We didn't slow down, unlike the others, when we got to the moon because we needed its gravity to get back, so we hold the altitude record. I never even thought about it. Records are only made to be broken.
For some time, I thought Apollo 13 was a failure. I was disappointed I didn't get to land on the moon. But actually, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.
I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.
I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.
I was born a year after Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic.
Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.
We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.
My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.
Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes. I was very much an airplane boy.
The fascination to go into space has existed for hundreds of years. But as we do things and they're successful, people get bored.
The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.
Houston, we've had a problem.
I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.
If you're going to go into space, you have to have an objective, a mission. Where do you want to go? Earth orbit? The moon? Mars? What's the technology to get there? You develop the technology for the mission.
The moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.
Mars is a long ways away. The moon is only 240,000 miles, but Mars is in the millions. It's too risky without spending more time going to the moon.
In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn't mean much.
I could put my thumb up to a window and completely hide the Earth. I thought, 'Everything I've ever known is behind my thumb.'
People say, 'Did you violate Heaven?' Well, God is down here, too. If you believe in God, you believe in God here as well as 240,000 miles away.
