>> absolutely. >> oh, yeah. i'd come that far. you see, ed, for example, had not been in the simulator, landing simulator at all. it was my job to land. had not n in the simulator at all. it was my job to land. i had done hundreds of these things. i knew if i could see the surface, man, i could get down -- maybe not exactly where we were supposed to, but i could get down close to it. >> you would have made the landing. >> i would have at least, at least been able to take a visual look. i would have pitched over and taken the visual look and then made a decision. >> fair enough. well, we finally have you on the moon. mission accomplished. or was it? tell me about what you and ed did on the moon as you remember it? what were the highlights?

>> of course the first feeling was one of a tremendous sense of accomplishment i guess, if you will, tremendous sense of realizing that, hey, not too long ago i was grounded. now i'm on the moon. there was that sense of self satisfaction i think immediately. then that went away. we had a lot of work to do. i'll never forget that moment. another moment which i will never forget is after ed had followed me down and we had set out some of our equipment, taken emergency some ms. we had a few moments to look around. to look up in the black sky, totally black sky even with the sun shining on the surface, it's not reflected.

no diffusion, no reflection. and totally black sky and seeing another planet, planet earth. planet earth is only four times as large as the moon. so you can really still put your thumb and your forefinger around it at that distance. so it makes it look beautiful. it makes it look lonely. it makes it look fragile. you think to yourself just imagine the millions of people living on that planet and don't realize how fragile it is. i think this is a feeling everyone has had and expressed it in one fashion or another. but that was an overwhelming feeling in seeing the beauty of the planet on the one hand but

the fragility of it on the other. >> being alan shepard, of course, shortly after that golden moment, you decided to play a little golf. >> i didn't decide to play a little golf. that is a long story. woint tell the whole story. >> tell us what you think might be all right. it is a very famous story. i'm sure a lot of people would like to hear your version of it. >> well, as you know, so far i'm the only person to have hit a golf ball on the moon. probably will be for some time. being a golfer, i was intrigued before the flight by the fact that the ball with the same club head speed will go six times as far. it will -- its time of flight --

i won't say stay in the air because there's no air. its time of flight will be at least six times as long. it will not curve because there's no atmosphere to make it slice. i thought what a neat place to whack a golf ball. well, when i went to bob gilruth to tell him i wanted to hit a couple of golf balls, of course, absolutely no way. there was a series when i saw it was not a normal golf club. it was a handle with a scoop on the end to scoop up handles of dust with. that was already up there, would be thrown away. then we had a club head which i adapted to snap on this handle and two golf balls for which i paid, two golf balls and the club head. no expense to the taxpayer.

the thing that finally convinced bob was i said, boss, i'll make a deal with you. if we have screwed up, if we have had equipment failure, anything has gone wrong on the surface where you are embarrassed or we're embarrassed, i will not do it. ly not be so frivolous. i want to wait until the very end of the mission, stand in front of the television camera, whack these golf balls with this makeshift club, fold it up, stick it in my pocket, climb up the ladder, close the door and we're gone. so he finally said okay. and that's the way it happened. >> if full view of a huge worldwide audience, millions of people who have never forgotten to this day. alan shepard is probably still best known as the guy who played golf on the moon.

>> well, it was designed to be a fun thing. fortunately it is still a fun thing. the club -- the makeshift club is with the u.s. golf association in their museum. there has been absolutely no commercial i commercialism -- there's been absolutely no commercialism. one company tried to say it was their golf ball and we cut them off very quickly. it's been just a totally fun thing. >> and still is. >> yeah. >> now some general questions. i guess maybe we better get you back from the moon. can't just leave you up there. you played golf. now you closed the hatch and came back. after that, it wasn't too long thereafter that you finally decided you'd completed your run with nasa and moved on to other fields. >> well, as you recall, of course, the only scheduled missions were the sky lab missions. the crews were already assigned.

the joint mission with the soviets, crews were already assigned. so it was going to a long time. >> including your friend. he finally got his shot. >> we were so pleased. we were so pleased. bless his heart. can you imagine having to learn to speak russian to go into space? that is above and beyond the call of duty. but he did it. i'm not sure the russians understood him. but he did it. we were so pleased and so happy for him. >> i'm remembering you were with me on television because you were doing a job as a consultant, an on-the-air challenge when the landing was accomplished. we were thinking, my, they all just look great. little did we know they had been dosed with nitric acid, was it? do you remember after the fact they had caught -- they had inhaled something or another -- >> some kind of vapors.

>> from the ejection system and were in bad shape for quite a while. >> i have forgotten whether there was a leak or what happened on that deal. have to look that up. >> we'll look that up. we'll forget it now. obviously it's not important. that's their flight, their stuff. anyway, okay, general thoughts then. john glenn is about to fly again. you and he are pretty close to the same age. i wonder what your thoughts are about john flying. >> john is a couple years older than i am. i believe he's 77. but i had been saying for years that the taxpayers didn't get their money's worth out of glen because he made one flight and immediately went into the congress. and as a taxpayer, i objected to that. i had been telling john this for years and years. i called him up the other day

after the announcement and i said, john, i'm glad you're going to give me one more flight for my tax dollars. i think it's good, quite frankly. obviously there are a lot of things about how weightlessness treats individuals and the person's reaction to weightlessness is a function of the amount of exercise or lack thereof, general physical conditioning and the kind of things that one really needs to know. if you're going to be in a long-term mission, the more you find out the better shape you'll be in. so he's a good data point. he thinks he's in pretty good shape and he probably is. but his bones are still more brittle, obviously. and i'm sure that there will be some lessons learned even during that short period of time

looking at his general physical conditions before and after. i think it's a good thing. i think we'll learn something from it. >> do you think you'd like to fly again? >> oh, of course i would. of course i would. unfortunately i'm not in top health at the moment. >> that's just subject of time. >> yeah. you've talked some about nasa managers. for example, tim webb. >> it was interesting being involved with the old naca and then the nasa during the formation periods because naca obviously was a group of engineers basically.

they didn't have a political type administrator. but when webb came along, i mean what a fresh breath he was. he knew all the ins and outs of play. not that he was a lobbyist in any sense of the imagination, he didn't have to be. he had a great package. men in space. and he played it well. he really did. he did us a great favor, certainly responding so quickly and so rapidly to kennedy's really surprising decision to go to the moon. he did a good job. jim did a good job. as i said before, i came to him with a technical request, not

turned down. at least he had some engineering knowledge there somewhere. >> speaking of engineering knowledge, let's take bob gill breath. >> i like bob, i really did. bob had been in the aviation business forever. been right there at langley seeing him, not every day, but seeing him frequently and talking to people who had been with him, the old naca days and what they had done, just a remarkab remarkable, remarkable gentleman. and i think that he was really sort of a hands-on kind of guy, too. i obviously appreciate his decision to let me make the first flight. but he never told me why he made

that decision the way he did. i asked him several times over the years. he has always said, well, you were just the right man at the right time. but i'm sure that he was very personally involved in that selection process. there was some suggestions from some of the other folks in the program that maybe he had made a mistake in the decision. and there might have been someone else who qualified better. but he did not change his mind. so he's one of my heroes. >> how about chris craft? >> i like chris. i like chris. you know, i guess we were really

closer in the early days when he was the flight director and we were all in that little building down there at the cape. i think i felt closer to him. you can see the decision-making process he went through. and you knew he was not making any sloppy decisions, that they had been very well thought through. >> george lowe. >> i didn't really know george that well. never really worked directly with him. as you know, that particular stage in the game, george came along later and actually deke worked with him more than i did. >> how about warner vonn brom. >> warner was an interesting guy. we never were together too much. i do remember as i'm sure the

rest of the original seven, we haddinr in at his house one night with him and everhart reese. then we drove out to a little hillside where they built their own observatory, and we took a look at the moon through a telescope which was -- here you are with a great rocket scientist and he's showing you what the moon looks like through a telescope. >> it seems strange to the public at large, bob gill ruth is kind of lost in limbo and vonn brom stands in mind as one of the prime movers. i wonder what your reaction would be of that evaluation? >> i think that's true. i think that's true. i think gill ruth's entire life was -- had been and was dedicated to aviation and space. and he basically was an

engineer. i think that perhaps von braun obviously was an engineer, but i think vonn brawn had been involved in political as specs over in germany where maybe it was a matter of survival. i think he dealt with the public more easily than gill ruth did. it came more naturally to him. and as a result, i think that in the final analysis, the general public knew more about vonn brawn than they did about gill ruth. but those of us on the inside, particularly the manned space aspect of it i think owe a lot more to gilruth than to warner. >> don't you think part of that

is because vonn brawn was a salesman of ideas and was out selling the concept of the lunar missions? >> i think so. i think you really almost felt he had to. maybe he felt the same way we did, yes, it was a great idea, but he might have been concerned a little bit with the pressure of the schedule. that may have been the reason, i don't know. >> here is one that comes right out of the gang at houston. what are some of the worst things that happened to you after your selection as an astronaut, some of the worst things that happened. >> the worst things? >> well, obviously and this was not a fault solve the system, but obviously 507s being grounded was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. >> when you were running the astronaut office, what was the

most difficult thing that you ran into there? do you remember anything as being particularly difficult during that time in office? >> i think that -- let me say that while i was head of the astronaut office that it was my responsibility, the care and feeding of very enthusiastic, very intelligent, very dedicated motivated bunch of guys. and there were jealousies in the ranks, people being jealous of so and so, particularly being chosen for flight or back-up position or support group

position. and there were instances where fairly harsh discussions were taken. to sort of straighten things out and said, hey, look, deke and i run this program and this is the way it's going to be run and we're sorry. but eventually you'll be treated fairly. there were some that still feel they weren't. but a small percentage hopefully. >> looking back on it, what do you think now about the "life" magazine contract? good, bad or indifferent? you don't have to answer that one if you don't choose to. >> well, i don't know.

with respect to the contract we had with "life" magazine, i think there's little ambivalence there. at first it was attractive to us because it provided controlled access to the press, especially on personal things. personal relationships, the wives, how do you feel about your husband going into space and that sort of thing. none of us had been involved in any of that sort of publicity or recognition before. and in the early days, it got to be a little bother some, quite frankly. so this -- i think at the start it appeared to be a way to get around that. and so it was -- it seemed to be

welcome from that point of view. but then the criticism came about the amount of money involved. so i think all in all we came out about even. half the people thought it was a good deal and half the people thought it was a bad deal. >> i think somebody in houston is looking for some information with this next one. would you change any of nasa's current practices in selecting, training and assigning space crews, space flight crews? >> you know, that's a very difficult question for me to answer because i'm not involved in the process anymore. i think one has to look at the flights which are being made, at the performance of the crews,

the number of delays because of mechanical problems and that sort of thing. and using these criteria, i would say they're running a good ship. i would say they're running a successful program. there have been obviously no errors which has resulted in loss of life. they have used the crew to control many -- correct many problems. remarkable repair of the hubble telescope. of course, that was some years ago these are tind koof o things which indicate to me they're doing a pretty good job. >> proving what you're saying, i'm thinking now i can't remember a sij case of disaster occasioned by pilot error which speaks pretty well for the

group, doesn't snit. >> yeah. >> today they're under things other than pilots, the broad gamut of pilots. >> when you consider the fact that you're still -- well, i suppose if you say you're still doing basic research into the operation of the shuttle as a shell, as a vehicle, that's probably not true anymore. you've probably reached the operational stage. >> or pretty close to it. >> yeah. >> recently, i guess it was the colombia flew its 26th mission for one spacecraft, remarkable. >> yes. i guess you could say they're operational. but still it's an unbelievable record. >> i've asked a lot of questions. seems to me it's high time we let you say anything you'd like if there's something that hasn't

been asked that should have been asked. if so, fire for effect. >> it's been a great part of my life to be involved in the space program, and even before that as a navy test pilot had some really satisfying, exciting jobs. i guess i would have to say it's been a distinct pleasure to be involved in the space program specifically, and being allowed to make a couple of really recognizable, spectacular, lucky missio missions. i think the thing that has impressed me the most about

about the whole nasa process is that it has worked so well over the years. when you take a look at a group of civilian engineers and scientists that have to worked with contractors that were paid and work with somebody else, that has also to work with the military because you've got military involved and that things have really turned out remarkably well. now, there have been some heated discussions between the advantages of manned space flight and unmanned space flight because there are parts of nasa as you know totally dedicated to unmanned space flight. there have been some noted discussions and differences of

opinion between the engineers on space flight who would like to automate everything and leave the pilots out of there. but you know, in the final analysis i can't remember any of these decisions that were made with an absolute heart over judgment. it seems to me there always has been and still are discussions going on to get the best possible answer. when you take a look at the massa organization, 1958, 1959, nobody would have thought what it has done over the years. nobody would have thought that the computers which took us to

the moon and back were the forerunners of today's chips and today's technology because of the money and the effort that nasa spent back in the '60s. sure, we would have computers. no question about it. but we wouldn't have advanced, we wouldn't be at the position we are today without that tremendous impetus that nasa had into making the computers. satellites, i mean incredible data of information flowing back and forth in satellites, all springing from the nasa organization. it's remarkable what the organization has done and is still doing. it's just a great process. >> let the record show that that commercial was totally unsolicited. that was alan shepard's own

thoughts. i'm just making that for the record. >> you didn't have to apologize for that. >> i'm not apologizing. i'm making sure that somebody watching this knows very well that that was purely alan shepard and not me instigating -- >> this is a nasa tape we're making. i want to make sure the people watching knows that's pure you. that's all. >> well, it's the truth. >> alan, thank you very much. it's been a real pleasure. >> you think you got enough, right? >> well, if we don't, we'll let the powers that be tell us to come back and do it again some time. >> all right. next week we'll hear from one of alan shepard's fellow astronauts, scott carpenter, the fourth american in space and the second to orbit the earth. you can watch oral histories

every week end right here on c-spa c-span3. for more information about "american history tv" including our complete schedule go, to c-span.org/history. to keep up with this during the week, send us your questions and comments, follow us on twitter, we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. i had my ambition to walk with john smith and pocahontas. i got to pocahontas. this makes a rectangular space which would be the chans chan sell. pocahontas marries john rofl in this church in 1614. so i guarantee you i'm standing exactly a little deeper than she was. this is where pocahontas stood when she got married. >> later today on "american history tv" tour the jamestown colony dig with william kel sew. the colony has yielded more than 1.5 million unique