in january 1963, the next nine astronauts, the second group that included neil armstrong, jim lovell, frank gorman, and others, they came out here on a very cold day, flew into flagstaff airport -- they flew planes in case one crashed, not all the astronauts would have perished. that was the thinking then. they flew in and these guys were rock stars. they were met by the mayor, they were met by cheering fans wanting autographs, but then they went to a meteor crater. if you are going to go to the moon and do geology around this pockmarked, cratered area of the moon, why not study and prepare for that in the best preserved impact crater there is, which is meteor crater, right down the road from where we are at lowell observatory. they went to meteor crater to see what an actual impact crater looks like, and then they went to lowell observatory to study the mapping and see how these features are depicted on maps. they will have to be able to read these maps and relate what they are seeing on the maps to the real features. at night, after dinner, the group broke up into three. each group

in january 1963, the next nine astronauts, the second group, including the alarm strong, jim lovell,s, came out here on a cold day, flew into flagstaff's airport and two planes, in case one crashed, not all the astronauts would have perished. that was the thinking that. they flew in these guys like rock stars and they were met i the mayor, fans wanting thegraphs, but they went to crater. because if you are going to go to the moon and do geology around the crater of the moon, why not study and prepare for that with the best preserved impact crater there is, right down the road from where we are at the observatory. so they went to meteor crater to see what an actual impact crater looks like, and then they went to lowell observatory to study the mapping and see how these features are depicted on that because they are going to have to be able to read these maps and relate what they see on the map to real features. and then at nights, after dinner appear, the group broke up into three. each group went with folks. some stayed at the observatory with this telescope. some went to northern ar

more or less, the -- i think itf was jim lovell, one of our agre.ackups who thought the eagle was a proper the ide motif, andd with that.. so i kindnd of took that idea aa ran with it. i went into a national geographic book and got a proper eagle trying to fold its wings as it was coming in.poppin and, ofg course, i had to havee little earth popping b up over e horizon and little, by little, the patch emerged. >> so also, on the patch itselfh on some of the other patches of the missions, they had the names of the astronauts. yours did not. why is that? >> i didn't want any names on it. it was a tradition that started with gemini 10 which i flew with john young. and john and i agreed that there were thousands and thousands of people deserved a name on a patch somewhere, and they weren't going to get one, and if they weren't going to get one, then we shouldn't have one.o ge that we were so dependent on thousands. if you go into mission control in houston, the walls are lined with patches. and i just like to see the ap gemini 10 and apollo 11, no ofh n