saying this phrase because it was sort of everything that was going on with this book and everything going on in my life at that moment and i just couldn't believe it because the thin tt really shocked me in researching this book was out tremendously difficult this race was, especially of dangerous, how unbelievably danger it was, so to illustrate that i would like to talk to you about at least the three times we know of that one guy while the boys working for nassau almost got killed and his name is neal 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 t x-15, working with a lot of other people. in this moment he was co piloting that be 29, ferrying

another pilot, the skyrocket has already been released in this picture. but at this time the sky roct was still attached to the be 29. armstrong a his co-pilot noticed that one of the propellers was going wrong. for those of you who don'tfly, its 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 ca jettison me, i am having bowel problems. starck, you are going now, they jettisoned him. after they did, the propeer came loose and turned into the applying chain saw. is sliced through the blade with a skyrocket was hitting and slice righthrough two of the other four engines. the y rocket had to come down with valve problems. this giant b-29s had to land on one engine and everyone cam

home okay. the secondime armstrong very nearly died while working at nasa was on the catastrophic gemini eht missi, the way we decided to go to the mo, astronauts had to learn how to run to and docking space. during gemini they tried learning to dock and rendezvous many times, and many tis they fail. this was the first successful time they got, whi was gemini ii and immediately after docking these two craft began spinningnd 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 missio

one of the thrusters had gotten stuck and was firing over and over again causing them to shift out of control. 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 sar 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 dhirds of the second to spare. he took off his uniform and went back to his offi 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 ofce. a coupleays later they asked him what was it like when you almost died that time?

id, you know, it is always a sad day when you lose machine. that shows you the incredible difficulties they had in undergoing this. besides the fact that how incredibly dangerous the space race was, the other thing that was incredible about itas the technology. heres werner von braun posing before, you can see four of the five engines of his masterpiece, the saturn v, and these engines, even thougwe have the finest rocket team in the world, it took seven years to make these engines because the eines kept owing up. you actually want engines to blow up because basically when you fly a rocket,ou are flying enormous bombs with explosions pointed in one direction. these explosions were n pointed inne direction, they were blowing up in all different directions which is what it took seven used to 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 in their launch towers a lot which is a problem you don't want, to crash into your lunch hour. these rockets have gimbals that sliglyilt so that you can slightly tilt your rocket away from your launch pad and avoid hitting the side. e other thing about them that is so incredible is the werner von aun team engineered these giant hold dn arms to keep the rocket fromnly rising a little bitntil all of these enormous motors had achieved full power and then itould release the rocket and it would ride into the air in a stable flyg fashion 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 because mfavorite part of doing this book, of course i like hearing about the astronauts and the mission control people but m favorite part was hearing about pple we never heard about which is those 400,000 people, everydy from within the r weaving memory cores with computers, to plumbers and things like that, an iredible thing. you can see the vehicle assembly building on the left, the mous, 500 ft. high building, clouds wilform inside and it will rain. they assemble tse fantastic rockets. that is actually the apollo 11 rocket with its monster red tor,t is on something the size of a baseball diamond, basically cutiant tank leaks, they are taking it a little bit

over a mile to write by the lent -- atlantic ocean. itill take seven hours to ge 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. thfirst 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 landn thd middle of albuquerqu they decided to go with the notion landing. the real reason they did it was because they constantly expected that the rocket would blow up o the pad and these capsules were made with a special little group of rockets on the t that if anything went wrong, the astronauts could separate their capsule from the rest of the rocket and splash wn into the atlantic. that is the main reason they designed that way. all of the gemini and apollo

capsules cou 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 anoth way, that other way is the fact that we can't believe how rimentary things were at the dawn of nasa, at the dawn of the space race. one of my favorite stnries 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 living creature into space, they designed a cradle forhe creature to ride in like an egg carton, they made is cradlfor the pig and put the take on back and strapped in and the pig almost immiately died. the cretary said you can't put a pig on its back, its belly fat will suffocate it and that is what happened. they had to givup on using pigs in spac and stch to moeys. this will show you the other high technology, these are women

assembling the space suits that theen will use to walk on e 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 mputer 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 are 30 stories i the air, looking at the little tiny command module and underath in its cradle is the little tiny lunar module, and up at the top ofhose rockets that i told you about that would take off and blast into the atlantic ocean is necessary, the entire rest of that tower is to esce earth's gravity and go nto earth orbit. that is all theest of the rocket is for, and the rest of the trip can be made with those little tiny rocts 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 wild cowboy guys, but in fact in order to become an astronaut, you had to be a military test pilot. military testilots are signal quality, they can sit and read out gauges and dials on aircraft while it is about to crash io the ground, so that people can know what was gog 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 chill that he s caed deice commander behind his back. partly because he is terribly shy, partly because his not a particularly social person. many people told me tt when you talk toim you can't tell if he is listening to what you say or not. he is that sort of anti-social. when you think 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, whilehe 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 onof the finest books ever written by anyone anasa. he ended of becoming the head of the first air and space museum at the smithsonian and now of paints water flowers in -- watercors in florida. then buzz aldrin, who is no longer eugene, he officially chged his name to buzz, he was actually a vy interesting person because he did evything he could become an astronaut. he went for and air force carr because he wanted to be an astronaut, studied rendezvous

and docking at mit because he wanted to be an astraut and when he became an astronaut, he was so aggressive in pursuing s career that he sort of alienated most of the executives, the point where even though nasa follows the navy in a lot of ways, the original navy team was born under the na, there are a lot of nav guys working at na, under navy rules, theomnders not the first person to step into unknown territory, an underling steps into unknown territory, and that would hav had buzz 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 thought it was a good idea at e time, ey want to armstrong. but ty didn't want to say is this was motivated on persal reasons, so in the dress rehearsals of apollo 9 and apollo 10, they found out that inside the lar module, it is

so tiny in there, that trying to get the 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, includingike collins, they believed this was armstrong's command decision, thate uld be first. you have three answers to e question, how did they decide armstrong would be first on the moon. the thing that is really extraordinary about nas besides that they manage this incribly compcated 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 foright years, he had two emissions. think abou training to do something for eight years and doing it twice. but that ishat they went throh. on the brilliant thing they did was me up with these simulators which simulated

everything on a mission. they put their ground control people and astronauts through mission after mission after mission in the simulators, it became so well done, did such a od job of tining them that during crises, ere were many crises on apollo missions, far more than we really know about, such as the famous apollo 13, you would think from hearing about it that every other apollo mission went fine with problem, but there were problems over problems over problems and all of them were resolved because of this training. asonauts would face incredibly difficult situations, the 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 , that is a plane that flies these sweeping parabolas like that. when you go like 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 is actually ming out of the hatch of the lunar lander in the background and the sending in 0 gravity to practice that in this airpla flying these problemss. they also had to learn geology. originally, the geologists who came in to nasa to train the apollo astronaut they have a ph.d. program, tried to give them that and almost succeeded, but instead they decided what they really needed were brilliant i witnesses to develop the eyeso you would see what was an intesting rock when you were on the moon. that is what they deled. one of my favorite things about armstrong, he is such a perfecist in dng his job, the minute he got out of the lunar lander he was supposed to grabbed a rock but got so excited taking ptures, he couldn't do it. he had to be nagged by ground control three times to get the rock. the other traing they had was

jungle training in pama where they had to learn to live among indians and get water and things like that. went mike colns was asked what was his favorite thing about his jungle training, what was the important thing he learned, he said don't eat code i want you to remember that, don't be toae toad toadtose tt. 1 million people came to watch the launch of apollo 11, this is mrs. spiro agnew, ladybird johnson, vice president at the time, behind em, 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 apollo 1. uc president nixon who was present at the time, did not attend. he was worried disaster might happen and might tnt h presidency. he decided to sd spiro agnew instead. here is the ground control at kennedy, the firing room, watching as well. yocan't really see it in the projector but if you look closely at every one of these faces, you c see half calm, half year, have nervousness on alst every single expression. one of the astounding things to me is they were racing so hard toet to the moon that they would change plans at the last mite. here are the equivalent of post-it notes. it says flight plan written in pencil, this is stuck on to the dashboard of the apollo 11 command module. what happened is, which is

incredible abo this moment, the astronauts didteem to be worried about things technically going wrong. they were worried that they uld screw up and embarrass the united states on the global stag they were so worried about this that at liftof face thain dead silence for 30 minutes, th were also so worried about it that mike collins started developing nervous tics in his eyelids while waiting for the rocket to lif off. in fa, armstrong was convince 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 ofit is a real surprise! this i probably one of the most beautiful pictures i have ever seen, this is of all 11 lifting f, it was a perfect lift off on a perfect day and evrything went absolutely perfecty, ten billion things could have gone wrong and the number of people

who worked on this, 400,000 watching their dre come true, it makes my eyes well up an 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, thfantastic trail it is making. here is the view of stagin staging s come up by a russian named tsiolkovsy who coined the phrase the rockets rain. i wish we really have brought it trained. you use this ormous amount of power to get off the ground, then you get rid of it to make aircraft lighter and lighter. what happe 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 likehis. what is incredible is the windows, the covers aren't off the windows just yet. but if they were,he jerk o the moon pools t rocket back like this, and the fireball that you created shoots in frontf you and when the next engine lights up, you issued through the fireball. it is pretty speacular. itakes me want to fly an apollo mission myself. something that makes me not want to fly an apollo mission is looking at this control panel. he is the dashbod for the command module. they tried to make it more difficult to use than this, i don't know how they could do it. you havto memorize the position of every single thing. in training, in simulationthey founout men in space suits would frequently be breaking these buttons as theyoved around the cabin, so they made covers for all of ese buttons but they didn'make covers for

the ones on the lunar module on apollo 11 and we will find out why that is a problem in a minute. when i was a kid and we watch these shows, we ought space food was very exciting and it is only recently that i reazed that all of it was the equivalent of eating flavored toothpas, that you had these freeze packs, and you would shoot hot water into them and squeeze them so you could have a beef with veetables, flavored toothpaste, canned 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 tronauts did not come 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 th 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 thangs he is supposed to do when he is on t moon, task after task after task into his sleeve. lots of times the astronauts worked so hard they never had a moment to really expeence what was going on aroundhem. i didn'tave a really good picture of apollircling the earth but apparently it is one of the greatest things in the world. you orbits the earth andvery 90 minutes you have a new day. the son rises and sets and you sethe gold and purple and when e sun -- whenhe 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 earthetting farther away that u can see the moon coming, you don'tee it until you are right on top of it. when they arrive, they arve

with sol eclipse, the sun shining behind the moon and this big, baron moon surrounded by , 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 astronau thought was very disturbing, they thought the moon was a very frightening place, not a good place to land. here you have -- the other thing i love about this is i the original capsule which you can't see any more at the smithsonian but originally the covering of bo 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 sputnikor the same reason. the designer wanted people on earth to be able to see it.

it was quite beautiful, these two silver ships. a l of people complain abmut the look of the lunar lander, that it is ugly but i think it is quite fantastic because it shows the fact at when you have a space ship that doesn't trav in an atmosphere you can make it look like anything. is really a shahat science-fiction people have never followed up on this, they make their space ships look like ships and bargeand thingsike that but if it is not sailing through an atmosphe you don't have to make itaerodynamic. at this moment, armstrong has just separated from mr. collins 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 capsules 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 i should be. so the landing did happen where it wasupposed to land. nasa had plannedor the computer to land the ship entily, human beings would not be involved but that little puff of air combined with some other things that happened along the way meant that en 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 control 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 in colombia to eagle and back again. the same time this happens the two different radar systems o eagle start interferingith

each other and the computer gets overloaded because it can't procs these two pces of information happening and it's that sending out warning systems that it has to be completely restarted over and over again because itan process all this information. everyone at mission control is having fits, they are losing their minds, armstrong is saying absolute nothing while all thiss goi on. when you read the fouh 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 hs one guy from umman, which build a lunar module, he has run testsaying that if the eagle landed on too much propellant i might blgw up. while everyo in mission control as terrifi that they are about to run o of gas, he is praying they do run out of gas. so finally it touches down, artrong says tranqulity base, the 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 ste 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 inside the legs were not correctly deployednd the bottom of this latter is three and a halfeet frothe lunar surface. he climbs down from the ladder, steps onto one of eagle's landing pads and makesure he can get back up on theder to t back into the craft before he takes the one small step. here is a really good picture of buzz coming down. it turned o to be extremely diffult putting on all this stuff to go o 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 wearin 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 pictes of mr. astrong on the moon. the only pictures he took of h th these big panoramas wre armstrong is this tiny figure. ..

>> so that night after finishing all of their chores ty said later the worst chore was having to plant the flag because they dn'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 w this hard granite. and they pounded and pounded away on this flag pole, and they could only get it 3 or 4 inches in, d they were convinced that 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.

even though they'd been awake working for 24 hours, they got almosto sleep before they had to take off again. it was too cold, and it was too bright. therwas too much light coming in fro the windows between t earth and the sun, and then where armstrong had positioned his hammock, he was right in ne 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 backo columbia, to take them back home. soldrin had to use a pen cap to get the button to work. so there you are. and here we have the beautiful spladown and one of the things that's veryice about splashdown i that everyone at nasa actually gets to say mission accomplished and celebrate. but the thing that was very funny about this was that michael crichton eterfying --

terrify l novel had just come out the andromeda strain, but m convinced this people in the top level of the government into thinking what if they have something like that? so they ce up with this bizarre quarantine procedure ere the astronauts 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, the opened the hatch in the pacific ocean, so the entire quarantine 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 airstream trailer, quarantine trailer greeting president nixon. and the one window 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 cak and here they are, they had to be cartedbod hornet which is the aircrt carrier taking them back, and thenhey're carted, and the trailer isutn 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 was how soon could she get him clean derwear? and even in quarantine mr. armstrong had a birthday in quarantine, so he got to he a birthday in 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 revolutions in science, we got a new understanding of

how the moon was born, we got incredible advances in everhing from computers to dicalquipment, weot a global idea of the ecology from seeing pictures ofhe earth from oer space, but one thing we really got was the united states as the mostcclaimed 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 habeen the agent for humanity to reach the moon. and you could almost say this is worth almost any price of any kind of money to be spent because if everyone loves you, maybe you don't need so many tas. but, so really think going to the moon was worth it. but i'm not sure if it was worth it for tse men. as i told you before, mike collins h a pretty nice lif afr the moon, but armstrong and aldrin did not. armstrong ss he was quite satisfied with hi wife, but it

seems prettyisappointing. 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, and then he worked for a few, he became a spokesman for chrysler, and then he worked on a few corporate boards of directors and that was it. mr. aldrin, meanwhile, had a sort of mental breakdown. he became terribly depressed, became an alcoholic, had terrible problems with women, and i actually dohink he's one of the bravest astronauts for admitting this problem because he comesrom a long history of a military family. and for someone from the military to admit mental prlems takes tremendous bravery, so i do think he's one of the bvest of all the astronauts. and a number of people wanted 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 o 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 finisd the apollo program, jack schmidt had fellowship at cal tech. he h a little money left in that, he spent mos of it, but he had a little left, and he pulled togethe 25r 30 people that had all worked on apoll we talk about what we had done, why we had done it,ow did we do it. and armstrong andonrad and schmidt, and i was a great experience. and we all had our ideas, but armstrong didomething 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 ande had them all out like this, and he had one of them titled leadership, one of them titled threat, one of themitled goo economy, he

had one of them titled peace or world peace, something like that, and h 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 hapned to be ready for that when all of those curves lined up. what i hope is that all of you will be ready again whe all those curves line up. thank u very much. [appuse] so m question is, i hope you don't mind if i take off my jacket, and my other question is do any of you have any questions? yes, sir. >> yeah. did they find any germs or any microbes -- >>ot atll. >> from the moon/ it's liketerile? >> its complety sterile. for all of human history the moon has looked exactly the same. >> it hasn't flown aroun or anything? >> no. it's looked exactly the same for all of human history. >> doesn't have wind? >> 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? >> [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 piece of the earth that were broken off by that collision we captured by the earth's gravity, a 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, anything like the earth does? >> no. the moon has a bunch o things lled mass cons which a concentrations of harder matter inside of it, andhat's why it has strange qualities to its gravity. that was part of the other

reason eagle wt farer 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,here's an exciting thi happening right now. nasa has a brandew satelite circling the moon taking pictures, and it's going to take picture of of all the apollo 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 tt good. yes, sir. >>s it true that armstrong bl the big line, that he was nervous and meant to say one small step for a man and it actually came out one sll step for man? >> when i listened -- i grew up

surrounded by mid western drawlers, which he is, and when i liste to this tape, i hear him say one step for a man. he says tha he says it, most people cannot hear it on the tape, so we historians put it with an asterisk. yes, sir. >>ell, i'm wondering about all these other missions. you know, this was like a pioneering one to go up to the moon, but we've had other miions, 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 happed 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 a new way of doing things, and that's what their training did for them. >> what about these contractors? who's keeping track of the quality control? 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 vious parts of the spaceship would remember a human life depends on what i do. and the quality was astounding. nasa ad a 99.9 percent reliability where if something was sent into them from one of their manufacturers that had more than a .1 pcent failure rate, was rejected. but this spacecraft was so 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 we doing, the fact that, you knowa mber of msions weren't catastrophes is amazing. the more you know about this, th more of a miracle it is. >> well, how much redundancy did th have? >> constant redundancy. >> yeah. >> that was the other thing they did. >> so if one thing doesn't wk, you can do it other ways? >> yes, exactly. except 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 do these people keep their cool? mean, you'd be really a nervoutype of tng 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. not that they were daredevils, not that they we 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 years of possibly people wanting to return to the 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. 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 you think that it is, but as far as a giant program like apollo such as going back to the moon and going on to mars, thi we're going to need either political or economicompetition for that kind of huge program to happen so that nasa has theolitical will power of ordinary america 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 business 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 i 10-15 years there will b a revolution in booster technology, and we will have space tourism. it'll be expensive, but it won't be mtimillionaire expenve. it'll be, you know, like going on t queen elizabeth or somein like that. luxurious and expensive, but think at least if you don't get to fly in zero g, your children will. yes? >> we're advancing quite pidly, it seems in robotics. so i'm wondering are the 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, the 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 as being a probe that they send up, you could say the rover at 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 stu to keep them alive that's very difficult. but at the same time there's nothing like a human being response to things ineal life for exploration. there's only so much the robot ca tell us. you know? yes, sir. >> well, as a, pardon e, as an extension to that i'd like to ask a question of all of you guys, how many o you know that the premier science research center for nasa is about 7 miles away fm us right now? show of hands? >> yeah. >> okay. if i were to walk io 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 reconnaiss orbiter which, in ct, was launched just last week -- how many of you heard anything about that on tv? okay. cause of the ft that they're primarily an unmanned mission center, no one pays atttion to it. so in -- if u want to look at itrom the analysisf 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' true. i agree.

anyone else? well, thank you so much. this has been a great night. i he you had a good time. i hope it was inormative, i hope you paid attention and thank you kindly. [applause] >> craig nelson served as the vice president and exive eder of -- editor of hper, row, hyperion of random house. for more information, visit craig nelson .u.s. >> we're here at the oregon council for social studies conference in oregon with stephen dow beckham, author of oregon iians, voices fro two centies. this book is a collection of primary documents. why was it important for you to tell the story this way? >> 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 yea i gathered materials and dropped them in file folders, and eventlly they became this volume. and how long have you been workin on this? [laughter] >> wel the book really started in 1964 and culminated when it was published by oregon sta university press. but in addition to the documents, the volume has a series of essays that provide the htorical context or chronology that introduces each ofhe periods in federal indian policy. >> you talk a little bit about an introduction about anvent in 1792 that was kind of the genesis of the book. why 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 coact with the native peoples of this region. to me one of the electrifying

moments was sitting in the british museum library in london d reading the diarif the vancouver expedition. and in one of those diaries appeared the word, and i though oh, my goodness, what does this mean? i contacted a scholar named victor, and i said, vtor, i ve these words, they were written in 1792, can you give me a translation? and victor said, my friends, m friends, i'm so pleased the meet you. he said, this is a termf greeting. and that was, i thought, a fascinating way to document first contact, first undon'ter, first -- encnter, 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 and reservations, walking to white man's land, and the disastrous policy of termition.

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 significant improvemenin terms of federal policy and program. really commenced with the indian self-determination educational assistance act when tribes were begin more andor power to take charge of their own destiny tribes no longer had t deal with the direct of indian affairs but could set up their own administration and contract for the services that they wanted. this empowerment alsame in the area of education where tribal people were able to work with local school districts to develo curriculum, participate in teacher training programs, acire curricular materials -- everything from text to visual inrmation -- and help operate summer cultre camps. so this empowerment came

gradually starting with the 1960s, 1970s and then grew dramatically with t impact of the indian gaming regulatory act. by 1990 oregon tribes had secured cpacts with thetate of oregon and were psednd ready to establish casinos. casinos meanollars, a dollars give the tribes an opportunity for self-determination and program development unlike anythinghat had occred previously. >> who do you think will read your book, and when -- what do you hope they're going to take from it? >> well, the volume was written for a general audience. i hope in particular that teachers and students wil encounter it because there are the primary materials and voices from the past that speak to events pivotal in native american history. it gives a student an opportunity to hear a voice, to read a text and then weigh the consequences of what has been said and what does it mean. >> your book was over 500 pages. how did you decide what

documents to leave out? >> that w a hard decision because i left out two-thirds of those that i had selected. in other words, this is the tip of the iceberg of the information that was out there. but i tried to select documents and voices from people or events that rlly mattered or counted. many of the things that are described in the book or recounted in the book are turning-point events such as the decision to terminate wtern oregon tribes or the decision to open a reservation for homesteading in an american selement. those were highly consequenti moments for the tribal people, and their voices and their response to those events are part of the fabric o this book. >> what's your opinion o the teaching of u.s./american indian story in this country? i tnk the teaing of it has improved significantly. there's much greater cultural sensitivity and awareness and embrace of the multiple ethnicities of the united states since the civil rights movement

of the 196. we've wised up. we've integrated advertising, '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 history. i have started writing some business histories. e next book later this year is going to be a history of the wyoming railrd corporation of rochesr, 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 int the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the pag select the watch link.

now you can view the entire program. yo might also explore the recently on book the box or the featured programs box to find and view recent and featured programs. >> we are at the cumberland county public library in fayetteville, north carolina, speaking with paul cuadros, author of a homen the field. mr. cuadros, what made you decide to write this book? >> i decidedo write this book because i noticedhat what w 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 vy, very interesting story and one that would influence and change our country in many different ways,

and that' the kind of story that i was very, very interested in doing and capturing. >> and why did you use the city and when you traveled there, what did you find? >> at the time itad 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 why people are migrating from mexico or central america into these small town communities. >>nd when you were there, you write about people you met who didn't want immicrants living in their town, but they wanted to benefit in the sense of food labor, they wanted their food cheaper. how did you talk to them about this dichotomy? >> the town is chicken town, so it runs on the poultry-processingndustry. and of the people in the city who saw their iluence come,

saw their town begin to change quite rapidly during the '90s, and they responded to it in various ways much like how the country's responding to immiation tod generally. sometimes with a lot of anger, a t of confusion, and that was a really interesting and difficult part to captureor the towns folk, the long time residents of e city. since then they've come to kind of an accommodation with the migration. it's perhaps more than 50 percent hispanic today, andhe town has beenransformed and changed, and actually economically it's gone a lot better. times are tough now f everybody, but there's no doubt e growth of the city during the 's and the early part of the 20th century 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 cse soccer because i moved here, i was bored, i

didn't have anything to do, i played in high school, and i got involved wit a group of boys coaching them,nd it quickly became apparent to me that there was no varsity team at the high school. and t latino boys definitely wanted to play athe 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 and get a team togethert jm. 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,hat their dreams are, what their hopes are and how ey 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 thi need to be enacted? >> this is a very complex question to answer. e president has called on benning a debate about

immigration or migration. and hopefly that'll happen this fall. therhave been propones to provide some sort of access or pathway toitizenship for some of the migrants who have come, and perhaps that's a good idea. there are people, ofourse,ho are opposed to that. i think when you look at the kids on the team and where they've bn, they've grown up here, they've gone to schools here, they're having children of their own, they're getting married and having children of their own, and yet their immigration status may bin question. i think that for that population something needs to be done to assist them to fully integrate into our society. ..

talk about the issues in that book. and this year they've chosen "a home on the field" which i'm very grateful for. and so we'll be talking abt some of the thieme -- themesnd issues in the book itself. issues like immigration, migrion. globalirion assimilation. all of those types of issues we can discuss. and what really makes it kind of good for the university is that the students will be basically reading about people their own age and pple that have had a very diffent experience than they have. so i'm hoping that they'll be that conctivity between the characters and the readers. >> and what's next for you, any books on the horizon?

>> yeah, i've got a lot of different projects i'm interested in doing. i think this is fascinati issue one of the biggest issues in our country today so i'll continue to write about it. >> great. we've been speaking with paul cuadros author of "a home on the field" how one championship team inspires hope for revival of small town america. thank you. >> thank you "booktv".