I grew up in New Jersey and never went up the Statue of Liberty.

You can tell I'm not too bashful about some of my feelings.

For every winner, there's a loser. And that person didn't really need to lose. They just didn't understand the game plan.

I participated with great honor in becoming one of the first to land on the moon, and now I am devoting and have devoted many years of my life to enabling Americans to lead international nations to permanence on the planet Mars.

As a youngster, I read of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction. And as a fighter pilot, I observed the selection of the Mercury astronauts. All this was fascinating, but I really didn't think I would ever be a part of it. It was only when my good friend Ed White was selected as a Gemini astronaut that I decided to join NASA as part of the Apollo program.

Over the years, I think I've matured in my spiritual evolution and development to understand a bit more than the narrow religious thinking - to move beyond that through a sort of perfection of the grandiose nature of the universe, and how perfect it is it in its sense and how satisfied we should all be in our place in that.

It was designed to have an impact on the stalemate over Mutually Assured Destruction with the Soviet Union. Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.