Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Reflects on the 1969 Moon Landing (1998)

Let me just stop for a second. He said that even the few samples that you... [clapboard] Well, we brought back some rocks, and they were different than rocks that anybody had really ever seen before. Maybe they'd seen tektites or other things that may have come from the moon, but we brought back real samples. Maybe we couldn't describe them very well, or we just grabbed them and stuck them, but they were different than anything people had seen here before, so there was a big change in our understanding of the moon. And later missions added to that, but the big change was between having no moon rocks, and now we have a few, whether they were described by the crew or not is very unimportant. Now we have some samples of the moon, and we have statements made by people, and we've gone over them, over and over again, and everything we saw, everything we said has been analyzed. But is that the significance of going to the moon? In no way, is it? It is that people alive today, when I meet them, they want me to know where they

were when we landed on the moon. They want me to remember because they remember, and this is multiplied over millions and millions of people who were alive and had their lives changed. That is the significance of going to the moon. It's not the rocks that were brought back, the little knowledge that we gained that we didn't have before. Is that changing our lives now? No, but America went to the moon. We made a commitment, we carried through that commitment, and that commitment to do that so impressed the Soviets that it brought about eventually the end of the Cold War. Now, not too many people are going to draw that comparison. I can go into more details about making a commitment to strategic defense that they didn't want to see us do because they knew that would ruin their economy. But when you do things like that, you demonstrate the character of the human species,

the curiosity to want to explore, but now you don't do that until you're challenged by societies that challenge you in one way or the other, and now you want to competitively make a commitment to do that. That's the nature of the American spirit, and that's what the achievement of going to the moon means because it meant so much to all those people who were alive. We'd never been to a place like that before, and we haven't been there since, and the longer it takes to go back, in a way, the greater the significance of having done Apollo 11 and the other missions, the greater significance that that'll have as a place in history. Why couldn't we do that again? Because it was difficult to do then. The engineering test, step by step, in retrospect, sound very logical, sound very orderly, but you had to have that rocket, you had to have that commitment,

you had to have that investment. There are a lot of lessons learned about Apollo, but how many people say, what came after Apollo? We built that Saturn 5 rocket. The first stage had five engines, monstrous engines, never been built, anything like that really since, that large an engine. They were never used again. We had hydrogen engines, five of them in the second stage, and then one of the same engines in the third stage that got us into orbit. That was the pioneering of Apollo that the Russians didn't want to take. They didn't want to take the risk of a hydrogen engine, so they had to build a much bigger rocket that never, never succeeded. But we made a commitment to build hydrogen engines. Wonderful engines, J2 engines, never used again. Why? Because America wants to start over again. We defined a shuttle that had a cockpit and a booster.

It wasn't necessary at all, but it made the cost too high. I'm just alluding to some lessons that were learned from Apollo that are meaningful today, but people don't want to pay attention to those lessons. They want to say, what did he say? Who got out first? That's not important. What's important is that we landed on the moon. We made a commitment and people remember that worldwide. Should we go back to the moon? Is that a viable goal? We'll go back to the moon in a