astronaut jim lovell. mr. lovell: as we came around the moon, we saw the earth, which was a small blue and white ball. i have said this many times. when i first looked at it, i put my thumb up and i could hide the earth completely behind my thumb -- realizing that behind my thumb there were about five billion people and everything i ever knew was behind my thumb. brian: what are these guys doing to stay alive so long? robert: they are most of all engaged mentally with the world around them, as they were back then. people think of astronauts as these daring fighter pilots and test pilots which is of course true of almost all of them. they are also of great intellectual minds behind that. they were top achievers in scholastics and studies although the way up through graduate levels. also, they keep their minds engaged. three of them are have much active physically. they are all completely engaged in the world, thinking into the future about space to this day. brian: what is jim lovell like? robert: he is one of

astronaut jim lovell at your event. moon, we came around the we suddenly saw the earth which was a small, blue and white ball then i said this many, many times when i first looked at it to put my thumb up and then i hide the earth completely behind my thumb. my thumb, hat behind five billion t people and everything i knew was behind my thumb. what are they doing to stay alive so long? they are engaged mentally with the world around them and they think of them as test of ts which is true of all them. they are great intellectual minds behind that. they were top achievers in studies.cs and all the way up through graduate levels so to keep their minds and three of them are very much active physically but they're all completely engaged thinking even into the future about space to this day. >> what's jim lovell like? kindest, ne of the sweetest men i've ever met. e had -- he is one person who did have that reputation going all the way back in nasa that nobody i spoke to could find a negative word to say about jim lovell in an

you met with jim lovell. you met with the other astronauts, the wives.hat mattered to you in getting this story? what's the difference between the story you are telling and what everyone else is doing? robert: one of the differences is the important -- importance of the family. you had to understand the role of family. it was the essential. you also had to understand the year in which this happened. this flight happened at the end of 1968, one of the most terrible years in our country's history. of martinination luther king jr., of robert kennedy, dead americans in vietnam, violence in the streets, including in chicago, the democratic convention and all kinds of other trouble. it seems that nobody could come together. everybody seemed divided against everybody else. 2018.are some echoes to here at the end of the year comes this impossible proposition. man is going to go to the moon, suddenly, in four months time. they're going to pull off something nobody has ever done before, that mankind has dreamed up for millennia. to put you in the capsule with them

and with that i introduce you to frank borman, jim lovell and bill anders, their first men ever to leave agency and to arrive at the moon. [applause] applause. [applause] [applause] >> okay, gentlemen, here we go. frank, you told me early on that by the time the mission changed for apollo 8 came in you already believed you had one of the finest crews nasa ever assembled. what made you confident the niece guys and your in yourself. >> well, i firmly believed at that time and believe it even more strongly now, of course, jim and i had spent 14 dales in gemini 7 and that was a grinding, grueling flying, something like that you spend two week in a volume smaller than the front seat of a volkswagen beetle witch got so friendly that toward the end of the flight we were both sharing a toothbrush. >> we declared we are engaged after we got down. >> we got out of the spacecraft, walked up on the carrier and the first thing lovell sis is frank and i want to announce our engagement. and bill anders was known through the astronaut corps as a hard core, hard working, competent guy, and i trusted him.