James May on the Moon

The Moon.

For millions of years it looked down at the Earth

with its lopsided face

and baffled mankind.

It was worshipped as a deity.

Its phases have been linked to fertility and insanity.

The ancients believed that if they built a tower tall enough,

they'd be able to reach up, pluck it out of the sky and own it.

Sooner or later, we were going to want to take a closer look at it.

NEIL ARMSTRONG OVER RADIO: 'That's one small step for man...

'...one giant leap for mankind.'

JAMES: That was all in 1969, when I was just a lad,

and now I've become a bit nostalgic.

"We choose to go to the Moon," said President Kennedy,

"not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

Three, two, one, engage.

How hard was it?

Legs tight. Deep breath.

(GROANING)

If you've just tuned in,

this is, in fact, a serious documentary

about the Apollo Moon mission.

I'm going to revisit a time when anything seemed possible...

MAN OVER RADIO: Our observation booth is literally being shaken apart.

...and see for myself why going to space

changed the way we look at the Earth.

Yeah!

Oh, man, I've got the curvature of the horizon thing.

Look at that. That's perfect.

Oh, it's lovely.

Man in heaven.

-Beautiful, beautiful.

-Ain't that something?

Magnificent desolation.

(MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY OVER RADIO)

I'm starting at a remote Air Force base in California.

They say this is the land of dreams.

Well, I'm hoping it can help me fulfil one of mine.

This is a Pontiac GTO,

the 6-litre one, 400-brake horsepower.

It's what the Americans would think of as a sports car.

It's about muscle rather than agility, as we would have in Europe.

This will do 0 to 60 in under 4.5 seconds.

We could go and make an American road movie in it

but instead we're going to use it to chase an aeroplane.

It's a weird-looking thing

but then it is the world's highest-flying aeroplane.

It should be here any second...now.

(# LED ZEPPELIN: Kashmir)

Wow.

Oh, look at that.

We'll talk him down to 10 feet.

There's 10, 8, 7, 6, 5.

4...

(INDISTINCT)

Just a little bit more left rudder.

This is a U-2 spy plane.

It's the peak of 1950s aviation from the dawn of the space age.

The car chase isn't a TV stunt.

The plane is so difficult to land,

the pilot needs a second pair of eyes in the car below.

That's an aeroplane with a wingspan of almost 100ft

landing on, essentially, bicycle wheels.

This aeroplane's stomping ground is at an altitude that,

back in the '50s, would have been considered the edge of space.

At 46, I am too old, too unfit, and, frankly, too long-haired

ever to know what it would mean to be an astronaut.

But this is a place where they can take me

to a sort of first base of space flight -

the nearest a normal mortal like me

could come to knowing what it's like to be an astronaut.

The Air Force have offered to take me up 70,000ft above the Earth

where I'll be able to look up into the blackness of space.

Up there, any failure of the aircraft's pressurisation system

will require more than a plastic oxygen mask and a rubber band.

So, to do it I'll need to wear a spacesuit.

NASA's first spacesuits were based on the ones worn by U-2 pilots,

because even before the space race started,

they were already up there, pushing the outside of the envelope.

And 50 years on, they're still doing it.

I've got three days to prepare for my trip in the U-2.

That flight will be the finale to my own mission.

More than that, it'll be the realisation of a childhood dream

that's been with me for 40 years.

This is the VIP enclosure at Cape Kennedy.

It was here, on 16 July 1969,

that people gathered in Apollo-era sunglasses

and sports jackets and brightly coloured floral dresses

to watch the launch of Apollo 11,

the first attempt to land on the Moon.

It's a very, very hallowed place, this.

I can't actually look at the old countdown clock over there

without feeling a slight shiver.

It's so familiar from old footage and old photographs.

REPORTER: They take with them this morning

the good wishes and the admiration of a world of people.

40 years ago, I didn't really grasp the enormity of all this.

Although, in fairness, 40 years ago, I was only six.

In fact, by the time they landed on the Moon, I was in bed,

because that was in the middle of the night.

But my dad came to get me up and he took me into the sitting room

where there were all these people chewing their fingernails off.

There was Mum and Dad, Grandpa, Grandmother,

aunts, uncles, big sister and so on.

It was a moment of global nervousness that made such an impression on me

that it still resonates,

even though I didn't really understand

what it was all about back then.

I'm at the foot of the ladder.

After the landings, my dad took me out into the garden

to look at the Moon,

and I thought I'd actually be able to see Collins in the command module orbiting,

because a quarter of a million miles

is just an inconceivable distance when you're six years old.

Gran and Gramp's house was about three hours away by car,

and that's eternity when you're that age.

12 men walked on the Moon.

Only nine are still alive.

Soon the whole episode will pass from living memory.

So I've arranged to meet a few of them,

starting with Alan Bean, lunar module pilot on Apollo 12.

What sort of a man is actually chosen,

out of all the men there are in the world, to go to the Moon?

Alan Bean will be the first Apollo astronaut I've ever met

and to be honest, in my imagination,

they live on Tracy Island in Thunderbirds

and they eat food out of toothpaste tubes,

and everything in their life goes, "Whoosh" or "Beep".

But this turns out to be a fairly normal house.

I've also promised myself I won't just go in and say,

"What's it like to be on the Moon?"

Cos that's, of course, what everybody else does.

I'll try and think of something a bit more original than that.

Here we go.

Alan Bean, Apollo astronaut.

BELL CHIMES

This must be him.

-Hello, James.

-Alan Bean.

Welcome to my home and studio. Come in, please.

Thank you very much. What a pleasure.

Did you set out to be an astronaut

and did you have an ambition to go to the Moon,

or did the system find you and think,

"This bloke Alan Bean, he looks like the right sort of chap"?

I wish they would do that.

No, it worked out this way.

As a kid, as far back as I can remember,

I wanted to be a pilot.

I never flew in an airplane, but watching movies,

I thought, "This looks like fun. I'd like to do that."

So that dream never went away for me.

I went to flight training and I became a test pilot.

I thought I had the best job in the world when I was doing all this.

Piloting, whatever.

"This is great. They're paying me to do this."

I'd do it for free if I could.

It might have seemed like fun to Alan,

but it was a hell of a dangerous job.

Test pilots could have very short careers.

But they were an elite band,

set on pushing the boundaries of aviation ever higher,

and from their ranks came the pioneers of space flight.

I turned on the TV one day,

and a guy named Yuri Gagarin is orbiting the Earth.

I thought, "That looks like more fun than I'm having."

And I watched Al Shepard get launched up for about a 15-minute flight

and in that 15 minutes he'd gone higher than I'd ever gone,

faster, and more importantly, he made a lot more noise doing it.

I thought, "That's what I want to be. This looks like fun."

Apollo astronauts were a breed apart.

Alan Bean and his mates seemed to the rest of us

to be more like rock stars than mere technicians.

# In the days of my youth

# I was told what it means to be a man... #

I thought I'd reunite him with an old friend.

-Recognise this?

-I sure do.

Had a lot of fun in this car... long time ago. 40 years ago.

See, this is what's missing from current space operations.

It's that sense of swagger and theatre.

I agree with you.

Some beautiful colour, isn't it?

We had them all painted this colour so that we'd be identified as the crew.

When we'd go to work we'd park 'em side by side.

They looked great.

We had the best job in the world.

Would you like a ride? It's a pretty nice machine.

I don't know if I can still drive it, but how would you like a ride?

-Go on.

-Want to take a chance?

-Yeah.

-All right.

You've been to the Moon.

I'm fairly confident you can take me round the block.

Well, not sure. But we'll find out. Here, jump in.

I suppose astronauts had to be a bit rock'n'roll.

They worked in conditions that us mortals could never experience,

including one that concerned scientists

as soon as space flight was suggested.

Rather alarmingly,

this aeroplane is known to its friends as the Vomit Comet.

That's a clue to the way it flies.

It doesn't just fly along in a straight line like a normal airliner.

This is where astronauts come

to learn what life is like without gravity.

This is a proper astronaut training exercise.

The way it works - it's quite complicated -

the aeroplane flies a parabolic trajectory,

which leaves you effectively weightless when you're inside it,

but the easy way to think of it

is that it goes over an extremely long humpback bridge.

I'd also like to boast that at no point in my life

have I ever been sick on an aeroplane

or in a car or on a boat or on a fairground ride,

or any of those things.

But that might be about to change.

This little pocket has a bag in it. You know - just in case.

Because this plane doesn't do just one parabola...

..it does 16.

And for every 30 seconds I'm weightless,

there'll be another when my weight's doubled.

Before the space race,

no-one was actually sure if human beings could survive in zero gravity.

Some specialists thought our internal organs would just fall apart

and we'd drop down dead, or float away dead, anyway.

PASSENGERS WHOOP AND SQUEAL

Then the Americans sent a whole menagerie of animals into orbit

to see what it would do for them.

And they all survived.

That wasn't really the point - the point was...

The point...the point was... Oh, God.

The point was, would a man be able to do something useful in zero gravity?

For example, operate a spaceship.

What they did was send a trained chimpanzee called Ham into orbit

on 31 January 1961.

Ham had been trained to pull a series of levers

in response to flashing lights.

The red lever is for the red light,

and the white lever for the blue light.

If he did that right, he was rewarded with a banana-flavoured chip.

If he got it wrong, he was electrocuted.

Ham is laced in his couch and wired for sound.

The electrodes on his feet

will give him a gentle shock in case he forgets.

PASSENGERS SCREAM AND LAUGH It's a pile-up.

Sorry.

Whoa! Hello, how are you doing?

This is where this child's game comes in, cos it's a very similar thing.

What happens is these lights go on in sequence.

I have to get the same sequence when I press these two little buttons.

If I get it wrong, it gives me a shock.

Ow!

Ham the chimp didn't have any problem with this.

He was doing it in zero G, which I'm going to try in a minute.

I've forgotten.

I hate this thing.

Here we go. It was that one, wasn't it? Yes, it was.

I can do it. I can do it.

Sorry.

I can't do it.

LAUGHING

The tests carried out in the Vomit Comet

showed that astronauts WOULD be able to function in zero gravity.

Oh, God. Space flight's absolutely hilarious.

Thanks, awfully.

Mmm.

Now, that was obviously terrific fun,

but also surprisingly exhausting.

So we should spare a thought for the astronauts

who had to do that thousands and thousands of times,

because every time a new piece of kit was developed,

or a new procedure was suggested,

they had to go and try it out in zero gravity.

It might be how to put a spacesuit on,

how to have a shave, how to take a comfort break.

It all had to be tried out in the Vomit Comet.

While all that was going on, other people were busy building rockets,

including, interestingly enough, me,

because back then, one of the most exciting things

you could get for your birthday

was the construction kit of the Saturn V rocket.

Here, for example, is the bit where you construct stage 2.

You've got five of those little rocket engines.

They come in two halves. You have to glue those together.

Fantastically exciting and evocative.

If you think this looks quite complicated,

you should have seen how they drew the real thing,

because they did quite literally draw it.

This was the sort of work done by men who had pencils behind their ears.

They envisaged things, they drew them on paper,

they drew them again and again until they got them right,

and then some other people went off and they bent metal.

They welded things and they riveted stuff together.

Slide rules, protractors and log tables produced this beast,

capable of flying to the Moon.

At Cape Kennedy it's a wonderful day for a wonderful event -

the first manned flight to the Moon.

Just look at this awe-inspiring sight behind here,

the great Moon rocket ready on its pad

like a great cathedral tower of ice in the morning light.

It is very complicated.

In fact, it is still regarded as the most complicated machine ever built.

But at the same time, it's actually rather low-tech.

In fact, if you look at it closely, it appears to be the combined effort

of a central heating engineer and a light-aircraft manufacturer.

That is all pipes and valves and unions and seals

and the rocket itself is aluminium sheet and rivets and screw heads.

It's quite remarkable, really.

And it's even better when you're shown around

by someone who's actually flown one to the Moon.

I must congratulate you on the size of your rocket.

I always forget how big it is until I see it again.

Yeah, we had the heaviest launch vehicle for Apollo 17.

Harrison Schmitt was one of the last men to ride a Saturn V.

He wasn't a fighter jock.

He was selected because NASA wanted to send a scientist up there.

The other thing that strikes me about it, looking at it in bits

and thinking about the launch,

is the basic principles of rocketry and a big rocket

are actually quite simple, aren't they?

I mean, rocket engines, in principle,

are much simpler than, say, petrol engines.

But it's just the amount of actual stuff that you need

to do it on that scale.

You have to control the burn.

You have to control the injection of the materials that are going in.

That has to be very precisely controlled to maximise the thrust.

It's not actually very sophisticated.

It's pipes, tubes, wires, rivets, aluminium sheet.

Well, you have to move liquids and electrons.

-Yeah.

-Mostly liquids.

At the time, the lightest-weight structural material they had

was aluminium alloy.

So that is liquid oxygen and kerosene.

-Kerosene.

-Paraffin. Aviation fuel, in effect.

And that is a bomb, really, isn't it?

Well, yeah, the whole thing is.

I can't believe there wasn't a moment of doubt in your mind

when you sat up at the pointy bit and thought,

"That's a hell of a lot of fuel underneath

"and it only needs a ropy bit of riveting by some bloke and..."

I think we all believed that the launch escape system would save us

if there was any problem.

That's confidence.

This rocket had six million components.

Even with NASA's target of 99.9% success,

they could expect 6,000 parts to fail even on a good launch.

One of the interesting things is that

when you see the thrusters up there on the side of the service module,

each one of those has about 50 pounds of thrust.

And you always have to think of that in terms of

1.5 million pounds of thrust in the F1 engine.

And the spectrum of technology that was required

to make this kind of an adventure happen.

That's a very good pub fact, that, Astronaut Schmitt.

Thank you very much. That'll be useful.

My pleasure.

But what still amazes me is this.

The vast majority of the giant rocket stack -

three whole stages, 94% of its fuel -

got it just 100 miles from Earth.

The basics of it are this.

This bit up here, plus the lunar module that it docks with, is - wait for it -

the spacecraft.

This is the bit we have to send to the Moon.

All of this bit is the launch vehicle.

Now, for this bit to go to the Moon,

it has to be accelerated to nearly 25,000mph

so that it can escape the pull of Earth's gravity

and be captured by the Moon's gravity.

The simple way of thinking about this is like the gearbox of a car.

First gear sends you up through the dense atmosphere to 6,000mph.

Second gear accelerates you to just over 15,000mph

through the upper atmosphere.

Third gear, here, takes you into orbit above the Earth

and then it fires again - that's fourth gear -

that takes you out of orbit and on the way to the Moon.

Finally, you're going through the vacuum of space in this.

You're coasting - you're in top gear.

OMINOUS MUSIC

Sitting on top of 7.5 million pounds of thrust

was going to be buttock-clenching, even for a fighter jock.

NASA did their best to weed out any with the wrong stuff.

They concocted a brutal programme of tests

which happened at places like Brooks Air Force Base in Texas.

I suspect today is not going to be very relaxing.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Back in the 1960s,

the face of Air Force doctor Dan Fulgham

was one no astronaut wanted to see.

-Hello, James.

-Hello, Doctor.

You ready for a little spin today?

-Yes.

-All right.

-This doesn't seem too threatening, this one, to be honest.

It's just like a roundabout.

Well, the purpose of this device, of course,

is to test your tolerance to disorientation.

I've heard that astronauts actually feared Brooks Air Force Base.

It's their least favourite place on the planet.

Is that true?

Well, not...not exactly,

but most pilots don't want to find out

that they've got some shortcoming, if you would.

So, assuming I have a reasonable tolerance to your rotating chair,

does that mean I am suitable for space flight?

Could I potentially go and do a space mission?

Physically...probably, yes.

Let's try it. Let's light this candle.

-You ready?

-Eyes closed. Sir, yes, sir.

Here we go. Starting to spin.

-So I'm going to the right.

-Mm-hm.

Clockwise.

Pfft, this is child's play.

But I've a feeling it won't all be so easy.

-Hello, sir.

-Hello, sir.

-Scott. Nice to meet you.

-James. Hello.

I think Sergeant Scott here's got something

a bit less pleasant for me in his centrifuge chamber.

This is where the torture peaked for the Apollo astronauts too,

where they were subjected to the crushing gravitational forces

they'd experience during the launch of the Saturn V rocket.

Whoa!

Smells a bit like an old Jag I once had, in here.

Your next ride's gonna be the 3G for 15 seconds.

OK, Houston, we're ready to go.

I think.

-Check my crew. Data station?

-Ready.

-Is ready. Operator?

-Ready.

Is ready. Medical?

-Ready.

-Is ready. Final ready.

SIREN BLARES

And three, two, one, engage.

-Legs tight. Deep breath.

-JAMES GRUNTS

-Breathe.

-JAMES GASPS

Short and sharp. Breathe.

One, two, breathe.

There you go. Squeeze your legs, your butt. Breathe.

OK, don't work as hard. Breathe.

One, two, breathe.

You're doing a good job. Keep it up.

And you're coming down to a complete stop. OK?

Is my heart and everything still working?

Your heart is working. Let's check with the doc.

-You're doing fine.

-Righto.

We're gonna do 5G for 30 seconds, sir.

-30?!

-Yes, sir.

Bloody Nora.

-Three, two, one, engage.

-Bracing.

And legs tight. Deep breath.

Breathe.

Short and sharp. Breathe.

One, two.

There you go. Stay with my count. Breathe.

One, two, breathe.

Squeeze your legs, your butt. Breathe.

-OK, can you talk to me, sir?

-Yes.

My face doesn't feel very good. I can't move my arms.

Oh, God!

-You still see all the green lights?

-Yep.

You're doing a good job.

And you're coming all the way down.

-Now you can relax.

-JAMES GROANS

-That was 30 seconds?

-Yes, sir.

5G. So a Saturn V launch, the burn of the first stage,

you'd have to put up with that for about 2.5 to 3 minutes...

..then it would go suddenly to nought

then you'd have another couple of minutes at 3, 3.5G.

Wow.

And that, presumably, is why they lie on their back,

cos I've just experienced G Zed -

or G Zee, as the Americans call it -

that is, the G is going that way

and it pulls the blood out of your head, goes down...

that's why you've gotta tense up your butt and your gut.

If you're lying on your back, you don't get that problem so much.

But then, of course, all that heaviness I felt in my arms,

you'd feel in your chest - it would be like people sitting on you.

And that would make breathing very difficult.

So either way, you've gotta be... HE LAUGHS

You've gotta be pretty tough.

Whoa.

Good job, sir.

Thanks.

The boots felt too big when you put them on,

but now they feel just right.

Surviving these tests was a superhuman feat

and proof an astronaut could withstand

extremes of physical and mental strain

yet still keep their heads enough

to fly the most complicated machine ever built.

Speaking with the astronauts,

I learned that in fact none of them actually enjoyed

having to come here and do all this stuff.

And more importantly, they all agree

that no matter what they went through here,

absolutely nothing, NOTHING, could prepare them

for the reality of riding a Saturn V.

Five, four, three, two. All engines running.

Lift-off. We have lift-off.

RADIO CHATTER

Suddenly, all that ruthless preparation made sense.

The crushing forces, the adrenaline,

the sheer challenge of flying this thing,

were totally unprecedented in the history of flight.

I thought I was prepared cos we'd trained for it so much.

But when I was in the actual event,

sitting on top of the Saturn V, 360 feet away from the engines,

you can start to feel the vibration.

I thought, "This thing is shaking way too much.

"I don't know if the metal in this spacecraft

"can withstand this shaking."

We don't know if you can hear, ladies and gentlemen...

I don't think anyone is ever prepared for that.

It is a magnificent experience.

Our observation booth is literally being shaken apart.

Our tape recorders are being blown to the floor

by the roar of this mighty rocket.

The vibration is so heavy you can't read the dials in the cockpit.

RADIO CHATTER

Well, I'm thinking, "This thing could come apart. Something's wrong."

Well, something wasn't wrong.

It was the fact that I had never been in a vehicle or anything else

that had the vibration and shaking and noise that the Saturn V had.

What a ride. What a ride.

It's exhilarating. Plus you know what you're doing.

You're on your way to the Moon.

There's nothing to say about it. What can you say about a sight like that?

This is Houston.

This is the legendary Mission Control.

As soon as the launch had cleared the top of the tower in Florida,

all the administration and the management of the whole shebang

was handed over to the people in here.

Eventually, we would arrive at a time

where there were three blokes in a tin can

orbiting the Moon 60 miles above its surface

and about 250,000 miles away.

And then two of them would climb into

what is really the shonkiest-looking spacecraft ever built,

the lunar module,

and descend those last 60 miles to the surface of the Moon.

When they did that, they were talked down by one man.

He sat here. He was known as CapCom.

Capsule Communications.

And he was the only person, no matter who else was in this room,

who actually spoke to the crew

because he was also an astronaut.

And the man who sat here was Charlie Duke.

Eagle, looking great. You're go.

As well as talking down the first lunar landing from Houston,

Charlie Duke had trained alongside Neil Armstrong

and got his own chance to walk on the Moon three years later

as lunar module pilot on Apollo 16.

The lunar module probably presented the biggest challenge of all

because landing it on the Moon

was essentially a rocket launch in reverse,

something that had never been done before.

And despite their best efforts,

NASA simply couldn't simulate it properly on Earth,

although they nearly killed Neil Armstrong in their attempts.

As someone who was there when they first did it for real,

I'm hoping Charlie Duke can tell me how they pulled it off.

This is an area of typically smart Texan suburbia.

Over there is a man who can probably help you with your tax return.

Over there, someone who can sort your teeth out.

But this is where Charlie Duke lives,

and he can tell me how to land on the Moon.

I've got the morning news here if you're interested. Over.

-Charlie Duke.

-'Tis I. Ha!

-James, come in. Nice to see you.

-Thank you. And you.

-Talk about landing on the Moon.

-Yeah, right.

-May I?

-Sure.

That's our little lunar module model.

What's amazing when you see it again

is it is the shonkiest-looking bit of flight hardware in history.

It's really strange.

When I first saw it, I said, "Is this thing really gonna fly?"

You know, it's strange-looking but it was a great flying machine.

Course, it would only operate in a vacuum.

It's too flimsy to try to put in an atmosphere or somewhere.

So it was a true spacecraft, designed for landing on the Moon

and flying around lunar orbit.

And that was it.

Obviously it doesn't fly in the accepted aeronautical sense

cos there's no air, which is why it presumably doesn't matter

that it's this terrible shape.

-That's right.

-But how did it actually handle?

To me, it was like flying a helicopter.

As the pilot, Charlie navigated the lunar module

from the window on the right,

while his commander, John Young,

handled the controls over to his left.

Why were the windows so small?

That seems mean, considering you were about to look at the Moon

for the first time that close up.

They really gave you good visibility.

John, on his side, had a sort of a ladder

etched on his window

and it was numbered, like 30, 35, 40, 45,

and I would say, "John, LPD 40."

41 LPD. 30,000 feet on profile.

He would look through the 40

and where his eyesight in a line of sight hit the ground,

that's where he's gonna land if he doesn't do anything.

I just wanna make sure I've understood that properly.

The way of guiding the lunar module down to the surface of the Moon

was with some lines drawn on the window?

Basically, yeah.

Charlie Duke makes landing on the Moon sound like reversing a car into your garage.

But in July 1969,

when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin headed for the Moon in Apollo 11's Eagle,

no-one had ever done it before.

-OK. Retro?

-Go.

-Final.

-Go.

-Guide. Patrol.

-Go. Go.

-Surgeon.

-Go.

CapCom, we're go to continue PDI.

Mum, Dad and I joined 600 million people

round the world in front of our TV sets

and listened to the words of Charlie Duke.

We're go. Same time. We're go.

But back then, I had no idea things weren't going to plan.

WHITE NOISE

Armstrong kept losing radio contact with Houston

and was two miles off course.

50 down at 2.5. 19 forward.

He was heading for a huge boulder field

and alarms rang out as the computer threatened to abort the landing.

Roger, 12.02. We copy it.

Armstrong coolly took the controls

and looking through his tiny window,

searched for somewhere safe to land.

100 feet. 3.5 down. 9 forward.

That's why NASA put elite test pilots on board.

Down 2.5.

Back in Houston, Charlie Duke was getting worried.

We were running out of gas.

'60 seconds.'

I called 60 seconds,

which meant they had another 60 seconds to land,

and then I called 30 seconds.

'30 seconds.'

You could hear a pin drop in Mission Control, which was rare.

And then I heard...

Contact light. OK. Engines stop.

I knew they were on the ground. Hopefully OK.

And so I said, "Roger, copy, you down, Eagle."

And then Neil comes back a few seconds later, says...

Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

We all erupted.

I came up with some statement like, "Roger, we copy on the ground."

'We got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.'

The first words that we heard from space there

this afternoon from Aldrin and from Armstrong,

"Tranquillity Base, the Eagle has landed,"

are words that every schoolboy over coming generations

are probably going to have to learn

and pass on to succeeding generations.

We'd like to give a special thanks...

..to all those Americans who built those spacecraft.

And to all the other people

that are listening and watching tonight...

..God bless you.

Good night from Apollo 11.

None of the thrill had worn off

by the time Charlie Duke experienced his own Moon landing.

Were you excited about landing on the Moon

or were you totally absorbed in controlling the thing

and making sure you didn't snap the legs off?

No, we were excited about landing on the Moon.

'Perfect place over here, John. A couple of big boulders.'

Especially when we got down close. We had plenty of fuel.

'The fuel is good. 10%.'

The closer you got, the more dust you blew away

and it was like landing through the fog

and I was calling out...

'50 feet. Down in 4. Give me one click up.'

"...Ten feet, five feet."

Then we hit. The little blue light comes on, says...

'Contact.'

John shut the engine down and we hit the ground

and we just erupted with excitement and enthusiasm.

It was really fun.

'Wow! Oh, man! Nice landing.

'Percy Precision has planted one on the plains of Descartes!'

In all, six Apollo missions landed.

They had some serious work to do,

taking photos and collecting rock,

more than 800 lb of it between them.

And by the fourth mission, they even needed a car.

Since I'm a car enthusiast, I have to ask you

what the lunar rover was actually like to drive on the Moon.

The Moon was very rough so you had good suspension system.

Each wheel had its own individual suspension system.

You'd hit a bump and you'd hit a little crater

and it'd start bouncing.

Occasionally we broke loose and we had a little skid

either one way or the other.

The most severe we had was 180 degrees.

We actually spun out 180 degrees as we went down into a little crater.

-You spun on the Moon in a car?

-Uh-huh. We did. Yeah.

I've often been intrigued about how you'd find your way around

once you were on the Moon.

Judging distance on the Moon was extremely difficult.

'Look at the size of that rock!'

You have no familiar objects on the Moon.

You're looking at rocks and craters that you've never seen before.

'That's about halfway maybe.'

A big rock far away looks very similar to a smaller rock close in.

'It is a biggie, innit?

'It may be further away than we think.'

Presumably compasses are useless because there are no poles, so...

There's no magnetic field on the Moon

so our navigation system on the rover

consisted of a gyroscope and an odometer on one of the wheels.

The odometer gave us the mileage.

The gyroscope gave us the direction.

When we started driving,

we were seeing a lot of things that weren't on our maps,

because the maps were only down to a resolution of 15 metres.

So anything less than that was not on the map.

You go over a ridge and there's a 10-metre crater in front of you.

And a 10-metre crater's a deep crater. It's 30 feet.

But if you ever worried about getting lost,

all you had to do was make a U-turn and follow your tracks back.

Cos it left them in the dust?

The tracks are still there.

Few of the Apollo astronauts

have found it easy to come to terms with a normal life back on Earth.

For Alan Bean, trying to express what the Moon meant to him

has become his sole mission in life...

as an artist.

Do you only paint space now?

It's all I do,

because I am the only artist in all history

that's ever been off this Earth and seen what's there

and come home.

In your pictures, people seem to be having quite a good time on the Moon.

That one especially. And that one.

Doesn't look like it was all work.

No, it wasn't.

Humans don't like to work all the time.

We want to work and then we want to have relaxation, some fun.

'Hippity, hoppity, hippity, hoppity.

'Hippity hopping over the hill.'

In fact, I think that's one of the things

that my paintings bring out.

I'd thrown some rocks up,

and I found that I could only throw underhanded in that suit.

But I threw underhanded

and the rocks would just go up and up and almost out of sight.

So as I go by, I look over, and on the ground over here

is a big piece of foil.

And so I said, "Boy, this foil would be even more fun."

And I watched it go up and up and up,

more than anybody could ever throw a ball.

Even an Olympic athlete

couldn't throw anything as high as that.

See, here we were down on Earth

thinking you were risking your neck at the new frontier of space

and you were just up on the Moon larking about.

Well, we were risking our neck, laughing about and playing games.

# I was strolling on the Moon one day

# In the merry, merry month of... #

-December...

-No. May.

# ..May. #

May, that's right...

Meeting three men who actually walked on the Moon

has been a remarkable experience.

And while no-one could ever deny the magnificence of their achievement,

it has to be recognised that 40 years on,

it's all beginning to gather a certain amount of Earth dust.

They're old men now.

The Apollo rocket has become a tourist attraction.

It's reckoned that 400,000 people were involved

in sending men to the Moon,

so you could argue that it was brains that sent men to the Moon.

But at the end,

you still needed somebody to occupy the pointy bit of the rocket.

You needed some men

who were prepared to strap themselves on top of a booster

that developed 7.5 million pounds of thrust

and was going to blast them into the void of space.

So, yes, it was a giant leap for mankind,

but it was also a giant leap into the unknown,

and they knew it.

That's what the right stuff was.

Hopefully, I'm not entirely the wrong stuff.

Back at Beale Air Force Base in California,

I'm hoping for a small taste of what it felt like

to be a space pioneer,

to be higher than anyone else.

I'm actually going to do something very special today -

something I've sort of dreamed about since I was seven years old

and making that model of the Apollo rocket.

I'm going to go up extremely high in a spacesuit -

which is actually necessary to keep me alive.

It's not just comedic dressing up for television.

And I'm going to be able to look down

and I'll be able to see the curvature of the Earth.

That's an enormous privilege. Not very many people will get to do that.

Anyway, most importantly -

astronaut breakfast.

Since it could turn out to be their last-ever meals,

Apollo astronauts generally got stuck into very butch steak and eggs.

Major "Cabi" Cabigas will be flying my U-2 spy plane,

and Lieutenant-Colonel "Meat" Broce will be helping us take off and land

from the chase car.

No doubt they'll be having a proper breakfast.

But I think I'm going for... a more delicate option.

Is that all you're gonna have?

I thought it'd be better for in-flight comfort.

Has a U-2 mission ever been aborted because of somebody's bowels?

-I'm afraid so.

-Hmm.

This has already been a tough ride.

You can't just walk in off the street and into the cockpit of a U-2.

"Are you currently feeling threatened or afraid?"

I've had three days' intensive training

on emergency ejection...

Unless you're screaming for dear Mother and God all the way down,

you should have plenty of air.

I will be.

..on survival at the edge of space...

Three, two, one.

Arggh!

..and on my lifeline - my spacesuit.

Because although space officially starts 62 miles up,

even at 13 miles, we'll be in atmosphere so thin

it would have exactly the same effect on my body as space itself.

Out there, with less than 5% normal air pressure,

one tear in the fabric of my suit would mean curtains.

One thing is suddenly very clear to me -

the know-how that put men on the Moon and kept them alive in their suits

was founded on the experience of high-altitude pioneers

like the U-2 pilots.

Now, my flight leaves in one hour.

Normally, in the last hour before departure

you go and buy a magazine

and have a double mocha choca topper from a coffee place,

but this time I'm going to sit here and breathe pure oxygen

in a sealed suit,

because that will purge my blood of nitrogen.

Nitrogen at altitude could give you the bends.

So what I'm sort of doing here is saving my life, in a way,

if anything goes wrong.

This is exactly what the Apollo astronauts did

for an hour before blast-off -

sit in a chair, read a magazine, breathe O2.

It's very good for you.

It's making me feel a bit high, actually.

Is that normal?

BREATHING DEEPLY

-Go get 'em, James!

-Thanks.

RADIO CHATTER

There's two. Two.

Two, one.

If you're ready to go...

I'm ready to go.

Whoa!

That is heaven.

HE LAUGHS

500 feet takeoff.

And we're off.

That's marvellous.

HE LAUGHS

RADIO CHATTER

Into the weather.

-Whoa!

-Stand by one there.

-That's quite a climb.

-No kidding.

That is incredible.

We've just passed the altitude of Everest,

so already if I was outside, I'd be feeling pretty squiffy.

There's the altimeter.

There's the view.

We're just approaching the start of what was "space" in the old days.

That's correct. Here it comes.

See? There it is.

If this were 1955, we'd be considered spacemen,

because at that height, the atmosphere would kill you

as certainly as space would.

You'd just boil. You'd be dead in seconds.

Just below us... You see on the left side below?

-See that airliner below us?

-Oh, man!

There it is. I think I got it, just briefly, on the camera.

Fantastic!

So that is now almost as far below us

as it normally would be above us if we were standing on the ground.

I knew this would happen.

I need to scratch my face.

Just think about other stuff. It goes away.

But...

Think about other things and it goes away?

-That's what I do.

-OK.

Oh, God. Arggh!

I'm thinking about other... LAUGHING

Or you could try your water bottle.

What - stick the straw through the...?

Bend the straw first.

There's a risk of making it worse doing this.

I got it. Mmm!

Mmm! Oh, yes!

It's not easy, is it?

No, not at all.

60,000ft has just gone past and we're now at an altitude

where things like tears and saliva and other body fluids

would boil pretty much instantly if you stepped outside.

I can already see why people go into space

and then spend all their time

blabbering on about how wonderful Earth is,

because it just looks fabulous from up here.

I think I'm gonna have a little bit of lunch.

-You're having lunch?

-Yes, sir.

Righto, I might join you. What flavour are you having?

I have clam chowder at the moment.

I'm having peaches.

Oh, yeah. Good choice.

Here we go, then, for space peaches.

Oh, it's nice. It's like baby food.

Mmm.

Sod the peaches - I've just noticed the view.

I'm liking that very much indeed.

It's gorgeous.

I've just noticed how dark the sky is.

God, I hadn't looked up.

It's quite dark, isn't it?

That's incredible.

There it is - 70,000ft.

It's interesting to think that at this altitude

95% of the Earth's atmosphere, by mass, is below us.

It's a skin on the top. It's a mist. Nothing more than that.

CHUCKLING

This is madness.

Is there anybody else up here? Presumably not.

I think it's fair to say the only people higher than us right now

are in the International Space Station.

That's correct.

I think that means Major Cabigas and Student Spaceman May

are the second-highest people in the world.

Yes!

Oh, man, I've got the curvature of the horizon thing.

Look at that. That's perfect.

-Yeah.

-That just looks fantastic.

Oh, it's lovely.

Do you get bored of looking at that? Surely not.

Oh, I never do.

Oh, it's terrific.

Let's see if it works... Oh, yes!

Does make me feel slightly emotional.

Feel free.

Man in heaven.

JAMES CHUCKLES

The sky looks just breathtaking.

If indeed that is the sky. Most of the sky is below us.

I think that might be the view of eternity.

Technically speaking, you are correct.

Sorry - do tell me if I'm rabbiting on too much,

but I've never done this before.

This is a fantastic privilege, being able to see this.

I'm just...I'm slightly lost for words.

It's just staggering.

I think the term you're looking for is "gobsmacked", aren't you?

Can I just say thank you for bringing me up here, major?

-You're absolutely welcome.

-It's absolutely...just...

..almost impossible to articulate what it feels like.

That is the real shape of the good Earth.

It's rather humbling.

Gear, flaps, lights, stall strips, speed brakes.

Lined up with the centre lines.

We're decelerating down to 76 knots.

Thank you. Breathtaking.

You're welcome. Welcome to the world of high flying.

I'm slightly lost for words.

-There you go.

-Oh, God.

Sorry, I'm slightly... Whoa!

It's amazing.

It's not like you imagine it.

It's not like being twice as high as an airliner.

It's like being in a completely different sphere of human activity.

You forget about the helmet, the oxygen, and everything.

You just see this... It's just incredible.

If everybody could do that once,

it would completely change the face of global politics,

religion, education, everything.

Thank you, Skipper.

It's going to take a while for that to sink in,

and that was just 13 miles up.

Imagine seeing the Earth from almost a quarter of a million miles away.

The Apollo astronauts saw it for what it really is -

nothing more than a dust mote left over from the Big Bang.

No wonder it had such an effect on them.

12 of us got to do that, so it was a great honour

and a great privilege, but also a great adventure.

I can remember looking back at Earth while we were in lunar orbit.

I held up my hand and underneath my hand was the Earth.

And that's a real unique perspective.

The thought occurred to me, "There's five billion people under my hand."

The only thing I can say that the Moon has changed

since I was on the Moon,

for me, personally,

is that I notice it more, I think.

I do.

It catches my eye.

Yeah, I'm not surprised.

My wife and I can go out to West Texas and park our car

and watch that beautiful Moon come up

and it's still romantic to me.

I see it as it comes up and it's beautiful to me,

but the thought does occur, "I've been there."

And that's different than most anybody else on Earth can say.

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