"In the illuminating conversation posted online on the CPA Australia website, Armstrong revealed how he thought his mission, Apollo 11, only had a 50% chance of landing safely on the moon’s surface and said it was “sad” that the current US government’s ambitions for Nasa were so reduced compared with the achievements of the 1960s.
“Nasa has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve,” said Armstrong. “It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.”
As a child, Armstrong said he had “become fascinated with the world of flight, as an elementary school student, and determined that, somehow, I wanted to be involved in that.”
He served as a fighter pilot in the Korean war and was working as a test pilot when President John F Kennedy issued his challenge to the country’s scientists to land on the moon. “We choose to go the moon and these other things,” said Kennedy to an audience at Rice University in 1962, “not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.”
At the time, the US had only managed to send Alan Sheppard 100 miles above the surface of the Earth for 20 minutes. “Now the president was challenging us to go to the moon,” said Armstrong. “The gap between a 20 minutes up and down flight and going to the moon was something almost beyond belief, technically.”
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/neil-armstrong-breaks-his-silence-to-give-accountants-moon-exclusive.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
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