Somebody else can be the first man on the moon. It doesn't interest me at all.
I cycled on a crew assignment as the backup commander on Apollo 16 and would have flown Apollo 19 on a return mission to the moon. However, the last few missions of the Apollo Program were canceled for budgetary reasons. So I lost my second opportunity to land on the moon.
After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.
There are countless space activities that would be no less exciting than the moon missions were, I have no doubt. The search for life on Mars, for example.
Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.
When I was 12, I saw the Apollo moon landings, and I thought that was really fantastic and exciting and thought, 'That's what I want to do.'
I'm in favor of changing the destination of humans. There are a lot of manned missions that can be done, but not in the direction of the moon.
By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow and I expect to be around in see it.
The Moon has given us months, tides and a destination that ever-beckons. It's time we build a rocket and go to stay.
The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.
