The Moment Of Twilight Is Simply Beautiful.

That Whole Day [ Of The Space Flight] Is Very Vividly Impressed On My Memory Because It Was Such A New Experience. We Hadn't Done That Before. And Then I've Recalled It So Often Since Then I Think That It's A - It's Remained Very Vivid Over The Past 50 Years, Seems To Me Like About A Week Or Two Instead Of 50 Years.

Exploration, Of Course, Is Going To New Places, But I Don't Think We Go To New Places Just Solely To Say: "well, We've Been There," And Come Back, Interesting Though It May Be. To Me, Each Time We Go Farther Into Space We Should Use That To Do Basic Research - Basic Research That Can't Be Done Before You Go There.

America Put More Money Into Research, Into The New And The Unknown Than Any Nation In History, And The Same Thing With Education, And Those Two Things Led Us Into A Worldwide Preeminence In A Very Short Period Of Time.

There Had Been A Number Of Failures But We Weren't Going Out To Ride A Failure. And We Felt They'd Corrected All The Difficulties With The Boosters Before That Time And The Launch Problems. And So We Had A Lot Of Confidence That There Was Going To Be A Successful Mission. We Weren't Off On Some Suicide Effort, Certainly.

I Hate To Think That We May Be Out There Seven To Ten Years Out And Dependent On The Russians For Our Journey Into Space.