the college park aviation museum in maryland hosted the event, it is 50 minutes. >> i am so glad to be back in washington because if you are a historian cominto washington is like a dream come true. not only a dream of going to the library of congress and working with documents but the dream with a warm welcome when you come back, out of the caves of research and your book is actually on the shelf. is 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. i was an eagle sut at the national jamboree in idaho when neil armstrong said hello to all of us on the way to the moon. i thought i really want to read the book on apollo 11, the big history book that tells you everything about it, explains the science, taking behind-the-scenes, shows you what happened, and i went out and although there are an incredible number of wonderful

books and fantastic archives and really great magazine articles and things like that, no one had really pull all of this material together into one coherent book and i decided that is what i wouldo. a couple years into doing this i went to kennedy space center to see a shuttle launch from the same launch pad at the, levin used. if you haven't, you have got to see a launch at kennedy, it is one of the most incredible thing deliver experience in your life. you can see waves of migration hittg the ground and coming for you, spend 10 seconds looking at a cloud appearing around the rocket thinking something terrible has happened because you can't hear anything and all of audden this war grieve your years becau where miles away, the difference between what you see and what you hear. is an unbelievable experience. while i was ere, i was having a pretty rough time with this book and my personal life.

i was wandering around kennedy and saw this strange little place at kennedy. i ask what is that? they have a a black, on this plaque is a latin phrase which they have translated as a rough path leads to the stars. i was dumb struck by seeing this phrase, everything that was going on with this book on it really shocked me how command asle difficult the space race was, especially how dangerous, how unbelievably dangerous it was. to illustrate that i would like

to talk about that, three times window of, one guy when he was working for nasa almost got killed, his name was neil armstrong. the first time he almost died was whene was working for nasa when it was still called naca, in the antelope valley of california, this is where chuck yeager broke the sound barrier, and what mr. armstrong was doing was flying an incredible plane called the x-15, working with a lot of other people. in this momt he was co piloting tt be 29, ferrying another pilot, the skyrocket has already been released in this picture. but at this time the sky rocket was still attached t the be 29. armstrong and his co-pilot noticed that one of the propellers was going wrong. for those of you who don't fly, it is very upsetting to a pilot when a propeller goes wrong because if the propeller comes

loose, it turns into a flying chain saw. the pilot told the guy in the sky rocket that he had to be jettisoned, he said you can jettison me, i am having bowel problems. starck, you are going now, they jettisoned him. after they did, the propeller came loose and turned into the applying chain saw. is sliced through the blade with a skyrocket was hitting and slice right through two of the other four engines. the sky rocket had to come down with valve problems. this giant b-29s had to land on one engine and everyone came home okay. the second time armstrong vy nearly died while working at nasa was on the catastrophic gemini eight mission, the way we decided to go to t moon, astronauts had to learn how to run to and docking space. during gemini they tried learning to dock and rendezvous many times, and many times they

fail. this was the first sucssful time they got, which was gemini viii and immediately after docking these two craft began spinning and spinning, so they undock thinking it would solve the problem but it got worse. the gemini started spinning at one revolution% which meant if it got worse, the two pilots, mr. scott and mr. armstrong could be rendered unconscious. they had to abort the mission. one of the thrusters had gotten stuck and was firing over and over again causing them to shift out ofontrol. the third time mr. armstrong was almost killed, he was training for apollo 11 in something called the llrv. this was a giant iron bedstead. you sat on top of it and had a

rocket motor underneath and you would practice landing on the moon. in this case, mr. armstrong, his 20 first attempt at flying this, wind shear caught it at 100 feet of altitude, it started crashing towards the ground and he ejected out of it and the thing exploded in a fireball, he got out with 2 thirds of the second to spare. he took off his uniform and went back to his office and a number of astronauts heard that someone had almost died practicing this but couldn't figure out who it was because neil armstrong was just sitting in his office. a couple days later they asked him what was it like when you almost died that time? said, you know, it is always a sad day when you lose a machine. that shows you the increble difficulties they had in undergoing this. besides the fact that how incredibly dangerous the space race was, the other thing that was incredible about it was the technology. here is werner von braun posing

before, you can see fou of the five engines of his masterpiece, the saturn v, and these engines, even tugh we have the finest rocket team in the world, it took seven years to make these engines because the engines kept blowing up. you actually want engines to blow up because basically when you fly a rocket, you are flying enormous bombs with explosions pointed in one direction. these explosions were not pointed in one direction, they were blowing up in all different directions which is what it took seven used t make these engines. the other incredible thing about these engines is if you look at a lot of the history of rocketry, you see the rockets crashed into their launch towers a lot which is a problem you don't want, to crash into your lunch hour. these rockets have gimbals that slightly tilt so that you can slightly tilt your rocket away from your launch pad and avoid

hitting the de. the other thing about them that is so incredible is the werner von braun team engineered these giant hold down arms to keep the rocket from only rising a little bit until all of these enormous tors had achieved full power and then it would release the rocket and it would ride into the air in a stable flying shion which is something you are looking for when you are buying a rocket. he created this staggering masterpiece, one of the most beautiful things to me is going to kennedy and seeing the way it works. nasa manufacturers vary the will of what we see when they take off. they hire subcontractors. if you add up everybody who worked for the subcontractors that work for nasa, that made men go to the mission, it took 400,000 americans to do this. i dedicated my book to them beuse my favorite part of doing this book, of course i like hearing about the astronauts and the mission control people but my favorite part was hearing about people we

never heard about which is those 400,000 people, everybody from within the r weaving memory cores with computers to plumbers and thingsike that, an incredible thing. you can see the vehicle assembly builng on the left, the famous, 500 ft. highbuilding, clouds will form inside and it will rain. they assemble these fantastic rockets. that is actually the apollo 11 rocket with its monster red tower, it is on something the size of a baseball diamond, basically cut giant tank leaks, they are taking it a little bit over a mile to write by the lent -- atlantic ocean. it will take seven hours to get from the building to the launch pad by the addition. some of you may remember that all of the apollo flights came down in the water. there were two reasons we did that. the first reason was at the

beginning of apollo, they had difficulty accurately landing these capsules. they didn't want to tell people they were going to bring them down in the new mexico desert but instead the capsule would land in the middle of albuquerque. they decided to go with the notion landing. the real reason they did it was because they constantly expected that the pocket would bw up on the padnd these capsules were made with special little group of rockets on the top that if anything went wrong, the astronau could separate their capsule from the rest of the rocket and splash down io the atlantic. that is the main reason they designed that way. all of the gemini and apollo capsules could land on land instead of in water. as i mentioned before, the technology at the time was something else, but it was also something else in another way, that other way is the fact that we can't believe how rudimentary things were at the dawn of nasa, at the dawn of the space race. one of my favorite stories is when nasa decided to start

testing its spacecraft, it decided it would use pigs because pigs have an anatomy very similar to human beings. when nasa sent a livg creature into space, they designed a cradle for the creature to ride in like an egg carton, they made this cradle for the pig and put the take on back and strapped in and the pig almost immediately di. the secretary said you can't put a pig on its back, its belly fat will suffocate it and that is what happened. they had to give up on using pigs in space and switch to monkeys. this will show you the other high technology, these are women assembling the space suits that the men will use to walk on the moon. they used an engineering technique that nasa called lol, which mantled ladies. the same engineering technique was used to weave the core memory chips on the computer on the space ships that went to the moon which were less powerful

than anyone's cellphone in anyone's pocket here tonight. here you are0 stories in the air, loong at the little tiny command module and underneath it in its cradle the little tiny lunar module, and up at the top of those rockets that i told you about that would take off and blast into the atlanc ocean is necessary, the entire rest of that tower is to escape earth's gravity and go into earth orbit. that is all the rest of the rocket is for, and the rest of the trip can be made with those little tiny rockets at the top. these guys were really something else. the more you know about them, the more incredible you come to believe they are. we have this idea of the astronauts as the wd cowboy guys, but in fact in order to become an astronaut, you had to be a military test pilot. litary test pilots are signal quality, they can sit and read

out gauges and dials on aircraft while its about to crash into the ground, so that people can know what was going wrong with the state of the airplane. that is their incredible quality, cool under pressure. you see that with all of these guys. armstrong is so chilly that he was calledeice commander behind his back. partly because he is terribly shy, partly because he is not a particularly social person. many people told me that when you talk to him you can't tell if he is listening to what you say or not. he is that sort of anti-social. when you thi about that, the fact he wrote one of the greatest lines in history, when he gives a speech is usually fantastic, is even more to his credit. he is not naturally that kind of person. mike collins who orbited over the moon, while the other two defended, if you want a guy temecula, that is 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, it is one of the finest books ever written by anyone at nasa. he ended of becoming the head of the first air and space museum at the smithsonian and now of paints water flowers in -- watercolors in florida. then buzz aldrin, who is no longer eugene, he officially changed his name to buzz, he was actually a very interesting person because he did everything he could become an astronaut. he went for and air force career because he wanted to be an astronaut, studied rendezvous and docking at mit because he wanted to be an astronaut and when he became an astronaut, he was so aggressive in puring his career that he sort of alienated most of the executives, the point where even though nasa llows the navy in a lot of ways,he original navy team was born under the navy, there are a lot of navy guys working at nasa, under navy

rules, the commander is not the first person to step into unknownerritory, an underling steps into unknown territory, and that would have had bz aldrin as the first man on the moon but he so alienated nasa executives that they decided they wanted armstrong, who reminded them of charles lindbergh, whether or not that is a good idea, they thoughtt was a good idea at the time, they want to armstrong. but they didn'tant to say is this was motivated on personal reasons, so in the dress rehearsals of apollo 9 and apollo 10, they found out that inside the lunar module, it is so tiny in there, that trying to gethe second man out of the door, which is next to the commander, was very difficult, so they gave that as the reason they have armstrong the first. but if you talk to many people who worked at nasa at that time, including mike collins, they believed this was armstrong's command decision, that he would be first. you have three answers to the

question, how did they decide armstrong would be first on the moon. the thing that is really extraordinary about nasa besides that they manage this incredib complicated project, is the brilliant training that they devised. it is a certain way that training is insane, if you think about it, neil armstrong was an astronaut for eight years, he had two emissions. think about training to do something for eight years and doing it twice. but that is what they went through. one of the brilliant thing they did was come up with these simulators which simulated everything on a mission. they put their ground control people and astronauts through missn after mission after mission in the simulators, it became so well done, did such a good job of traing them that during crises, there were many crises on apollo missions, far more than we really know abt, such as the famous apollo 13, you would think from hearing about it that every other ollo

mission went fine with no problem, but there werproblems over problems over problems and all of them we resolved because of this training. astronauts would face incredibly difficult situations, they would calm down by saying this is just like a simulation. here is buzz in the famous vomit comet. those of you who have not experienced it, that is a plane that flies these sweeping parabolas like that. when you go lije that, you get to experience 0 gravity for a couple seconds. by flying up and down very fast and very hard, it does that. he i actually coming out of the hatch of the lunar lander in the background and the sending in 0 gravity to practice tha in this airplane flying these problemss. they also had to learn geology. originally, the geolists who came in to nasa to train the apollo astronauts, they have a

ph.d. ogram, tried to give them that and almost succeeded, but instead they decided what they really needed were brilliant i witnesses to develop the eyes so you would see what was an interesng rock when you were on the moon. that is what they developed. one of my favorite things about armstrong, he is such a perfectionist in doing his job, the minute he got out of the lunar lander he was supposed to grabbed a rock but got so excited taking pictures, he couldn't do it. 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 things like that. went mike collins was asked what wahis favorite thing about his jungle training,hat was the important thing he learned, he said don't eat codes. i want you to remember that, don't be toae toad toadtoadset.

1 million people came to watch the launch of apollo 11, this is mrs. spiro agnew, ladybird johnson, vice president at the time, behind them, mr. webb and mr. siemens. they both left after the apollo one fire, this is their return to see the triumph of apollo 11. they had to leave over the terrible fire of allo 1. uc president nixon who was present at the time, did not attend. he was worried disaster might happen and might taint his presidency. he decided to send spiro agnew instead. here is the ground control at kenned the firing om, watching as well.

you can't really see it in the projector but if you look closely at every one of these faces, you can see half calm, half year, have nervousness on almost every single expression. one of the astounding things to me is they were racing so hard to get to the moon that they would change plans at the last minute. here are the equivalent of post-it notes. itays flight plan written in pencil, this is stuck on to the dashboard of the apollo 11 command module. what happened is, which is incredible about thimoment, the astronauts didn't sm to be worried about things technically going wrong. they were woied that they would screw up and embarrass the united states on the global stage. they were so worried about this that at liftoff face that in dead silence for 30 minutes, they were also so worried about

it that mike collins started developingervous tics in his eyelids ile waiting for the rocket to lift off. in fact, armstrong was convinced that the liftoff would be delayed because so many times they had gone to launch and they canceled it and got out, he said you know, we canceled so many times that when you really take off it is a real surprise! this is probably one of the most beautiful pictures i have ever seen, this is of all 11 lifting off, it was a perfect lift off on a perfect day and everything went absolutely perftly, ten billion things could have gone wrong and the number of people who worked on this, 400,000 watching their dream come true, it makes my eyes well up and raises the hair on the back of my head, a beautiful picture. this is the last thing you can actually see if you go to a launch, this fantastic paintbrush of fire, you can still see the outline of the

saturn, the fantastic trail it is making. here is the view of staging, staging was come up by a russian named tsiolkovsky who coined the phrase the rockets rain. i wish we really have brought it trained. you use this enormous amount of power to get off the ground, then you get rid of it to make aircraft lighter and lighter. what happens is you are traveling at this tremendous rate and all of a sudden you stop, your tale gets thrown away, then you restart. it is literally just like being jerked back and forth like this. what is incredible is the windows, the covers aren't off the windows just yet. but if they were, the jerk of the motion poo the rocket back like this, and the fireball that you created shoots in front of you and when the next engine lights up, you issued through

the fireball. it is pretty spectacular. it makes me want to flyn apollo mission myself. something that makes me not want to fly an apollo mission looking at this control panel. here is the dashboard for the command modu. they tried to make it more difficul to use than this, i don't know how they could do it. you have to memorize the position of every single thing. in training, in simulation, they found out men in space suits would freently be breing these buttons as they moved around the cabin, so they made covers for all of these buttons but they didn't make covers for the ones on the lunar module on apollo 11 and we will find out why that is a problem in a minutd. when i was a kid and we watch these shows, we thought space food was very excithng and it is only recently that i realized that all of it was the equivalent of eating flavored toothpaste, that you had these freeze packs, and you would

shoot hot water into them and squeeze them so you could have a beef with vegetables, flavored toothpaste, cand corn flavored toothpaste, it turned 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 complain the astronauts did not ce back and have all this beautiful description of what it was like to be in outer space and go to the mission. one of the major reasons why they couldn't do that is because they worked like dogs. to show you how hard they work, this is the to do list, so into armstrong's sleeve. these are all the things he is supposed to do when he is on the moon, taskfter task after task into his sleeve. lots of times the aronauts worked so hard they never had a moment to really experience what was goingn around tm. i didn't have a really good

picture of apollo 11ircling the earth but apparently it is one of the greatest things in the world. you orbits the earth and every 90 minutes you have a new day. the sorises and sets and you e the gold and purple and when the sun -- when the clouds pass you see the geography of all the continents you know so well i did is a glorious, glorious experience, then you spend three days going to the moon. the way it is done, you don't see any of it getting closer. you concede the earth getting farther away that you can see the moon coming, you don't see it until you are right on top of it. when they arrive, they arrive with solar eclipse, the sun shining behind the moon and this big, baron moon surunded by fire, it is lit with an icy blue from the earthshine because the earth on the moon is eight times brighter than the brightest full moon you have ever seen. it is almost like having a second little sun shining, the

astronauts thought was very disturbing, they thght the moon was a very frightening place, not a good place to land. here you have -- the other thing i love about this is in the original capsule which you can't see any more at the smithsonian but originally the covering of both the eagle and columbia is this beautiful metallic mirror finish, 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 wanted people on eartho be able to see it. it was quite beautif, these two silver ships. a lot of people complain about the look of the lunar lander, th it is ugly but i think it is quite fantastic because it shows the fact that when you have a space ship that doesn't travel in an atmosphere you can make it look like anything. is really a shame that science-fiction people have never followed up on this, they make their space ships look like

ships and barges and things like that but if it is not sailing through an atmosphere you don't have to make it aerodynamic. at this moment, armstrong has just separated from mr. llins who is still in colombia and he is showing mr. collins his legs because there are little rockets inside the legs to extend them and collins is making shore all the legs have extended correctly. what has happened is in nasa's planning for the landing, they thought that all of the air inside the two capsules inside the tunnel between the two caules would be gone but there is a little puff of air leftover, and it was like a champagne cork and it pushed the eagle module a little farther along than nasa thought it should be. so the landing did not happen where it was supposed to land. nasa had planned for the computer to land thehip entirely, human beings would not

be involvedut 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 farther along than it was supposed to be and the computer was about to land it in a bunch of rocks. armstrong looked out and realize this was a serious problem and he took over manual conol of the ship. at the same time he is trying to land manually, the radio intermittently conks out and they have to pass radio transmission from the ground through collins icolombia to eagle and back again. the same time this happens 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 informatn happening and it's that sending out warning systems that it has to be completely restarted over and over again because it can process all this informatio everyone at mission control is having fits, they are losing their minds, armstrong is saying absolutely nothing while all this is going on. when you read theourth

transcript all you hear are aldrin reading out the dials on his gauges and another guy saying any minute now they are going to run completely out of gas. while this is happening there is one guy from grumman, which build lunar module,e has run tests saying that if the eagle landed on too much propellant it might blow up. while everyone in mission control as terrified that they are about to run out of gas, he is praying they do run out of gas. so finally it touches down, armstrong says tranquillity base, t eagle has landed, the first reaction is another restaurant, charlie duke, saying we are all about to turn blue here, he can't even say the word tranquillity. this is the fantastic step. one of my favorite things learning about this is armstrong did such a beautiful job setting eagle down, that he set it down so gently that the shock

absorbers inde the legs were not correctly deployed and the bottom of this latter is three and a half feet from the lunar surface. he climbs down from the ladder, steps onto one of eagle's landing pads and makes sure he can get back up on the ladder to get back into the craft before he takes the one small step. here is a really good picture of buzz coming down. it turned out to be extremely difficult putting on all this stuff to go out and then get through that hatch and climb down these stairs because basically what these men are wearing, they're basically wearing little space ships of their own, because they can be attacked by michael meteorites, they have to be pressurized corn, like you are wearing a giant inner tube, it is terribly difficult to walk and terribly difficult to do something for some mysterious reason, mr. aldrin forgot to take pictures of mr. armstrong on the moon.

the only pictures he took of him with these big panoramas where armstrong is this tiny figure. .. >> so that night after finishing all of their chores they said later the worst chore was having to plant the flag because they didn't really know what the lunar surface was going to be

like, and there were a number of scientists, in fact, who thought it was going to be this giant pile of dust that would swallow anything that landed on it. but, in fact, they discovered there was a very little tiny thin piece of dust and underneath it was this hard granite. d they pounded and pounded away on this flag pole, and they could only get it 3 or 4 inches in, and they were convinced that with millions watching around the world on tv it would fall over, and ty would be humiliated, and that would be the worst possible thing that could happen on this mission. 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 betweenhe earth and the sun, and then where armstrong had positioned his hammock, he was right in line of the telescope aboard eagle, and he said it was like having a giant unblinking blue

eye staring at him all night long. and the final thing that happened, somebody bumped into one of those buttons and broke it off, and that 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 actually gets to say mission accomplished and celebrate. but the thing that was ver funny about this was that michael crichton easterfying -- terrify l novel had just come out the andromeda strain, but i'm convinced this people in the top level of the government into thinking what if they have something like that? so they came up with this bizarre quarantine procedure where the astronaut had to put on these horrible suits and be

quarantined for 21 days, and then they lived in a trailer. in the middle of all this, they opened the hatch in the pacific ocean, so the entire quarantine made no sense at all. the one time missi control gets to relax and enjoy themselves is after splashdown, so here they are actually cheering. and here are the men in their little airstreai trailer, quarantine trailer greeting president nixon. and the one wdow inside this trailer is at, like, the height of most people's belt. so they're constantly crouching down for everything. no, 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 hado be carted aboard hornet which is the aircraft carrier taking them back, and then they're 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 leis for their wives, and the first question buzz had for his wife w how soon could she get him clean underwear? and even in quarantine mr. armstrong had a birthday in quarantine, so he got to have a bihdayn quarantine with the people celebrating. now, the thing about apollo 1 11 is people say, well, what did we get out of going to the moon? and we got an incredible number of things, frankly. we got revutions 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 as 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 americanshad been the agent for humanity to reach the moon. and you could almost say this is worth almost any price of any kind of money t be spent because if everyone loves you, maybe you don't need so many tanks. but, 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 ne life after the moon, but armstrong and aldrin did not. armstrong says he was quite satisfied with his wife, but it seems pretty disappointing. all of these men were only 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, d then he worked for a few, he became a spokesman for chrysler, and then he wked on a few corporate board of directors and that was it.

mr. aldrin, meanwhile, had a sort of mental breakdown. became terribly depressed, became an alcoholic, had terrible problems with women, and i actually do think he's one of the bravest astronauts for admitting this problem bause he comes from a long history of a military family. and fo someone from the military to admit mental problems takes tremends bravery, so i do think he's one of the bravest of all the astronauts. and a number of people wanted to know, you know, has the uted 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 froth book, but it's not something i wrote. it's something mr. armstrong said. and this is from one of the flig directors, and his name is gary griffin. when w finished the apollo program, jack schmidt had a fellowship at cal tech. he had a little money left in that, he spent most of it, but he had a little left, and he

pulled together 25 or 30 people that had all worked on apollo. we talk about what we had done, why we had done it, how did we do it. and armstrong and conrad and schmidt, and it was a great experience. and we all h our ideas, but armstrong did something very interesting. he was up in cincinnati teaching engineering, and he got up at the blackboard, and he drew a set of curves. they looked kind of like mountain peaks, and he had them all out like this, and he had one of them titled leadership, one of them titled threat, one of them titled good economy, he had one of them titled peace or world peace, 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 happened tg be ready for that whe all of those curves lined up. so what i hope is that all of you will be ready aga when all those curves line up.

thank you very much. [applause] soy question is, i hopyou dot mind if i take off m jacket, and my other question is do any of you have any questions? yes, sir. >> yeah. did they find any germs or any microbes -- >> not at all. >> from the moon? it's like sterile? >> it is completely sterile. for all of human history the on has looked exactly the same. >> it hasn't flown around or anything? >> no. it's looked exactly the same for all of human history. >> dsn't have a wind? >> i has no atmosphere at all. >> wow. >> and i'm going to tell you an incredible story. we have a whole notion of how the moo was born. do you know how it was born? >> [inaudible] >> that's right. we know from 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 the earth that were broken off by that collision were captured by the earth's gravity, and they formed to 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, anything like the earth does? >> no. the moon has a bunch of tngs called 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 eagleentarther than it was supposed to. any other questions? someone must have a question. yes, ma'am. >> [inaudible] >> what? >> is the flag still standing? >> it is, and in fact, there's an exciting thing happeni righ now. nasa has arand new satellite circling the moon taking

pictures, and it's going to take picture of of all the apoo landing sites. so you should be able to see the bottom half of the lunar landers. you'll see the apolo employee missions that -- missions that had those little jalopies, dune buggies, you'll see those, and you might even be able to see some flag. i'm not sure 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 it actually came out one small step for man? >> when i listened -- i grew up surrounded by mid western drawlers, which he is, and when i listen to this tape, i hear him say one step for a man. he says that he says it, most people cnot hr it on the tape, so we historians put it with an asterisk. yes, sir. >> well, i'm wondering about all

these otherission you know, this was like a pioneering one to go up to the moon, but we've 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 problems? >> 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 a come up with a new way of dog things, and that's what their training did for them >> what about these contractors? who's keeping track of the qualityontrol? who's keeping track of everything that goes in -- >> that's what nasa did in that giant building you saw. in fact, one of the brilliant

things nasa did was 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 percent reliability where if something was sent into them from one of their manufacturers that had more than a .1 percent failure rate, it was rejected. but thi spacecraft was s complicated that even under that 4,000 things could fail, and it would still fall within that reliability. so when you consider, when you really 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 mor of a miracle it is. >> well, how much redundancy did they have? >> constant redundancy. >> yeah. >> that was the other thing they did. >> so if one thing doesn't work,

you can do it other ways? >> yes, exactly. except they did not have two engines to get off the mn. they only had one rocket to get off the moon, so that was always a hair-raising moment during the apollo missions. >> how do these pple keep eir cool? i mean, you'd be really a nervous type of thing was you know -- because you know so much. >> yeah. >> i don't see how they managed to keep their cool. >> it's what they did for a living, that was their unique quality. no that they were daredevils, not that they were wild, brave, crazy guys, anything, it was that they were cool characters under the greatest of pressures. yes, ma'am. >> we've heard some talk in the past couple of yea of possibly people wanting to return tohe moon. what value do you see in that? >> i think that actually we are not going to have a big manned space program again until we have competition. rst, ihink 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 you tnk that it is, but as far as a giant program like apollo such as going back to the moon and 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 will power of ordinary americans to do it. but i do think that will happen. i think russia, china or india will pose a competition for us that we'll want to meet or some busine will whether it's 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 10-15 years there will be a revolution in booster technology, and we will ha space tourism. it'll be expensive, but it won't be multimillionaire expensive. it'll be, you know, like going on the queen elizabeth or something like that. luxurious and expensive, but i think at least af you don't get

to fly in zero g, your children will. yes? >> we're advancing quite rapidly,t seems in robotics. so i'm wondering are they going to be able to develop robots that wil be able to do whatever a human could do or maybe even betterith, younow, the technology? >> what do you think? >> i'm wondering if they would raer 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 as being a probe that they send up, you could say the rer that went to mar is the a robot. you can say that 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 the robot can tell us. you know? yes, sir. >> well, as a, pardon me, 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 na is about 7 miles away from us right now? show of hands? >> yeah. >> okay. if i were to walk into a shopping mall and ask pple 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 connaissance orbiter which, in fact, was launched just last

week -- how many you heard anything about that on tv? okay. because of the fact that they're primarily an unmanned mission center, no one pays attention to it. so in -- 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, eh. send a person up, they pay some attention. >> yes, that's true. i agree. anyone else? well, thank you so much. this has been areat night. i hope you had a good time. i hope it was informative, i hope you paid attention and thank you kindly. [applause] >> craig nelson served as the vice president and exive eder

of -- editor of harper, row, hyperion of random house. for more information, visit craig nelson .u.s. >> we're here at the oregon council for social stues conference in oregon with stephen dow beckham, author of oregon indians, voices from two centuries. this book is a collection of primaryocuments. why was it important for you to tell the story this w? >> i felt that native americans needed to help tell their own story, and their voices have not been well heard, nor readily visible. for 45 years i gathered materials and dpped them in file folders, and eventually they became this volume. and how long have you been working on this? [laughte >> well, the book really started in 1964 and culminated when it was published by oregon state

university press. but in addition to the documents,he volume has a series of essays that provide the historical context or chronology that introduces each of the periods in federal indian policy. >> you talk a little bit about an introduction about an event in 1792 that was kind of the genesis of the book. y don't you tell us a little bit about that event. >> well, in 1792, in the voyages of the enlightenment to the north pacific, european nation states and ultimatety will united states of america made contact with the native peoples of this region. to me one of the electrifying moments was sitting in the britirh museum library in london and reading the diari of the vancouver expeditio and in one of those diaries appeared t word, and i thought, oh, my goodness, what does this mean? i contacted a scholar named

victor, and i said, victor, i have these wds, they were written in 1792, can you give me a translation? and victor said, my friends, my friends, i'm so pleased the meet you. he said, this is a term of greeting. and that was, i thought, a fascinating way to document first contact, first undon'ter, first -- encounter, first documented relationship between europeans and native americans in oregon, my friends, my friends, we're so pleased to meet you. >> the titles of the chapters include removals a reservations, walking to white man's land, and the disastrous policy of termination. but you end on a happier note with the last chapter titled restoration of hope which talks about the last 30 years of the 20th century. where is the u.s. today on their relationship with american indians, and have we seen much improvement in the 21st century? >> we've seen signifint improvemenin terms of federal policy and program. it really commenced with the indian self-determination

educational assistance act when tribes were begin more and more power to take charge of their own destiny. tribes no longer had to deal with the direct of indian affairs but could set up their own administration and contract for the services that they wanted. this empowerment also came in the area of education where tribal people were able to work with local school districts to develop curriculum, participate in teacher training programs, acquire curricular materials -- everything from text to visual information -- and help operate summer culture camps. so this empowerment came gradually starting with the 1960s, 1970s and then grew dramatically with the impt of the indian gaming regulatory act. by 10 oregon tribes had secured compacts with the state of oregon and were poised and ready to establish casinos. casinos mean dollars, and dollars give the tribesn opportunity for self-determination and program development unlike anytng that

had occurred previously. >>ho do you think will read your book, and when -- what do you hope they're going to take from at? >> wl, the volume was written for a general audience. hope in particular that teachers and students will encounter it because there are the prima materials and voices from the past thatpeak to events pivotal i native american history. it gives a student an opportunity to hear a voice, to read a tt and then weigh the consequences of what has been saidnd what does it mean. >> you book was over 500 pages. how did you decide what documents to leave out? >> that was aard decision because ieft out two-thirds of those that i had selected. in other wor, this is the tip of the icerg of the information thatas out there. but i tried to select documents and voices from people or events that really mattered or counted. many of the things that are described in the book or recounted in the book are rning-point events such as the

decision to terminate weste oregon tribes or the decision to open a reservation for homesteading in an american settlement. those were highly consequential moments for the tribal people, and their voices and their response to those events are part of the fabric of this book. >> what's your opinion on the teaching of u.s./ameran indian history in this country? i think the teaching of it has improved signicantly. there's mu greater cultural sensitivity and awareness and embrace of the multiple ethnicities of the united states since the civ rights movement of the960s. we've wised up. we've integrated advertising, we've integrated programs, we've integrated movies, we've integrated housing, we even have an african-american president. >> and what's next for you? >> what's next was a new book that came out this week. it's a corporate histo. i have started writing some business histories. the next book later this year is

going to be a history of the wyoming railroad corporation of rochester, new york. so my interests range from the native americans to corporate history. >> thank you. >> did you know you can view booktv programs on -- online? go to booktv.org. type the name of the author, book or subject into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of t page. select the watch link. now you can vw the entire program. you mht also explore the recently on book the box or the featured programs box to find and vie recent and featured programs. >> we are at the cumberld county plic libra in

fayetteville, north carolina, speaking with paul cuadros, author of a home on the field. mr. cuadros, what made you decide to write this book? >> i decided to write this book because i noticed that what was happening in rural communities in the south and in the midwest was a demographic change, a migration of latino immigrants to these small towns that i knew was going to transform both the culture and those communities. i thought that was a very, very interesting story and one that would influence and change our country in many different ways, and that's the kind of story that i was vy, very interested in doing and capturing. >> and why did you use the city and when yoq traveled there, what did you find? >> at the time it had two poultry processing plants, a feed mill, about 300 chicken farmers in chat ham county, and so for me it was an easy choice

because the food processing industry is a big generator for y people are migrating from mexico or central america into these small town communities. >> and when you were there, you write about people you met who didn't want immigrants living in their town, but they wanted to benefit in the sense of food labor, they wanted their food cheaper. w did you talk to them about this dichotomy? >> the town is a chicken town, so it runs on the poultry-processing industry. and of the people in the city who saw their influence come, saw their town begin to change quite rapidly during the '90s, and they responded to it in various ways much like how the cotry's responding to immigration today generally. sometimes with a lot of aer, a lot of confusion, and that was a really interesting and difficult part to capture for the towns folk, the long time residents of the city. since then they've come to kind

of an accommodation with the migration. it's perhaps more than 50 percent hispanic today, and the town has been transformed and changed, and actually economically it's gone a lot better. times are tough now for everybody, but there's no doubt the growth of the city during the '90s and the early part of the 20th ctury is due to the chicken workers, the foreigner workers. >> you used soccer as a way to help assimilate the newcomers. why did you choose soccer? >> i chose soccer because i moved here, i was bored, i didn have anything to do, i played in high school, and i got involved with a group of boys coaching them, andt quickly became apparent to me that there was no varsity team at the high school. and the latino boys definitely wanted to play at the high school, and they had been advocated for several years to create a team at jordan matthews high school. unfortunately, the administration didn't think it was a good idea, so i led an

effort to try andet a team together at jm. we were successful, and we went on, and we had tremendous success on the field with these kids. but really the boys serve as a means to kind of let you know who this community is, why they've come, what their dreams are, what their hopes are and how they are assimilating into our society. >> what do you think we as a country or our government needs to do regarding immigration, what policies do you think need to be enacted? >> this is a very complex question to answer. the president has called on beginning a debate about immigration or migration. and hopefully that'll happen th fall. there have been proponents to provide some sort of access or pathway to citizenshipor some of the migrants who have come, and perhaps that's a good idea. there are people, of course, who are opposed to that. i think when you look at the kids on the team