- Between 1966 and the very last flight with a space shuttle, there was always a battle rhythm in flight operations at the Johnson Space Center, a battle rhythm. I mean, we were doing something now, we're gonna do something next, and it's on. It's in front of us; it's there. Get in and get it done. - [NASA Technician] 11, 10, nine. Ignition sequence starts. - I don't think the battle rhythm is there today. - After we landed on the Moon, I knew that by 1995, and certainly before the year 2000, humans would be on Mars, with no doubt in my mind. -I don't think we should have ever given up the Moon, ever. I mean, we were there at one time, and we should have continued to go there, and we shoulda stayed there. - We had a space station planned that was gonna support Mars, be a transportation node on orbit. We were gonna fly up rockets on smaller rockets, assemble stuff in space, and go to Mars or go to the Moon. George Abbey wanted to set up a colony on the Moon right after, if we had the Saturn Vs, and that never came to fruition. - Everything just came together for Apollo, the threat of the Cold War. The superiority, apparently, of the Soviet Union's technology came together to cause the public, the Congress, the administration to say we gotta do this. - I'd have to admit that we would probably never have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the politics. We did Apollo wrong. We should have done it in a more gradual-step fashion of development of vehicles, which, when we got through, would have allowed us to do one heck of a lot more, rather than get to the end and stop and say, I'm finished. - It's just human nature to focus on your accomplishments and kinda ignore where you look back and say you were kinda dumb. I would not second-guess what Kennedy did. In many respects, his jumpin' out to go to the Moon rather than come on with Gemini to a space station, then to L1, and then to the Moon. Probably if we hadn't even done Apollo, we might be better off. - The investment in the accomplishment of what we did, the impression it had on the rest of the world, and the fact that the United States is the greatest place and the greatest society, yeah I did all that. I agree with that. But it could have been done differently and then allowed us to do one hell of a lot more than we did, and we'd still be doing it and gaining from what we did then and what we could do with the development then of more technology. That's the way I would have done it, but I didn't have that choice. - I didn't have a clear vision of where we were goin', but I thought we would continue to go kind of at the rate we'd been at, and instead what I saw was just this enormous slow down as we were tryin' to get shuttles designed, built, flying. And then here comes space station along, and I wasn't the least but interested. We'd already done that So ... yeah, it's a disappointment. - The Johnson Space Center decided it wanted to have a space station. I remember Al Laveer calling about 40 of us together in building 226 in the back lot saying, "The reason you guys are here "is because we're gonna write "a program plan for a space station." I couldn't have been happier. And now we have a space station that, in my view, it mostly does nano-size experiments so that intellectuals can perform a nano-size experiment, write up a paper, and put it in their CV. Which really honks 'em off when you say that, by the way. I never dreamed that, especially when we got into the space station at Johnson Space Center, the one that I worked on for six years, I said, we're on our way to Mars. We're on our way to the Moon. We've got a plan. -We are so far from sending humans to Mars, in my opinion, today. We've got so many things we got to deal with. You gotta figure out how are these people gonna live and eat and feed and dump trash and radiation and all this stuff. How are we going to do that? - To do a three-year mission to Mars is a 30-year program. It's money and politics. Congress can cherry-pick Orion, or they can cherry-pick SLS. You have no o'er-arching contract. They can cancel either one of those or both of 'em with no problem. - In the human space flight program, we can't seem to pick what it is we need to go do and stick with it long enough to go get it done. If we truly believe that Mars is the next thing or whatever, well, okay, good luck with that. - We say we've got commercial spacecraft and commercial rockets. That's not what it is. It's government money that they're spending. People say, well, let's let the commercial people do it and get NASA out of it, or NASA can just observe, or they can go do something else. You can't do that; they don't do it that way. When you say SpaceX is gonna do it, or Boeing is gonna do it, they're not doing it. The United States is doing it, so let's do what is in the best interest of the country with the best people to do it, which includes the commercial people along with the government people. - In practical terms, the space agency NASA, and the nation, got tremendous facilities that we still use today. Granted, we had to update 'em and keep 'em up and that sorta thing, but look, we're still launching rockets off the Apollo launchpads for cryin' out loud. But I really think the inspiration is what is the most important thing. If we could do that then, think what we can do tomorrow, and that's gotta inspire people in school today and all the rest of us, not just about space exploration, but about whatever endeavor we're about. So, it's a tremendous legacy that in America, if we put our minds to it, we can do the impossible. - Seeing anything that deals with what you worked on, you can't help but feel like I was a part of that. And I thought, this is such a huge thing, and my part was so tiny. And I'm just stuck here on Earth, and once it's taken off, there's nothing I can do about anything. Your part's small, but it has to work, and it matters. So, I didn't ever treat anything they asked me to do trivially. - On the landing day, I was on another shift, so I was at home. Had these two little kids sittin' on my lap, and saying, now watch this. You kids watch this, because this is history bein' made. Nobody in history has ever done this. This is the first time this is gonna happen, and I want you to remember this all your life. - Thing that sticks with me is that black and white image of the guys takin' their first steps on the Moon, and watchin' that with my kids. But it was just an amazing sight, and the fact that the whole world was watching, best I can tell, and as it was reported, just think that you'd been a part of something that the whole world kinda stops and looks at.