As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
I want to be the first. If they'd let me go to the moon, I'd crawl all the way to Cape Kennedy just to do it. I'd like to go to the moon, but I don't want to be the second man to go there.
In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.
Nobody ever asks who was the seventh person on the Moon. The only thing they know is who's number one and who's number two. Does anybody know who the last man was?
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.
Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.
No one remembers who came in second.
I don't go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we've already practiced.
Neil Armstrong, when he was out there landing on the moon, I was there first.