The countdown reached ten seconds and I could almost hear an invisible crescendo of stirring background music. 'Anchors aweigh!' Five, four, three, two, one... and we had ignition!
I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We're only human beings.
If the guidance failed or started to stray or went somewhere we didn't like or the ground didn't like, I could flip a switch, and I could control seven, over seven and a half million pounds of thrust with this handle and fly the thing to the Moon myself.
NASA has been scattered to the four winds.
I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill.
