioning on clouds will form and it will rain. and you see that is actually the apollo 11 rocket with its lobster-red tower and it's on something on the size of a baseball diamond which is a giant tank cleats and they're taking it -- a little bit over a mile there to right by the atlantic ocean where the launch pad is and it will take them seven hours to get from the building on the left to that launch pad by the ocean. and some of you may remember that all the apollo flights came down in the water. and one of the reasons that -- there were two reasons why we did that. the first reason was that the beginning of apollo they had very difficulty accurately landing these capsules and they didn't want to tell people they

were going to bring them down in the new mexico desert but instead the capsule woodland in the middle of albuquerque so they decided to go with the ocean landing but the real reason they did it was because they constantly expected the rocket would blow up in the pad and they were made with a little tiny group of rockets at the top that if anything went wrong the astronauts could separate their capsule from the rest of the rocket and splash down into the atlantic and that's the main reason they were designed that way. in fact, all of the gemini and apollo capsules could land on land instead of on the water. but as i mentioned before, the technology at the time was really something else. but it was also something else in another way. and in that other way is the fact that we can't believe how rudimentary things were at the dawn of nasa and at the dawn of the space race. when nasa decided to start race racing it decided they would use pigs because pigs have an

anatomy the same as human beings. when nasa sends a living human being they design a cradle for the pig and they put the big on the back and the pig almost immediately died and the secretary said you know you can't put a pig on its back. its pelly fat will suffocate it and that's what happened. they had to give up using pigs in space and switch to monkeys. this will show you the other high technology. these are women with glue pots and they are assembling the space suits that the men will use to walk in the moon and they used an engineer tech which means lol which means little old ladies and the same engineering tech was to weave the core memory trips on the space ships on the moons which was less powerful than anyone's cell phone in anyone's pocket here

tonight. you're 30 stories in the air and you're looking at the little tiny comb that's the command module and underneath it in its cradle is the little tiny lunar module. and up at the top are those rockets i told you about that would take off and blast into the atlantic ocean if necessary and the entire rest of that power is to escape earth's gravity and then to go into earth's orbit. that's all the rest of the rocket is for. and the entire rest of the trip can be made just with those little tiny rockets at the top. now, these guys were really something else. and the more you know about them, the more incredible you really come to believe they are you know, we have this idea of the astronauts as being wild, cowboy guys. but, in fact, in order to become an astronaut you had to be a military test pilot. and the military test pilot sort of signaled quality is the fact that they can sit out read out gauges and dials while it's about to crash so people will know what's going wrong with

their state-of-the-art planes. that is really their incredible quality is cool under pressure. and you see that with all of these guys. armstrong is so chilly that he was called the ice commander behind his back. partly it's because he's terribly shy and partly because he's sort of not a particularly social person. many people have told me that when you talk to him, you can't tell if he's listening to what you say or not. he's that antisocial. but when you think about that, the fact that he wrote one of the greatest lines in history and the fact that when he gives a speech, it's usually fantastic is even more to his credit. he just is not naturally that kind of a person. and then mike collins, who orbit over the moon while the two men descended is really, you know -- if you want a guy to back you up, that's the guy. he did every part of his job perfectly. he wrote a fantastic memoir called carrying the fire. if you haven't read it you got to read it. it's one of the finest books written by anyone at nasa. and he ended up becoming the

first head of the air and space museum and he paints watercolor. and there's buzz aldrin who's no longer eugene who officially changed his name to buzz. and buzz was actually a very interesting person because he did everything he possibly could to become an astronaut. he went for an air force career because he wanted to be an astronaut. he studied rendezvous and rocking at mit because he wanted to be an astronaut and when he actually became an astronaut he was so aggressive in pursuing his career that he sort of alienated most of the executives there. and to the point where even though nasa follows the navy in a lot of ways, the original agency was born under the navy and a lot of people from the navy are working at navy and the commander is not the first person to step into unknown

territory. an underling steps into the unknown territory. but he had so alienated nasa executives that they decided they really wanted armstrong, who reminded them of charles lindbergh whether or not you think that's a good idea, they thought it was a good idea at the time, so they wanted armstrong to be first. and then -- but they didn't really want to say this was motivated for any personal or political reasons. so in the dress rehearsals of apollo 9 and 10, they found inside the lunar module it's so tiny in there that trying to get the second in command out of the door which was next to the commander was very difficult. so they gave that as the reason for why they had armstrong be first. however, if you talk to many people who worked at nasa at that time, including mike collins, they believe that this was armstrong's command decision that he would be first so there you have three answers to the question how did they decide armstrong would be first.

now, the thing that is really extraordinary about nasa besides that they managed this complicated project is the brilliant training that they devised and in a certain way the training was insane. if you think about it, neil armstrong was an astronaut for eight years. he had two missions. think of training to do something for eight years and doing it twice. but that's what they went through. and one of the brilliant things that they did was come up with these simulators which simulated everything on the mission and they would put their ground people and their astronauts through mission after mission after mission in these simulators but it became so well done and did such a good job of training them that during crises, and there were many crises on apollo missions, far more than we really, really know about such as, you know, famous apollo 13 but you would think from hearing about it that every other apollo mission went just fine with no problem at all but, in fact, there are problems upon problems upon problems.

and all of them was resolved because of this training and when astronauts would face incredibly difficult situations, they would calm down by saying to themselves, you know, this is just like a simulation. and here is buzz in the famous vomit comet. and for those of you who haven't experienced such a thing, the vomit comet is a plane that flies these swooping ways like that and when you go like that, you get to experience zero gravity for a couple of seconds. so by flying up and down very fast and very hard it does. and he's actually coming out of the hatch of the lunar lander, that's what's in the background, and descending in zero gravity to practice that in this airplane flying in these ways. they also had to learn geology. and originally the geologists who came into nasa to train the apollo astronauts thought they should have a ph.d. program in geology and tried to give them that and they almost succeeded but instead they decided what

they really needed were brilliant eyewitnesses to develop the eyes so that you would see what was an interesting rock when you were on the moon. and that's what they developed. and, in fact, one of my favorite things about armstrong -- he is such a perfectionist in doing his job, but the minute he got out of the lunar lander he was supposed to grab a rock but he got so excited taking pictures he couldn't do it and he had to be nagged by ground control three times to get the rock. the other training they had was jungle training in panama where they had to learn to live among indians and get water and eat iguanas and things like that and when mike collins was asked what was his favorite thing about his jungle training, what was the important thing he learned he said don't eat toads. so i want you to remember that, don't eat toads, all right? you promise you won't eat any toads? will you promise nasa you won't eat the toads. okay. thank you. now, over 1 million people came

to see the launch of apollo 11. and here you have mrs. spiro agnew, mrs. lady bird johnson, lyndon johnson and spiro agnew, the vice president at the time. behind them are mr. webb and mr. siemens. they had given their lives to do in which they had been sort of -- had to leave over the terrible fire of apollo 1. and you'll see that president nixon who was president did not attend because he feared a disaster would happen and it would taint his presidency so he spent agnew instead. here's the firing room at kennedy watching as well. i guess you can't really see it in the projector but if you look closely at every single one of those faces you can see there's like this half-calm, half-fear,

half-nervousness in almost every single expressions of these men's faces. one of the astounding things to me they were racing so hard to get to the moon that they would change plans at the last minute. and here are the post-it notes. it says flight plan written in pencil and this is stuck into the dashboard of the apollo 11 command module. now, what happened that i thought was incredible about this moment is that the astronauts didn't seem to be worried about things technically going wrong. they were worried about that they would screw up and embarrass the united states on this global stage. and they were so worried about this that at liftoff they sat in dead silence for 30 minutes and they were also so worried about it that mike collins started developing nervous ticks in his

eye lids waiting for liftoff. and armstrong was concerned that the liftoff would be delayed because so many times they'd gone to launch and they cancelled it and they got out. and he said, you know, we cancelled so many times when you really take off it's a real surprise. and this is probably one of the most beautiful pictures i've ever seen. this is apollo 11 lifting off and it's a perfect liftoff on a perfect day and everything went absolutely perfectly and 10 billion things could have gone wrong. and the number of people who worked on this, the 400,000 who are watching their dream come true and it just sort of make my eyes well up and raises the hair on the back of my head and makes me sweat every time i see this beautiful picture. and here's is the last thing you can actually see if you go to a launch which is the sort of fantastic paintbrush of fire and you can still see the -- sort of the outline it's making. and here's a view of staging.

staging, which is called the rocket train and every time i hear the rocket train i think, gee, if only we really had rocket trains. but anyway, the concept is that you use this enormous amount of power to get off the ground and then you get rid of it to make your craft lighter and lighter as you use it up. but what happens is that you're traveling at this tremendous rate and then all of a sudden you stop and your tail gets thrown away and then you restart and it's literally just like being jerked back and forth like this. but what's incredible is that the covers aren't off the windows just yet but if they were, the jerk of the motion pulls the rocket back like this and the fireball that you created shoots in front of you and then when your next engine lights shoots into a fireball and it's pretty spectacular. it makes me want to fly an

apollo mission myself. but one thing that makes me not want to fly an apollo mission is this control panel. here's your dashboard through your command module and if they try to make a dashboard more difficult to use than this, i don't know how they could do it. you have to memorize the position of every single thing. and in training, though, in simulation, they found out that men in space suits would frequently be breaking these buttons as they moved around the cabin in the inthat's space suits so they made covers for all of these buttons but they didn't make covers for the ones on the lunar module and we'll find out why that's a problem in a minute. so when i was a kid and we watched these shows, we thought that space food was very exciting. and it's only recently that i realized that basically all of it was the equivalent of eating flavored toothpaste. that you have these things, these freeze pack things and you would shoot hot water into them and squeeze them so you could have beef whipped

vegetable-flavored toothpaste and canned corn-flavored toothpaste and it turns out the astronauts would eat about a third less than they were supposed to because they couldn't stand the food no matter how nasa tried fixing it up. the other thing is a lot of people complained that the astronauts did not come back and have all this beautiful description of what it was like to be in outer space and go to the moon. and one of the major reasons why they couldn't do that is because they worked like dogs. and to show you how hard they worked, this is the to-do list sewn into armstrong's sleeve. these are all the things he's supposed to do while he's on the moon. and they showed task after task into his sleeves and the astronauts worked so hard they never really had a moment to experience what was going on around them. now, i didn't have a really good picture of apollo 11 circling the earth but apparently it really is one of the greatest things in the world.

you orbit the earth and every 90 minutes you have a new day and the sun rises and sets and you see that gold and that purple and when the clouds pass you get to see the geography of all the continents you get to see so well. it's a glorious, glorious experience and then you spend three days going to the moon. and the way it's done, you don't see any of it getting closer. you can see the earth getting farther away but you can't see the moon coming. you don't see it until you're right on top of it. and when they arrive, they arrive with solar eclipse. the sun is shining behind the moon and you have this big barren moon surrounded by sort of a fire and it's lit with an icy blue from the earthshine because the earth on the moon is eight times as brighter as the brightest full moon you've ever seen. it's almost like having a second little sun shrike this blue light and most of the astronauts when they see it they thought it was very disturbing. they thought the moon was a very frightening place and they did not think it was a good place to

land on actually. and the other thing that i love about this is that in the original capsule, which you can't see anymore at the smithsonian, the covering of both eagle and columbia is this beautiful metallic mirror finish and that was so that when they reunited they could see each other and you found exactly the same finish on sputnik for the same reason. the designer of sputnik wanted people to be able to see it. so it was quite a beautiful ship these two little silver ships. now, a lot of people complain about the look of the lunar lander. that it's ugly but i think it's quite fantastic because it shows you the fact that when you have a spaceship that doesn't travel in an atmosphere you can make it look like anything. and it's really a shame that the science fiction people have never followed up on this. they make their space ships look like barges but if it's not sailing through an atmosphere you don't have to make it arrow

dynamic. at this moment armstrong has just separated from mr. collins who's still in columbia and he's showing mr. collins his legs because they're little rockets inside the legs to extend them and collins is making sure all the legs have extended correctly. and what has happened, though, is that in nasa's planning for the landing they thought that all of the air inside the two capsules, inside the tunnel between the two capsules would be gone but there was a little puff of air left over and this little puff of air was like a champagne cork and it pushed the eagle module a little farther along than nasa thought it should be and so the landing did not happen where it was supposed to land. nasa had planned for the computer to land the ship entirely. that human beings would not be involved. but that little puff of air combined with some other things that happened along the way meant that when eagle came down,

it was four miles further than it was supposed to be and the computer was about to land in a bunch of rocks and armstrong looked out and he realized this was a serious problem and he took over manual control of the ship. and at the same time he's trying to land manually, the radio intermittently turns off and they have to have collins from columbia back in. the two different radar systems on eagle start interfering with each other and the computer gets overloaded because it can't process these two pieces of information happening and it starts sending out warning systems that it has to be completely restarted over and over and over again because it can't process all this information. so everyone at mission control is just having fits. they're just losing their minds and, of course, armstrong is saying absolutely nothing while all of this is going on. when you read the voice transcripts all you hear are, armstrong reading out the dials on his gauges and another guy

saying, how any minute now they're going to run completely out of gas. and while all this is happening, there's one guy who built the lunar module sitting there and they had staths saying if they run out of gas it will blow up. he's praying they do run out of gas. so finally it touches down and when armstrong says, tran quilt based the eagle has landed the first reaction another astronaut charlie duke saying we're all about to turn blue. he can't even say the tranquility we're about to turn blue here. armstrong does such a beautiful job setting eagle down that he set it down so gently that the shock absorbers inside the legs weren't correctly deployed and the bottom of the ladder is

3 1/2 feet from the lunar surface so he climbs down from the ladder, steps onto one of eagle's landing pads and make sure he can get back up on the ladder to get back into the craft before he takes the one small step. and here's a really good picture of buzz coming down. it actually turned out to have been extremely difficult putting on all this stuff to go out and then get through that hatch and then climb down these stairs. because basically what these men are wearing, they're basically wearing little space ships of their own because they could be attacked by microimmediatiori s microimmediatiorites -- space junk and it's difficult to do something. now, for some mysterious reason mr. aldrin forgot to take pictures of mr. armstrong on the moon. the only pictures he took of him were these big panoramas where

armstrong is this little tiny figure. this is one of the few pictures of armstrong on the moon. it's taken from a data camera that's on the top of the lunar module. and here's a beautiful picture of the flag at the foot of eagle. and here is mr. aldrin walking away with one of his scientific experts. and here he is setting it up. this is a fantastic thing that they had devised which is an array of reflectors and when a laser is pointed from the earth and it bounces back off these reflectors it tells you exactly how far away the moon is from the earth. and it was made with this fantastic robot that would deploy. and here is the earth rising over eagle. so that night after finishing all of their chores, they said later the worst chore was planting the flag. they didn't know what the lunar surface was going to be like and there were a number of scientists thought it would be

this giant pile of dust that would swallow up anything in it. they discovered there was a very little tiny thin piece of dust and underneath was this compressed surface that was like hard granite and they pounded away on the flagpole and they were convinced with millions watching around the world on tv it would fall over. and they would be humiliated and that would be the worst possible thing that could happen on this mission. the other thing that's very funny even though they'd been awake working for 24 hours they got almost no sleep before they had to take off again. it was too cold and it was too bright. there was too much light coming in from the windows between the earth and the sun. and then where armstrong had positioned his hammock he was right in line of the telescope board eagle which was pointing back at the earth and he said it was like having a giant unblinking blue eye staring at him all night long and the final

thing somebody in their space as you sit here bumped into one of those buttons and broke it off and the button happened to be the button that armed the rocket to take them back to columbia to take them back home. so aldrin had to use a pen cap to get the button to work. so there you are. and here we have the beautiful splashdown and one of the things that's very nice about splashdown is that everyone at nasa gets to say mission accomplished and celebrate but the thing that was very funny about this was that michael creighton terrify had just come out about a virus from outer space that turns human blood into ash and i'm convinced this taught people in the government into thinking what if they come back to the moon and they have something like that so they came up with this bizarre quarantine procedure where all these astronauts had to put on these horrible suits and then be quarantined for 21 days and then they lived in a trailer but in

the middle of all this they opened the hatch in the middle of the pacific ocean. so the entire quarantine actually made no sense at all. the one time mission control gets to relax and enjoy themselves is after splashdown. so here they are actually cheering. and here are the men in their little air stream trailer quarantine trailer greeting president nixon. and the one window inside this trailer is at the height of most people's buzz so they're constantly crouching down for everything. when you complete a successful mission at nasa, you get a cake. so one of my favorite moments is the poor men enjoying their cake ceremony while everyone else gets to eat their cake. and here they are -- they have to be carted on board a hornet and then they are carted and the trailer is put on a truck and it

goes to the air station where they're flown back to houston and they brought lays for his and buzz wanted to know from his wife how soon she could get him clean underwear. even in kwan treen mr. armstrong had a birthday in quarantine so he got to have a birthday in quarantine with the people celebrating. now, the thing about apollo 11 people say, well, what did we get out of going to the moon? and we got an incredible number of things. frankly, we got revolutions in science. we got a new understanding of how the moon was born. we got incredible advances in everything from computers to medical equipment. we got a global idea of the ecology from seeing pictures of the earth from outer space. but one thing we really got was the united states is the most acclaimed and admired nation in the world. and everywhere they went, people would say, you must be so proud being an american. but they would also say we did

it. that americans had been the agent for humanity to reach the moon. and you could almost say this is where almost any price of any kind of money to be spent because if everyone loves you maybe you don't need so many tanks. so i really think going to the moon was worth it. but i'm not sure if it was worth it for these men. as i told you before, mike collins had a pretty nice life after the moon but armstrong and aldrin did not. armstrong says he was quite satisfied with his life but if you look at it, it seems pretty disappointing. it was only over -- these men were 39 when they were on this mission and armstrong worked at nasa advanced research department for a while. and then he became a physics professor for a while. and then he worked for a few -- he became a spokesman for chrysler and worked on a corporate boards of directors and that was it. mr. aldrin for a while had a

mental breakdown. he became depressed and an chock. he had terrible problems with women and i actually he's one of the bravest astronauts for admitting this problem because he comes from a long history from a military family and from someone from the military to admit mental problems takes tremendous bravery so i think he's one of the bravest of all the astronauts. and a number of people want to know, you know, has the united states declined because we don't have things like apollo anymore? and have things gone downhill? and i'm going to read you one thing from this book, but it's not something i wrote, it's something mr. armstrong said. and this is from one of the flight directors and his name is gary griffin. when we finished the apollo program, jack schmitt had a for themship at caltech. he had a little money left and he pulled together 25 or 30 people that had all worked on apollo. we went out to caltech and spent

about three days to talk about what we had done, why did we do it and craft was there and armstrong and conrad and schmitt and it was a great experience and we all had our ideas and the cold war was a piece of that but armstrong did something very interesting. he was up in cincinnati teaching engineering and you got up at the blackboard and drew a series of curves and he had one of them titled leadership and one titled threat and one good economy, he had one of them peace or world peace or something like that, and he said my theory is that when all of these curves are in conjunction, when they all line up together you can do something like apollo. apollo or something like it will happen and we happen to be ready with all of those curves lined up. so what i hope is all of you will be ready again when all those curves line up. thank you very much. [applause]

>> so my question is i hope you don't mind if i take off my jacket and my question is do any of you have any questions? yes, sir. >> did they find any germs or any microbes at all? >> not at all. >> it's like sterile. >> guess what, the moon has looked exactly the same. >> any ants rolling around. >> it's looked exactly the same -- >> it has no atmosphere at all. >> wow! >> and i'm going to tell you an incredible story. we have a whole notion of how the moon was born. do you know how it was born? does anyone here know? [inaudible] >> that's right. we have evidence from apollo that billions of years ago when the moon was a big -- when the earth was a big ball of lava another celestial body the size of mars smashed into it and the pieces of earth that were broken off or the collision were

captured by the earth's gravity and they formed into a ring and they spun around and the gravity coalesced this big little chunks of lava into another body and that's the moon. and that's how the moon was born and we know that from evidence brought back by apollo. >> does the moon have a core or anything like the earth does? >> no. the moon has a bunch of things like mass cons which are concentrations of harder matter inside of it and that's why it has strange qualities to its gravity that was part of the other reason the eagle went farther than it was supposed to. any other questions? someone must have a question. yes, ma'am. >> is the flag still standing? >> it is. and, in fact, there's an exciting thing happening right now. nasa has a brand-new satellite circling the moon, taking pictures. and it's going to take pictures of all the apollo landing sites.

so you should be able to see the bottom half of the lunar landers. you'll see the apollo missions that had those little jalopies, the dune buggies and you'll see those and you might be able to see some flags. i don't know if the resolution is that good. yes, sir. >> is it true that armstrong blew the big line that he was nervous and meant to say one small step for a man and actually came out for man? >> well, i actually -- i grew up surrounded by midwestern drawlers, which is what he is. when i listen to him one step for our man in that drawl but other people do not hear him. he says that he says it. most people cannot hear it on the tape. so we historians put a in a little astrict one step for a man and one giant step mankind. yes, sir. >> well, i'm wondering about all these other missions. you know, this was like a

pioneering when they go up to the moon. we had other missions and i'm wondering how much have all these other astronauts had to improvise? how much have they had to come up with, wow, we weren't anticipating this. we've got to come up with something to solve the problem? >> it was constant. it was constant. if you look into the history of almost any one of these missions you'll see it happened all the time. there was never a mission that went exactly the way it was planned. they were constantly having to improvise and come up with new things of doing and that's what their training did for them. >> well, what about these contractors? who's keeping track of the quality control? who's keeping track of everything that goes -- >> that's what nasa did in that giant building you shaw it ran all these things through massive tests. and, in fact, one of the brilliant things nasa did it sent astronauts to the

manufacturing facilities so that the welders and the plumbers and all the people working on the various parts of the spaceship would remember a human life depends on what i do. and the quality was astounding. nasa had a 99.9% reliability. where if something was sent into them from one of their manufacturers that had more than a .1 failure rate it was a failure rate, it was rejected. but this spacecraft was so complicated even under that, 4,000 things would fail. it would still fall within the reliability. when you look at what was going on with the technology and how little they knew about what they were doing, the fact that, you know, a number of missions weren't catastrophes is amazing. the more you know about this, the more of a miracle it is. >> how much redundantcy. >> they did not have two engines

to get off the moon. they only had one rocket to get off the moon so that was always a hair raising moment during the apollo missions. how did these people keep their cool? it would be a really nervous type of thing because you know so much? >> yes. >> i don't see how they managed to keep their cool? >> it's what they did for a living. that's what they were -- that's -- that was their unique quality. not that they were daredevils. not that they were wild, brave crazy guys or anything. it was that they were cool characters under the greatest of pressures. yes, ma'am. >> we heard talk of people returning to the moon, what value do you see in that? >> actually, we're not going to have a big manned space program again until we have competition. first, i think nasa is incredible. and it does astounding things and the more you know about it, the prouder you are of it and the gladder you are we have it

and the more amazing that you think it is. but as far as a giant program like apollo such as going back to the moon and then going on to mars, i think we're going to need either political or economic competition for that kind of huge program to happen. so that nasa has the political willpower of ordinary americans to do it. but i do think that will happen. i think russia, china or india will pose a competition, whether space tourism or mining or a new form of energy that is discovered. i do think we'll have that competition again and we will go back. i also think that in 10 to 15 years, there will be a revolution in booster technology and we will have space tourism. it'll be expensive but it won't be multimillionaire expensive. it will be, you know, like going on the queen elizabeth or something like that. it will be luxurious and expensive and if you don't get to fly in 0g, your children will.

yes. >> we're advancing quite rapidly it seems in robotics. so i'm wondering, are they going to be able to develop robots that will be able to do whatever a human could do or maybe even better with, you know, technology? >> what do you think? >> i'm wondering if they would rather send robots instead of humans and not risk the person's life and so on. >> well, it actually is pretty much the conflict going on. almost everything you can think of is being a probe that they say -- you can say the rover that went to mars is a robot. and you can say the lunar orbiter that's taking pictures is a robot. you can say almost everything that doesn't have a person in it that nasa sends out is a kind of a robot and that's actually the biggest conflict because when you send human beings, you have to take into account all this

stuff to keep them alive that's very difficult. but at the same time, there's nothing like a human being response to things in real life for exploration. there's only so much that the robot can tell us, you know. yes, sir. >> well, as an extension to that, i'd like to ask a question of all of you guys. how many of you know that the premier science research center for nasa is about seven miles away from us right now. a show of hands. okay. if i were to walk into a shopping mall and ask people at beltway plaza that, if i were to gather 100 people, most people would not know that. and the reason why is that goddard space flight center where they do that magnificent work where they built the lunar reconnaissance orbiter which was launched last week, how many of you heard anything about that on

tv? okay. because of the fact they're an unmanned mission center, no one pays attention to it. so if you want to look at it from the analysis of what people get proud of, when we send an exploration robot that does magnificent things, in many cases everyone goes, send a person up, they pay some attention. >> yes, that's true. i agree. anyone else? well, thank you so much. this has been a great night. i hope you had a good time. i hope it was informative and thank you kindly. [applause] >> craig nelson served as the vice president and executive editor of harper, row and hyperion and random house. for more information, visit

craignelson.us.

>> paula kamen, who was iris chang? >> iris chang was best known for her bestseller that was the book, the rape of nanking and it did huge things to raise awareness about japanese

atrocities during world war ii. it was not only in nanking but she wrote detail about the massacre but it raised atrocities throughout asia and it became a whole movement rather than just a book in the 1990s. >> was she a historian? >> she was both a historian and a journalist. so she didn't see them as mutually exclusive. i think her big tool of hers was archives, you know, she spent days and days buried in the national archives and other archives but then she also went out, confronted people face-to-face, so she used all these methods. >> where was she from? >> she was from urbana, illinois. we met in college at the university of illinois in the mid-'80s and then we were friends since then. >> and what kind of relationship did you have as friends? >> at first i didn't know what to make of her. that she was always many steps ahead of me. there was very few internships

and every time there was one she would get it. you know, before i even thought of applying to it she would have already gotten it. and that's how a lot of people on the college paper thought of her. she was always so far ahead of us. and she had the idea to write for the "new york times" as the u of i correspondent. she just called them up and soon she had stories in the front section of the "new york times", you know, and we're thinking hobbs does that? what to make of her but then i -- i was her editor there and i saw just what real talent backed up this incredible nerve and i decided to try to emulate her instead of seeing her as a rival. and through the years both of us wrote books and we were both sounding boards. and she became a huge role model of what it meant to be a successful author. >> what happened to her? >> this is the reason why i wrote the book because it was the most shocking things that i'd ever experienced. that she committed suicide,

which seemed for no apparent reason in 2004 when she was 36 years old. there were lots of rumors that were swirling everywhere that the the right wing japanese had assassinated her. she had a lot of enemies. >> because of her book? >> yeah. she was very vocal in criticizing their history books and their political leaders. there was also rumors that the u.s. was somehow behind it. that she was very active in trying to get veterans of the baton death march to sue japan for their enslavement and the state department wasn't so happy about that. but it turned out that she fit -- that she fit a lot of patterns of manic depressive illness or bipolar disorder that got worse after she had her son, which often happens with women.

and was exacerbated by a lot of real pressures that were all around her. >> so what was your last conversation with her? >> she called me just -- just three days before she killed herself. and that was the first time that i sensed something was very wrong. i realized now that it was a goodbye call. then it just seemed like a strange, bizarre -- bizarre thing. i didn't know what to make of it. but that was the first time i'd ever noticed her as really depressed and disconnected from reality. she was so depressed, it was hard to get the words out. and in retrospect i see that she was explaining to me why she was about to do this. she talked about a lot of guilt in ways that she had raised her son. she talked about a lot of fears that she had. and said i had been a good friend to her. yeah, it was -- it was very,

very disturbing but as disturbing as it was, i didn't think her life would end a few days later. >> so what did you find about iris chang? >> she was very, very complex. that there was a lot behind this veneer of perfection that all of us basically saw her having the absolute perfect life and being the perfect person, you know, to the extent we didn't want to even share our problems with her thinking she would understand having problems, you know, what that was like. you know, that she was incredibly -- incredibly driven and that's what helped her to uncover, you know, all these really tough parts of history and atrocities in japan. and i think with the mental illness she didn't know when to stop and she didn't know about any kind of limits that she had. so she was inspiration in her drive, not seeing limits but then ultimately it was a weakness, you know, and not getting treated for the mental illness, you know, she refused to accept that she had it.

>> is there a stigmatism with mental illness and asian-americans? >> yeah in every culture there's a huge stigma but in asian culture it's really, really extreme that asians are much less likely to get treated with therapy and medication when they do go for treatment it's usually at the 11th hour when they're already at the psychotic stage, you know, when it's really hard to reverse. chaise what happened to her, she didn't see a psychiatrist until two weeks before her death and that was just because her family forced her. and she wasn't compliant with him, you know, what he was telling her to do. >> what changes have you made in your life because of iris chang's suicide? >> no one has ever asked me that before. i appreciate living -- a lot of it is corny. i appreciate living in the moment.

i'm having my second child in several months. and just -- just -- i'm looking a lot toward the lighter things in life and enjoying them. i mean, i'm going to return to writing about the tough topics, but just to know my limits and it's okay to take time off. and not be so driven, you know, every second of the day. >> besides this book, what other books have you written? >> i've written three other books. the one before this was all in my head about an 18-year migraine. and i've blogged about that on the "new york times".com about a year ago. a lot of that is about women in chronic pain and how it's been seen as all in our heads where recent research shows it as neurological. and then i wrote two feminist books when i was 24 called feminist fatale. that was known as like the first -- the first post-boomer

feminist book. and then one that's related is called her way about young women's sexual attitudes about having more status and education in society has affected their personal lives. >> we've been talking with author paula kamen about her book, finding iris chang. ♪ >> this summer book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> mary matlin, what are you reading? >> well, my political books are in the genre of going back to the future. i'm reading liberty and tyranny and i've got a first edition set, twelve volumes of edmond burke of all his fascinating not good beach book but it's a good thin