Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone.

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.

It's a strange, eerie sensation to fly a lunar landing trajectory not difficult, but somewhat complex and unforgiving.

Hey, we missed the whole thing.

I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo [space program] in 1961.

I have been in relatively high-risk businesses all of my adult life. Few of the others, however, had the possibility of direct gains in knowledge which this one had. I have confidence in the equipment, the planning, the training. I suspect that on a risk-gain ratio, this project would compare very, very favorably with those to which I've been accustomed on the past 20 years.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.