Interview with Astronaut “Rusty” Schweickart on the Moon

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On the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo program to reach the Moon, Apollo 9 astronaut Russell “Rusty” L. Schweickart spoke about his extraterrestrial experience, intelligence and humanity’s relationship with machines. His speech was delivered during a dedication ceremony for a North American F-86H Sabre static display at Otis Air National Guard Base, Mass. on June 8, 2019.

Schweickart flew the F-86H Sabre during the early 1960’s while assigned to the 101st Tactical Fighter Squadron. The event on base was held to formally announce the dedication of tail number 31235 in his honor.

Following his service with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Schweickart joined NASA as one of 14 astronauts named in October 1963. He served as lunar module pilot for Apollo 9 from March 3-13, 1969, logging 241 hours in space. This was the third manned flight of the Apollo program and the first manned flight of the lunar module. During a 46 minute spacewalk, Schweickart tested the new Apollo space suit and portable life support backpack which were subsequently used on lunar surface explorations. On the mission with Schweickart were commander James A. McDivitt and command module pilot David R. Scott.

Video b-roll illustration includes images from Apollo 8, 9 and 11. Audio transmissions are from Apollo 9.

Transcript

This is Apollo Control at four hours fourteen minutes. Huntsville has acquisition. (radio static)

Huntsville valid due in.

Houston, Apollo 9.

Go Apollo 9, this is Houston

Okay, Houston you’re coming in very weak but be advised we had a successful ejection and we are presently separating very slowly from the S-IVB. We’ve got them in sight out of all the windows.

Alright, sounds beautiful. Could you give me your ejection time, please?

We’ve created a real partnership with machines which have allowed us to do amazing things. We don’t really know what life elsewhere in the universe looks like so we don’t know what the parallel to that is, but I suspect that part of life, wherever it may exist, of necessity involves intelligence and self-awareness. Creating tools and machines, which enable it to do things that it could not otherwise do. As I say, we’re all very much wrapped up in this. Everyone of you has got, in your pocket or your purse or whatever. I got one right there, this thing has, I have no idea, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,000,000 times the capability that got me and my buddies up into space and to the moon and back. We take it for granted. But it got me thinking that that idea, as a tribute, that we seldom acknowledge is something that I felt I wanted to bring to people’s attention. People today at the edge, at the frontier of investigating the evolution from the Big Bang all the way through the 13.7 billion years that lead to today. Believe certainly that life is a natural outcome of the fundamental structure and organization of the universe. You go back to the Big Bang that started with quarks. Extremely hot, extremely dense and as things expanded and got cooler you know those quarks and things got together and formed nuclear particles. Atomic particles following on from that and eventually things cool off enough that atoms got together to form molecules. Eons later, out of chemistry, comes a transition which we have no clue today how that happened. And that is the evolution from chemistry into biology. And with biology came some very fascinating realities. Survival instinct. The fundamental recognition that driving all of life that we know of is this tendency to do whatever it takes to survive, to expand, to go beyond and that’s where, out of intelligence and humanity as we evolved out of that life process we invent machines that enable us to go beyond. And of all people here, in this particular gathering, here I am telling you that we’ve gone out and landed on the moon. I look back at Apollo on this 50th Anniversary Celebration and I look in particular to Apollo 8, guys that preceded me, by the way General, with the third mission but that’s okay, you were close fourth. (laughter) Sorry about that General, but I (audience laughter) Apollo 8 was the crew Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders all very good friends of mine who went out the moon at Christmas 1968. The most memorable thing about it for me was the fact that they got there, went into orbit around the moon. Not just around it and back but they went into orbit. They were looking at the craters on the surface of the moon to get any kind of information and intelligence they could about the subsequent landing that would help on the landing to come a couple missions later. They were flying pointed straight down as they went around the moon and they were actually going backwards so that they would see the craters come out from under the nose of the spacecraft and disappear over the far horizon. They did that for three orbits around the moon, six hours. And then for some reason, that I don’t know and I don’t know if he knows but Frank Borman rolled the space craft so that they were going forward. Same altitude but they were going forward then craters were coming from the far horizon toward them. The same thing, crater upon crater upon crater, shades of gray, looking up stars in a very very black universe and all of the sudden shockingly, I mean literally, it was a shock to them when up over the horizon came the earth. Beautiful, blue and white, colorful and suddenly, for the first time, in history humanity realized what it was all about. We are the creation of the universe here in this small corner of the universe that we occupy and we’re the only life that we know about, for that matter, in the universe but certainly here in our little corner of the universe and they, with their own eyes, saw that beautiful earth and recognized the earth as Mother Earth. And we, humanity, intelligence, life, being born out of that non-human mother but Gaia, Mother Earth. And I look back at that and as far as I’m concerned that was the moment of what I call cosmic birth. That was the moment that life first moved out of the mother, that was the moment where as in human life there forms a two-way relationship. No longer a fetus being supported by the mother but now, a life independent of the mother. The development of love and think about the environmental movement that started at that time. Think about the whole birthing process of the fetus demanding more and more energy and material to support it’s growth. Creating more and more waste and the mother having to process it. There are good analogies there. We adopt them in our whole environmental process. But love has become now a two-way process. And the next thing that follows on that love, that love relationship that we have now with the planet is responsibility. We all assume in our own way some responsibility for our mothers and fathers, for that matter but they don’t count much. (laughter) And here we are celebrating 50 years of human eyes first seeing and recognizing and to some extent still in the process of acknowledging that responsibility which is intrinsic in the understanding that we are the only life in our corner of the universe and this evolutionary process, in which we’re a part, will continue and we now, with the power that we have, our cells, our brains, the machines that we create are responsible for the continued evolution of life out of Mother Earth. That’s what Apollo was all about. It wasn’t Rusty Schweickart or Neil Armstrong or anybody else. It wasn’t the Apollo 9 mission or the Apollo 11 mission. It was that moment in time that will be remembered 10,000 years from now, 100,000 years from now. With a little bit of luck and responsibility lived we’re gonna see that there is life that we were part of here. This unique moment when that life first emerged out of this Mother Earth, this beautiful earth that we celebrate here today and that is what we should be celebrating today on the 50th anniversary of Apollo and I appreciate being here to suggest that to you to charge you with whatever you’ve got to do to see that that continues to your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, that is the process of evolution we’re all part of and what we celebrate today. And if it were not for that airplane behind me and the Mass Air Guard and the 101st and the 102nd, I wouldn’t be here today to celebrate it with you. But, thank you very much for inviting me and I really appreciate it. Thank you (applause)

Thank you sir.

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