We Accepted the Challenge of Going to Moon… (Part II)

ALDRIN: As we’ve been discussing the events that have taken place, in the past two or three days here on board our spacecraft, we’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the Moon. More still than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Neil’s statement that the other day upon first setting foot on the surface of the Moon: “This is a small step for a man, but a great leap for the mankind,” I believe sums up these feelings very nicely. We accepted the challenge of going to the Moon. The acceptance of this challenge was inevitable. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission I believe is a tribute to the timeliness of that acceptance.
Today I feel we are fully capable of accepting expanded roles in the exploration of space. In retrospect, we’ve all been particularly pleased with the emblem of our flight, depicting the US eagle bringing the universal symbol of peace from the planet Earth to the Moon, that symbol being the olive branch. It was our overall crew choice to deposit a replica of this symbol on the Moon. Personally, on reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from the Psalms comes to mind to me: ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him?’ COLLINS: This trip of ours to the Moon may have looked to you simple or easy.
I’d like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn V rocket which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked perfectly. This computer up above my head has a thirty-eight-thousand-word vocabulary, each word of which has been very carefully chosen to be the utmost value to us, the crew. This switch which I have in my hand now has over three hundred counterparts in the command module alone. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuit breakers, levers, rods and other associated controls. The SPS engine, our large rocket engine on the back end of our service module, performed flawlessly or we would have been stranded in lunar orbit.
The parachutes up above my head must work perfectly tomorrow or we will plummet into the ocean. We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of this flight. All this is possible only through the blood, sweat and tears of a number of people. First, the American workmen who put these pieces of machinery together at the factory. Second, the painstaking work done by the various test teams during the assembly and the re-test after assembly. Finally, the people at the Manned Spacecraft Centre both in management, in mission planning and flight control and last, but not the least, in crew training. This operation is somewhat like the periscope of a submarine, all you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands of others, and to all those I would like to say thank you very much. (Source: The Folio Book of Historic Speeches)