Neil Armstrong talks about landing and walking on the Moon
When NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary back in 2008, NASA Glenn Research Center invited a number of Ohio astronauts back to Cleveland for a special recognition.
Among them... John Glenn, James Lovell and, of course, Neil Armstrong.
During the evening there was a question and answer session in which Armstrong talked about various parts of his career -- including the Apollo 11 mission.
While approaching the moon in the lunar lander, Armstrong did not like how rocky the selected land site looked. He took manual control and flew over the surface looking for new landing site. He touched down with only 16 seconds of fuel left before they would have to abort.
►50 YEARS LATER | Expanded coverage of Apollo 11
“No pilot likes to land in a bad place,” Armstrong told the crowd. “Pilots by nature will go to any extreme good place to. And that’s what we did.”
What did he remember about walking on the moon?
“Pilots take great pride in making smooth landings, but they never really worry about making a smooth step off the airplane. And so we had a few people that thought it was going to be very difficult to walk on the surface for whatever reasons they believed that to be true. And our simulations, sometimes, were a little bit difficult. But the human is remarkably adaptive, and what we found out was that by the time we had just stood around in the cockpit for a couple hours we were completely adapted. And when we walked down off of the craft onto the surface we already were right at home. And you'd really like it.”