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My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.
I like new experiences, so I want to promote the same among my colleagues, and this is why I decided to go on this adventure, because I believe going to the Moon will help me create something better.
If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.
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.
I am not sure about Bill Nelson. I haven't heard him say, 'Let's junk the NASA plan to send humans to the moon.' He's not about to say that. That would not be very popular.
Exploring Mars is a far different venture from Apollo expeditions to the moon; it necessitates leaving our home planet on lengthy missions with a constrained return capability.
I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights.
My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.
Going back to the moon is not visionary in restoring space leadership for America. Like its Apollo predecessor, it will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies.
Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.
The decision to go to the moon is now appreciated and associated with President Kennedy's speech, but somebody else had told him it was a good idea. It turned out to be a good commitment, but it was a unique situation.
All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they'll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he'd be a national hero.
Any observations from the Moon or a sense of realising this or that about the greater meaning of things wasn't as influential for me as the experience of coming back and dealing with being a person who's been to the Moon.
Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?
To send humans back to the moon would not be advancing. It would be more than 50 years after the first moon landing when we got there, and we'd probably be welcomed by the Chinese. But we should return to the moon without astronauts and build, with robots, an international lunar base, so that we know how to build a base on Mars robotically.
If we go back to the moon, we're guaranteed second, maybe third place because while we are spending all that money, Russia has its eye on Mars. Landing people on the moon will be terribly consuming of resources we don't have. It sounds great - 'Let's go back. This time we're going to stay.' I don't know why you would want to stay on the moon.