Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
with a few of your closest friends. And other times, it means a resort on a private beach with no one else in sight. Wherever you decide to go, find the detail that moves you with unique benefits at hand-selected hotels from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. They have my...
It's like a whole new Berlin. I can buy two. I'm saving so much. Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends. They will be mourned by their nation. They will be mourned by the people of the world. They will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same. But our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow and surely find their way home.
Man's search will not be denied, but these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
So that, Dominic, was your hero, President Richard Nixon. Or rather, it was Richard Nixon as he would have been had the Apollo 11 mission gone wrong, had the Eagle not landed or had it been unable to take off, had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin been left stranded on the moon. But fortunately, that never happened. But I think of all the things that have been written about
the moon landings. That is the one that haunts me more than anything, because it really brings home the jeopardy, the incredible sense of danger that accompanied a mission that is now so much part of our imagination that we just take its success for granted, don't we? We completely do, Tom. Well, first of all, I will say tremendous effort there. Thank you. I didn't
I felt it was slightly wavery at times, but as we will discover, we won't give it away right away, but you were under tremendous pressure there. I was. I mean, because there is a Californian listening to this who has maybe dabbled a little bit in amateur dramatics himself. Bit of acting. In acting himself, exactly. So you did well under tremendous pressure. To be honest, Dominic, it was Richard Nixon talking about the search for truth and understanding that made me wobble. Of course, right. Yes.
Yes. So it is an extraordinary thing, isn't it? When you think about the 20th century, it will of course be remembered in the long run for technology, for the world wars, for the terrible depths of man's inhumanity to man. But the one great shining light, I would say, is the sense that
mankind was pushing the frontiers of technological exploration and that that moment when man lands on the moon is the supreme symbol i think in the 20th century of you know the conquest of frontiers that would once have seemed absolutely impossible and the sheer symbolism don't you think of that moment when neil armstrong steps onto the room and you're absolutely right i think to
to emphasize the jeopardy, which is something we so often overlook. Now, you and I are too young, aren't we? I mean, I wasn't even born. Well, I'm not actually. You're too young to remember it though. Yeah, I am definitely too young to remember it. But the good news is we have a guest today who does remember it. Now, Tom, we are a patriotic podcast. So it pains me, given our history with the French,
This is our first guest who is a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, would you believe? That we have on the show. Yeah. However, on the positive side, he is a fan of Aston Villa. Well. So it's not all bad. Two pretty deep black marks there, Tom. But I'm prepared to overlook them because it is our first guest to have won, not one, but two Academy Awards for Best Actor in successive years. It is, of course, Aston.
historian Tom Hanks. Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you. And by the way, Tom Holland, a dead ringer as Richard. Thank you. Thank you.
Without a doubt. Thank you. If you could say such things like, I am not a crook and you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. Those were two of his other quotes. I'll feel like I'm sitting in the same room. Wow. You are too kind. That is charitable. That is so kind. That is so generous. That is a beautiful quote.
It's odd to say, but a missed opportunity for some magnificent poeticizing in that speech that did not have to be given in that it really does encapsulate the risk and the danger in the 50-50 one-shot only opportunity that Apollo 11 had and Apollo 12 had in order to land on the moon. And it only took...
It took less than a year for the opposite to happen. On Apollo 13, that odd thing occurred, a bad valve, a misread test result, improperly interpreted reading, what have you.
Had it happened at any other point in the voyage to the moon, would have taken the lives of all three astronauts that were on board Apollo 11. Jim Lovell, Chuck Schweiker, and Fred Hayes. And Tom, that is a mission that is associated with you. I played, I was in the movie. I played Jim Lovell. I talked to all of those guys and did a deep, deep, deep dive into that other aspect of exploration was what happens when something goes wrong, terribly wrong.
And what does it take in order to avoid
uh, the disaster that really would have defined, I think the Apollo moon message, the American space race, and perhaps going to the moon. I just to ask before we, we start looking at the history of how man ends up on the moon. What's your kind of personal sense of it? It goes back to childhood, doesn't it? You were kind of playing games in swimming pools and things. Yeah. I'm 67 years old. I was born in 1956 and my school days, uh,
perfectly with the story of the decade and as Dominic said, really of the 20th century. We were going to go to the moon. Human beings were going to walk on the moon as
As early as 1962, the question was when and who and how fast and which nation would it be? The Soviet Union, who seemed to be light years ahead of us in their secrecy and in their accomplishments, or would it be the very open and public and very expensive Ukraine?
American space program. So from John Glenn or actually Alan Shepard in the early 1960s, I was in second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade. So I was 13 in July of 1969.
And the only thing I was paying attention to outside of maybe some girls was the run-up to landing on the moon, which began really in earnest in the, I think, in the zeitgeist of Vox Populi starting in 1968 when Apollo 8 went to the moon and broadcast live from lunar orbit on television. And we saw that very particular vision of ourselves on the planet Earth,
In the distance, in black and white, but yet there we were. But seeing it on television, I was sitting in my mom's house in Red Bluff, California, thinking that history just cracked wide open. Something had happened that had never happened before. And so now it was just, we had to complete the task. And when would that happen? There were two more missions that went and tested equipment and one flew to the moon again, Apollo 10, they did not land.
And it wasn't until that July where it was going to happen. And it was a countdown. It was, it was a, uh,
Every day that ticked by every week, every headline was sort of like written all of the disciplines that I was studying. Certainly it was current events, you know, the news of the day, but it was also science. It was also physics lift plus thrust is equal to load plus drag. It was engineering. It was mathematics of how do you build these rockets and how do you put three guys into it? And how do you,
What does it take in order to build something that can land on the moon? It was science and technology because they had amazing computers that would help divine how to get there. Computers in the primitive sense. Your average calculator that you get for free on one of your apps on your phone now has more memory than everything they had on Apollo. And then there was also a degree of artistry to it.
Because I can't tell you enough of how much the combined presence of 2001, of Space Odyssey, the motion picture, as well as the poetry of Archibald MacLeish and the ongoing science fiction writing of anybody from Robert Heinlein to Arthur C. Clarke. This was all enmeshed in this world of before we land on the moon. I was very cognizant of that great moment.
I overused the imagery of Rubicon that was crossed by humankind. On one side of the lunar river one day, and then the next day we had crossed over to the other side. All of humankind now were spacefaring, planetary visiting beings. And Tom, can I ask you, so you said you were born in 1956. Obviously the following year, I think it is, is the year that the Russians launched spacefaring.
Sputnik, which was a great shock for Eisenhower's America. How much were you growing up conscious of the fact that the space race was being driven by that kind of Cold War competition with an ideological adversary? Or was that not really on ordinary people's radar, would you say? No, it was us versus them.
Turns out the threat of Sputnik was really just they'd been able to do it. Everybody was like, oh, now they can drop rockets on us. No, no, they couldn't. Sputnik was essentially a grapefruit-sized ball that was going beep, beep, beep. But the fact that they were able to do it in the first place,
was what kind of like kicked America's ass for a while. How come they can do it when we can't? Then, of course, Yuri Gagarin goes up and orbits the moon. And it seemed as though the Russians were building spaceships when America's were kind of like sending up versions of toasters to see if they could work in outer space instead. But it was. It was a competition, pure and simple, us versus them competition.
And it was always in the perspective of they're beating us. We are losing. We're in second place because it was so secretive. Yeah, of course. Because Khrushchev kind of openly gloats, doesn't he, when he congratulates Gagarin and he kind of saying, let the capitalists catch up with us. They'll never beat us.
And then of course, John F. Kennedy picks up the gauntlet. And since you were thrilled by my first impression of an American president, let me- So you asked for this, Tom. You opened the door to this. All right, let's hear it. So this is September the 12th, 1962. And JFK gives a speech at Rice University in Houston, where of course, you know, mission control is and all that kind of thing to 40,000 people. And he commits the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. So he is providing a kind of a deadline
But why, some say the moon, why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why to climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
What do you think of that? So what people who are listening to this can't see is that actually Tom Hanks is in tears and horror at the destruction of an American icon. I mean, it's such a stirring speech. And I hope that I haven't completely destroyed any sense of the drama of it with that. But it is... You can't screw up that text. You know, the words live. Right. Even the worst actor, you're saying. But it's an amazing commitment because...
failure in that mission will be so public. It's about as bold a statement as was ever to be made, I think, by any politician. Now, later on in the famous speech to Congress, he says, I believe that we should dedicate ourselves before this decade is out of sending a man onto the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
Between that and what he said in the stadium at Rice University, and that, why does Rice play Texas? That was a great ad lib that he put in there for the local crowd. It really does state something much more than a political will, but sort of like the purpose and definition of humankind. Why would we try something like that?
You know, you can take that into account by why go across those mountains, you know, in primitive man, when all you can do is walk. Why go from here to there when it's on the other side of that body of water? Why do anything that was going to risk your life?
cost a lot of money, maybe have absolutely no value at the end of the day. Why go off and explore or try anything new? Because it is the human condition, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. He goes on and speaks about the test that is going to make of all of ourselves, of the people that are involved in that. They're going to have to just figure things out
with no guarantee of success, in fact, a 50-50 chance of absolute public failure. And here's the thing that I think comes down to what backed up his ability to say such a thing, is there's a ton of people that want to do exactly that, that don't view themselves as being fully alive
Without trying the impossible, without attempting to figure out what has never been attempted. It is part of the human condition for some people to leave the campfire and go outside the cave and see what's on the other side of the valley. And in this case, I mean, my God, I mean, here we have been looking up at this thing.
that has been above us in different shapes and forms more or less every single night of our existence. And depending on when we get up at night, sometimes the moon is there shining down on us. Sometimes it's just barely showing up. And it is this huge, big, circular, crescent, gibbous-faced source of light and perspective that can...
With only a few minutes of pondering, produce nothing but questions. What's up there? Can I go there? Why is it there? How did it get there? What does it mean? I mean, what does the moon mean? How does it affect us? I mean, you know, I think it's interesting that...
crazy people were often called lunatics. You went to a lunatic asylum. I've spoken to people in the psychiatric industry. They said, hey, what's the deal with the full moon? Does it really make people go crazy? And they said, why do you think they called them lunatics? Because even periodically that moon comes out and we all get a little bit hairy. We all turn into
some version of werewolves. Yeah. And it's as certain as the tides being pulled, you know, on bodies of water. So there's this thing that exists up there for some kind of reason. And as John F. Kennedy says, you know, we choose.
to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they're easy, but because they are hard. They're going to be a test of ourselves and why we're here on the planet Earth in the first place. Now, it's not far, I don't think, in order to take that and say, well, why try to figure out what bacteria is? Why not try to...
you know, conquer viruses. Why not try to do any of the other things? Because they're not going to be easy. They are going to be hard. But at the same time, it's a problem that we are a problem-solving race. We like these mysteries and tasks. So you said something interesting there about, you know, Kennedy's pledge, his vigor, his optimism, tapping something in the human spirit. But now that you look back,
Do you think that the 60s, I mean, Kennedy obviously talks about the new frontier and all that kind of thing. Do you think that the 60s, that that was a peculiar moment, the kind of technological optimism, the can-do spirit? Obviously, the economy is doing really well. The United States is really keen to flex its muscles, I guess. I'm not talking about militarily, although there is a military dimension to it, but there's a real sense of
The whole new frontier thing, conquering frontiers, they're obviously now, from the perspective of the 2020s, we kind of don't have that to the same degree, do we? We're much more pessimistic, we're much more introverted. But do you think there was something unique about that spirit? So that climate in which you were growing up,
of kind of can-do, vigor, dynamism, all of that kind of thing. Without a doubt, the 1960s were this time where the newness of so much of our technological abilities as human beings was probably on display in a much more vigorous kind of way.
I'm going to say somewhere between the advent of television through to the 1970s, maybe, when we could have the VHS machine and record everything. Suddenly, all this stuff was possible that had been the stuff of science fiction for generation upon generation. Even my dad.
My parents could only get across the country really at the speed of a railroad. And if they were going to make a telephone call, your voice had to get there along whatever electrons could fit onto a copper wire. And all of those barriers disappeared in the 1960s. Just communications in general went nuts. And also in our own individual lives,
You know, it was an incredibly important invention, and it came about widely in the 1960s. It was air conditioning. Mm-hmm.
Because suddenly you could live in parts of the world that were inhospitable. Well, like Houston, right? Yeah. Oh, Houston. That's why it can be done in Houston. Houston's a swamp, for goodness sake. It's a murky, humid swamp with bugs and spiders the size of your head. Yeah. And air conditioning comes along. And suddenly we are able to live our daily lives in this type of comfort and ease.
For the first time in human, in all of human history. And so along with that, I think stirred this catalyst of, well, what else is possible? What else can we do? What else is fun? You know, what else is going to be entertaining and what else can we do at nighttime when we're home done with our, done with our jobs?
But also then what else is going to be able to move us from here and there? And what else is going to be technologically imaginatively possible? It seemed there for a while that if you could imagine it, you could make it happen. Yeah. In the 1960s, that has just sped so fast, you know, that now we don't even think twice about all the things that are possible.
Tom, I should mention, this is a thought that struck me very, very powerfully when I went to a show that you narrate, Moonwalkers, in King's Cross here in London where we are, which is on at the moment. It's on, I think, until the 13th of October 2024. In that, you narrate the story of all the various Apollo missions. One of the things that leaps out from that is how short the distance of time is between utter disaster and utter triumph. Apollo 1
I mean, three astronauts die horribly burnt to death in their tin can, as David Bowie would put it. And they weren't even meant to fly. They were just doing tests on the ground. And something went so hideously wrong that they were incinerated to death and they couldn't even open the door to the space capsule. Because that seems a terrible... I mean, Apollo 1, they die so horribly, the technology seems dodgy, and yet...
The speed with which the missions are being sent up. So we, we already talked about Apollo eight with moonrise and Jim level up there and everything. And then Apollo 10, uh,
Dressed rehearsal for the Apollo 11 lunar landing, which is called Snoopy, isn't it? The one that goes down. Well, yeah. But okay. Listen, can we take a moment just to examine Apollo 10? Sure. Yeah. Well, Charlie Brown and Snoopy was a command module in the lunar module. Apollo 8 had gone around the moon at Christmas with three guys in it. It was just them, just to see if the math worked.
That Apollo 8 was kind of like, if we can throw this hammer far enough, hard enough, it'll go around the moon and come back. Right? And they did. And I'll tell you this little side story. Charles Lindbergh.
visited the crew of Apollo 8 just before they were about to launch. And they said to him, you know, are you going to come back in July for the Apollo 11? Because that'll really be history because they're going to land on the moon. And Charles Lindbergh said, no, you guys are making the most important flight in humankind. You guys are leaving the gravitational pull of the planet Earth. That's never been done before.
If you guys can do that, all the rest of this stuff is nuts and bolts. How about that? Yeah. So then let's take Apollo 10. Thomas Stafford, who is the commander, and Gene Cernan. Gene Cernan is in Snoopy. Ha!
The lunar module that cannot land on the moon, but separates in lunar orbit, goes around a bunch of times, does a bunch of tests, separates into its two descents. So I've been and I've asked Gene Cernan this. How in the world do you go all the way to the moon?
Fly just a few dozen miles above its surface and willingly give up on the idea of landing and coming back home. I mean, you are so close and yet you're not allowed to park and go into Disneyland. You can only drive by and look at it. Is that why they called it Charlie Brown?
Because they never got there. No, actually, the reason they called it Charlie Brown is because it was the first time they were going to have two different spacecraft that they had to talk to individually. Oh, I see. So they needed names. So when they said, hey, Charlie Brown, that meant the command module. They said, hey, Snoopy, that meant the lunar module. Right. So as somebody who's talked to a lot of these astronauts, and obviously you've played astronauts and you've narrated films about them and so on and so forth, is there a sense of...
I mean, does the camaraderie trump everything? Are they just so proud and privileged to be doing the jobs that they are? Or is there a sense of, I don't know, maybe jealousy is too strong, but rivalry, you know, because the guy who gets to be the first guy on the moon, I mean, that is a very privileged position. So in other words, do the people on Apollo 10 think,
yeah, this is all very well, but I wish I was on a pillow at 11. Or does that not come into it? They are perhaps the most competitive group of people I've ever come across. They are all convinced, rightly so, that they are the most accomplished of anybody who's there. They do give each other great respect for what they have accomplished, but they don't necessarily get along.
They don't necessarily have to like each other. Without a doubt, it is a class. And by class, I mean a group of people who are all studying and competing for the same honors. And inside that comes every one of the human feelings that was part of the human condition. But what they also are, they are members of an extremely...
exclusive club that is a meritocracy. You have to be smart. You have to be accomplished. And you have to withstand any number of intellectual and physical rigors to be a part of it. So I have found them all to be a source of, if you can get them away from, what's the word I'm, you know, anybody who accepts a check from the federal government
Runs the risk of saying something so improper or whatever. And so there's an awful lot of pressure on them to always say and be and do the right thing.
I'll take that into account because I understand that what goes along with it. But just like, I don't know, it's kind of like when you get a chance to have a real conversation with one of the Rolling Stones, you know, hey, Bill Wyman, I got some questions for you about what it was like being a part of the Rolling Stones. Yeah. Hey, Charlie, Charlie Watts, you got to watch the back of those. What do you think? You know, they all have a very, very, very individual story to tell about what they saw and what they went through. And it is singular.
It is for them and them alone. You know, you Tom and Dominic, you talk about what would have happened if Neil and Buzz and Apollo 11 had died going down to the surface or not able to get off the surface. Let's imagine their corpses are in the sea of tranquility for the rest of time. OK, do you know what Michael Collins had to do?
Michael Collins was the astronaut in the command module. He was there to take them home. You know, he had to drill and practice and come up with the
the plan in order to fly home by himself. And that was not just a theoretical thing written on paper. He had to run those simulations himself. Now, you hear that, and it's like, okay, I think it's great that Neil and Buzz got to work. I have some questions for Michael Collins I'd like to ask about what he went through. It's almost as though let's not discount the expertise of those men simply because they didn't get to go down and get their boots dirty. But also, I mean, imagine...
Aldrin and Armstrong know that Michael Collins has been preparing for that. Michael Collins knows it. I mean, such courage. And just to go back to the letter that we opened with, they're getting in a tin can. They don't know it's going to work. So we should probably take a break. But before we do that, let's get...
man on the moon. So let's follow Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they are coming down to the surface of the moon in the Eagle. As preparation for this, I rewatched the Ryan Gosling film, First Man, and they do it brilliantly. And I think it's kind of music, kind of incredible tension. And I was prompted then to go and read a book that you wrote the introduction for, Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, because I hadn't realized until I saw that film that
that they almost land in a crater, don't they? Yeah. And Neil Armstrong has to kind of take over. He kind of goes, he says, pretty rocky area here. He said, understatements of the year, pretty rocky area here. Well, yeah, yeah.
On the moon? And the NASA tracking guy is saying it was like watching a man, some kind of snake charmer, put his hand on a cobra. Anything can happen any minute and probably will. I mean, I cannot imagine the tension there must have been at that moment. There was also the fact that the visuals of landing there, because there is no atmosphere, there is no sense of depth perception.
It's very hard to determine how big that rock actually is. Is it the size of a house? The size of a car? Is it the size of a toaster? How big is that rock? Because the lack of an atmosphere means everything is crystal clear. Everything is as sharp as focus as there is.
Outside of the analog radar, they had a very primitive version of radar, not much better than had it existed since World War II. The best guide they had was the fact they had the shadow of their lunar module. They had the shadow of the Eagle. And the math that went into them landing meant that their lunar module had to be coming into a landing with the sun directly behind them.
So that this little shadow that finally shows up in the distance is them. And they just match it up for where they are until the show. And it's not until about,
20 feet above the surface that the dust of the moon starts kicking up and Buzz Aldrin says, picking up a little dust, that means they are that close. So a shadow and some dust is the only thing that tells them how close they are to the surface. I can't get past those kind of details. Yeah. Should we take a break now? And when we come back, we'll let the listeners know whether the Eagle manages to land or not. Yeah, let's find out because I'm anxious to know. Okay. See you in a few minutes. Bye-bye.
Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
♪♪♪
Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are still here with Tom Hanks talking about moonwalkers, the men who walked on the moon. So we're on July the 20th, 1969. Our young Tom Hanks is watching in awe in California. I think that's right, isn't it? You were watching at home. Yes. Flew to your TV like so many people. And they've been gone for four days. They have 30 seconds of fuel left in the reserves. The tension is mounting. I know. The world is watching.
And Neil Armstrong brings the lunar module down and he cuts the engines and he says, the Eagle has landed. And the show at the Lightroom that you narrate, so Tom mentioned it earlier in the first half at King's Cross, you get a sense of this almost ecstatic joy and relief.
in the control room when they realize they're down, they've made it. And the next thing is actually getting a human being down the steps and onto the surface of the moon. And am I right in saying that before they do that, Buzz Aldrin has...
some bread and wine and he wants to have a kind of a religious moment. Is that right? Yeah, he was about Catholic. And the interesting personalities of all of these crews, I think, comes out in Apollo 11, because I don't think you could have two individuals that are more different than Neil Armstrong was from Buzz Aldrin.
And you chucked Michael Collins in there. And you have, honestly. I'm not sure those guys would have volunteered to drive to the beach together had they not been assigned to it. But he did do it. And I think it's actually very beautiful, particularly for a man of any type of face. And it does put that other sort of
context into the endeavor. Now, NASA, I don't think was ever wild about there being any religiosity brought to anything in the program. In fact, when Apollo 8 read from the book of Genesis on their television broadcast,
There was all sorts of, you know, any number of public comments of the bike. This is the last thing we need. But it was, I think what Buzz did there was he said, this is a personal moment that I am experiencing. So therefore I'm going to note it in a very, very personal way. And one way or the other in an awful lot of the conversations I've had, I haven't spoken to every one of the men who walked on the moon.
But they all do some version of that. That is just a moment for themselves. But of course, for people watching on television,
The key moment is when Neil Armstrong actually steps onto the moon and he slightly fluffs his great line, doesn't he? Did you, as an actor, ever talk to him about that? There's all sorts of fabulous old wives tales or legends about what it is. And if he had said, that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind, that might have been...
But for my view, it's one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind. There is a rule, I think, when it comes down to literature is to get rid of any word that you do not need. Right. I think that he just truncated it perfectly. And maybe.
Maybe he was a little excited. Maybe his heart rate was a little large because I think what he did not say, and I've heard fabulous jokes about this from various comedic outlets. What he did not say is, holy cow, I'm stepping on the moon. Oh, my God. I can't, you know, I can't frigging believe this. I'm standing on the goddamn, you know, he didn't say that.
Right. So I think it ends up being as beautiful as anything that Shakespeare or Sophocles or Confucius or late Zhao has ever said, that you can't go much better than a giant leap for mankind. Right. And
And just to get back to the competitive thing that you talked about in the first half. Yeah. Buzz Aldrin wanted to be the first man on the moon, did he not? And is it not right that when they said, listen, it's going to be Neil, that he was like, you know what? I think it actually should be me. Well, every single man who was in the astronaut corps wanted to be the first man to...
to set foot on the moon. Al Shepard wanted it to be, Fred Hayes wanted it to be, Pete Conrad wanted it to be. And actually he had a shot because if something had gone wrong with 11, he would have made the first landing on 12. But there had been this hierarchy when it came down to who gets out of the spacecraft. On Gemini for the spacewalks of Ed White and Gene Cernan and Michael Collins made a spacewalk on Gemini with two guys.
The commander stayed inside the craft piloting it and the pilot, the other guy, essentially popped the hatch and got out first. That's the way it had always been in Gemini. And they would have assumed, you would have assumed that that would be the case also when it came down to landing on the moon. Now, is it an odd detail of spacecraft design that the hinges...
of the door of the hatch of the lunar module made it impossible for the guy standing on the right hand side to get out first and instead the commander of the mission the guy who actually made the landing right i don't know that we will ever know if it was that or it could have been and i'm on i have no i have no detail that says this was the case i wouldn't be surprised i
If when it came down to that decision and the design of the hatch itself, that,
somebody, maybe it was Deke Slayton, maybe it was Chris Kraft. I don't believe anybody is going to be the commander of the first landings on the moon who's going to say, no, let the other guy get out. I'm the commander. I'm getting out. I just landed. So leave it to that. So is it because of the design of it or is it because of some greater discussion? The record, I think, will probably go to show that, let's just call it a disappointment,
that Buzz Aldrin was not the first one. I mean, who doesn't want to be the first man to walk on the moon? Yeah. And it was a piece that he had to make with himself and it took a long time probably for him to make that. Neil Armstrong was the best pilot, was he, I think, in the entire space program. I mean, he had that reputation. Well, not if you ask all the other pilots. Ha ha.
Well, yeah, sure. But then they didn't walk on the moon, did they? The first. Well, you know, Pete Conrad. But I guess there's also the sense. Yeah. There's a sense also that he's the kind of guy you would want to be the first man to walk on the moon. He was a civilian. How about that? He was the only civilian. Everybody else. Yeah. Maybe not Jack Smith, but everybody else had been commissioned officers.
in the Navy as an aviator or the Air Force. Neil Armstrong was not. But he was going to play, the first guy who walks on the moon is obviously, you know, if he makes it back, he is going to be in the eye of the global media and he will be for the rest of his life. And so I guess you would want someone who could carry that off with dignity. And Neil Armstrong obviously did that tremendously. He certainly did. And I will say this, that came about because everything went according to plan.
plans that had shifted as early as December of 1968, when they decided to bypass the schedule of tests and missions. If, for example, anything had gone wrong, even on Apollo 10, even if Apollo 10 had not lived up to its specifications, Apollo 11 would have been a different sort of mission and would have been bombed. And Apollo 12 could have very easily have been the first mission to the moon. Or,
Somebody else could have done something else. They would have slid it around. It's an interesting question of what was the guarantee that Neil and Buzz and Mike Collins were going to be the mission that landed first on the moon? Okay.
Because even Al Shepard's Apollo 14, they were originally going to be Apollo 13, but that got slipped for any number of reasons. So there's a period of time where the schedule is in flux. But they make it back. They do. And they lived up to that second important part.
land a man on the moon and return them safely to the earth. Yeah. Let's look at them and just the physics of that. Okay. All right. They have landed on the moon. They have to ascend back up into orbit around.
around the moon. There's a lot of math involved in that, a lot of technology, meaning that rocket has to work perfectly. That rocket engine, all those valves and all the pressure and all the mixture and all the glycols and all that kind of stuff has to work perfectly.
The command module has to be in the right place, and it's got to hook up. They've got to be able to get back together, stow everything in, and then they throw away that ascent station. Then they have to line up perfectly and come home to Earth. And how many shots do they have at that? They have one...
single shot. They essentially come back from the moon on a clothesline, straight through, going, I don't even, you guys might be able to tell, how fast is the spacecraft going as it comes backwards? Something like 55,000 miles an hour? Dominic will know. Dominic, you got those numbers for us? I don't have them immediately to hand over.
Okay, all right. That was very mean. But it's going. It's thousands and thousands of miles per hour, right? Because the gravitational pull of the Earth is pulling them even faster and faster and faster. And then they have to survive that fiery thing, and then the parachutes all have to work, and they can't drown in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and all this stuff. So can I ask you, so Apollo 11 succeeds, and then Apollo 12, and men land on the moon and come back, and it's all brilliant. Right.
But of course, Apollo 13 famously, things go wrong. And everything that you've been talking about is essentially what the character that you play in that film has to deal with.
I assume that having played Jim Lovell, it gave you a much sharper sense of everything that was at stake, not just in Apollo 13, but in all the missions. The question that I think everybody asks, and I might have asked it of Jim himself, hey, how scared were you? And the truth is, no more scared than any other time they'd gone up in an airplane and figured out, oh, something could go wrong on them.
On Apollo 13, the crew knew exactly what they were going to have to do. They were going to have to treat the lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat. That was the engine that they, and that was a contingency to a degree. And after that, I said, well, did you ever have those times, moments where you were just sitting there thinking, we're screwed? And he said, no, because there was always something to do. He described it as a long, long game of solitaire.
You could always go three cards and see three cards and see nothing. Three. Oh, no, I can do this here. We need to do that here. There was a thing with the taking the O2 out of the out of the atmosphere. There was always something they could do. Fred Hayes, played by Bill Paxton, the late Bill Paxton, good friend. He said, you know, sometimes the only thing to do was just to switch over to the forward omni radio antenna.
Because they were spinning around in space. And so they always had to have the antenna turned on that was pointing at the earth. Sometimes he said, that's all I had to do.
But, you know, that gave me something to do every two and a half minutes. So that was something that was something. So getting getting to that aspect where they are always in play. And as long as they had a step that they had to take, they realized that there was a chance that they were going to make it back. The bigger thing, I think, that I certainly get from Jim Lovell. And he said this. He said, anytime you go up in an airplane.
You cheat death. Human beings aren't meant to fly, but we've just figured out how to do this. Human beings aren't supposed to go up into outer space. And by the way, when he flew on Apollo 13, he was the most traveled man in the history of humankind. He had been in space more often. He had been in space longer. He had gone farther than anybody else up to that point because that was his second flight to the moon because he'd been on Apollo 8.
I really got from him the tactile understanding that at the end of the day, it's flesh and blood and brains that make all of this stuff possible. Yeah. And we always had our brains and our flesh and blood was still intact. That's all they needed in order to have faith in themselves. Faith in themselves, I think, is the great divisive part between people that achieve things and those who don't even try.
It's the difference between us and rival history podcasts, isn't it, Tom? Exactly right. I'd like to think so. So when you talk about Jim Lovell and you talk about how well-traveled he was, I mean, that's an extraordinary thought, isn't it? He's the most well-traveled man in human history to that point. And you get a sense of the awesome scale of their achievements and the sense of possibility. I mean, they are doing this
year after year after year, multiple times a year sometimes. So Apollo 13 is what, 1970? And then you have 14, 15, 16, 17, and they're playing golf on the moon. Well, yeah. Apollo 15, they have a lunar rover. They have effectively a car on the moon. A fold-up electric car. Now, how about that? Someone said, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could see a little bit more on the moon and help these guys. How can we get a car up there? And someone says, I know,
Let's build one that folds up. Right. And so you'll just have to pull this little cord and it'll pop open up on the moon. You have four wheels and all the, all the stuff, and they can drive as far as they want to. I, uh, the, the guys, they were called the J missions. Right. 14, excuse me, 15, 16, and 17.
Not only did they have this electric car, but they were going to spend three working days out on the moon. Neil and Buzz were on the lunar surface for about two hours. That's it. And by the way, the Soviet Union, had they been the first to land on the moon, they wouldn't have even been able to walk more than a few yards from their spacecraft because they would have been connected by an umbilical cord. Is that so? They would have picked up some rocks. Right. They would have picked up some rocks and dust.
planted a flag, you know, the hammer and the sickle, and they would have done a couple of other things. And then they would have got back and they would have come home. Their plan was not necessarily to explore the moon. So Neil and Buzz are out for one spacewalk, about two hours. Pete Conrad and Al Bean, they did two spacewalks on Apollo 12, spent the night
And then took off. By the way, also made a pinpoint landing because they landed right next to the surveyor probe. Apollo 13 didn't make it. Apollo 14 did what Apollo 13 was going to do. And what they wanted to do was go to a different sort of geological formation on the moon to see the difference between the rocks. They were in the Fraumura Highlands.
Then along comes 15, 16, and 17. It's like, go as far as you can, find as much as the stuff and land in the most difficult places. And let's find out what is there. Every time they did that, every one of those missions tested some new aspect of what it takes for human beings to go into outer space and prove that either worked
or did not work. And I think they all found a surprisingly great amount of leeway. I'll tell you this, let's just ponder their pressure suits, the lunar, LEVA suits, lunar excursion suits that they had, the pressure suits, they worked perfectly. The worst thing that happened was on Apollo 14, the water hose got crimped
And the astronaut was not able to replenish himself with liquids while he was out on the moon for seven hours. Oh. Then here's a very interesting detail. And let's not discount that. I was in the Lunar Special and Receiving Laboratories.
where they still have the rocks from the moon, geological samples from the moon, that have not been touched. They have not been examined. I mean, most of them have been. But underneath gloves, inside a vacuum-packed seal in an airtight antiseptic atmosphere, I was able to hold the packages that had moon rocks in them. And the geologist that was there said to me something fascinating. He said, you know, 90% of what we know about lunar geology came from the rock
that Neil Armstrong picked up. On Apollo 11, Neil picked up the lunar specimens. Buzz laid out the scientific packages. So 90% of our understanding, our education of geological origins and makeup of stuff on the moon came from the rocks that Neil Armstrong picked up in his two hours. So you got to think then, what were all those missions for?
To find out what was possible, to find out the limits of how far one could go, and to find out the other specifications that is going to be the template for how anybody goes into outer space. Yeah. And you talk about them bringing stuff back like the lunar rocks, but they also left things there, didn't they? Oh, yeah. So there's a lovely story. I remember it from the Lightroom show that you did.
Charlie Duke, he leaves a photo, doesn't he? With an inscription with his family's fingerprints. And the inscription on the photo says, this is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke from planet Earth who landed on the moon on April the 20th, 1972. I actually found that the most, because I'm sentimental, I found that the most kind of poignant bit of the whole exhibition. This photo, which now has been bleached,
by the sun. So like the flags as well have been bleached. Yeah. On one side of that photograph is probably just, you know, a white blotch. But on the other side that has been sitting in darkness since 1972 are the names and the thumbprints of his family. So let's imagine that we're long gone and somebody else comes along to the moon. What do they notice? There's plenty of flags. There's a number of books. There's a
Bible was left on the lunar rover. Plenty of scribbles of initials probably here and there. There's that sculpture of the fallen astronaut that Dave Scott left because by that time, human lives had been lost in the space program. And that was representative of
Everybody, you know, if you want to go on the Internet, you'll be able to see that there's an entire market for lunar Apollo memorabilia, everything from patches that had that had been flown, you know, stowed away and flown to and from the moon autograph signed flight plans, this and that. That stuff is all scattered about.
And I don't know that everybody is willing to talk about this stuff that they took up with them and they brought back. And I think there's a lot of very personal mementos that the 12 moonwalkers took up with them and brought back and gave off as very, very special gifts and historic ones because, you
I mean, imagine if you could come back with, you know, a fork from Columbus's original. Oh, wow. Yeah. Sure. You know, you might want to say this fork was, you know, was used on Magellan's, uh, uh, you know, trip around the, around the world. That would, that would be a very unique fork. So Tom, you said 12 men walk on the moon.
And the Apollo missions end in 1972. So no human has set foot on the moon since then. Could we end, I mean, I know this is a history podcast, but just ask you to look into the future and what your hopes would be
for the future of human space travel and perhaps going to the moon and perhaps, who knows, going to Mars. I found out recently that even just for the next 12-month period, I think there's something like 24 different enterprises that are going to go back to the moon. 24 different entities are going to land something there, plant something there.
Figure out how to put a probe down a robot, whatever. And it just happened, what, like a week and a half ago. Somebody landed on the moon and thing fell over. So it's now laying on its side. So I want to say the desire to go back, but I also would say the need for us to return to the moon is as present now as it was to get there in the first place.
It is still there and it holds opportunity. Sure. Someone is, you know, I just, I just read the other day that somebody is going to try to go up and put a robotic tractor up there that is going to try to harvest the helium three isotope. You guys can have a whole podcast about the potential for helium three isotope. Oh, we'd love that. Dominic talks of little else. I have to say. Wouldn't that be fantastic? By the way.
Book that show and then just get ready for record setting listeners. I don't want to miss that helium three podcast on the rest is history. You got to get that. So the opportunities go out there. It exists, but what you're, you really are going to be coming around to that same sense of humanity, the same human need to continue along the track of what's up
there. And so do you think it matters that it would be humans rather than say robots? I mean, is it something about it being flesh and blood that matters for scientific reasons or perhaps imaginative reasons, making a statement? Because that's what's so moving about the physical constraints on human beings. Yeah. Makes it more impressive. I mean, it's the flesh and blood. Yeah. It will be both. It's not either or.
Because human beings will not accept either or. Tell human beings they can't do something. And then see how big the line is for the people who said, don't tell me what I can't do. Now, will human beings walk on the moon funded by governments and by popular will or by votes of Congress or parliament or whatever? Maybe not.
What we have learned from the Apollo missions is literally how to do it and how to do it does not necessarily have the need for huge massive space consortiums in order to do it. I mean, a husband and wife with the right amount of money and the right amount of smarts and enough land
Could probably do it themselves right now if they set out in order to do it. The technology is there. The physics is understood. The composites, the building materials, the computers, all that stuff is right there. The question will always still be to what purpose? It certainly isn't just to go back. And we did it.
And here I am. And now I'm going to come back and I'll be, you know, I'll have my own podcast for the rest of time because I'm the guy right back to the moon. The Artemis mission, you know, that's that's going to probably go up and circumnavigate fly around the moon sometime next year. That's going to be literally the first footstep toward some brand of recovery if if all the funding and everything holds out like that. But even without that.
There are folks out there, maybe they're only eight years old or maybe, you know, maybe there's somebody, you know, who's 67 like I am. It's going to say, I'm not going to miss out on the opportunity to go back and restart or to take up again the mantle of what those first 12 human beings did. It's time for us to, it's time for us to go back. We have never let a single piece of our planet earth remain unresolved.
unexplored. I mean, there's people who live in Antarctica, you know, because there's stuff to figure out there. We've never done that. And we're not going to do that with something as close as our nearest celestial neighbor either. Because once we get up there, we say, well, why do it? Because it's
It's just going to be the next step towards whatever is beyond. And, you know, I love the scientific, the science fiction aspects of it. And then we'll go to Mars and we'll figure out that. And then we'll go on here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll do all that. That's great. Somebody else is going to take that on. But let's talk about who really actually is going to go off.
And do it for the reasons that human beings will want to go to the moon in order to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. And I think that's fascinating. And will it happen? Look, I hope it happens within the next 10 years. It's got a really good shot. Right. And if it happens within the next 10 years, it's just going to keep happening and keep happening and keep happening until it becomes as...
routine as flying from Long Island in New York City into Paris, just like Charles Lindbergh did it.
or being able to get on a 747 and flying from Los Angeles to Sydney. It will become something that is like, oh yeah, oh, someone flew back on the moon. Oh, who did it this time? And maybe they'll pay attention and maybe they won't, but it will be being done by people who are phenomenally invested in the enterprise itself. So more people will choose to go to the
to the moon and they will do it not because it is easy they'll do it because it is hard that's a brilliantly optimistic we don't normally end the rest of history episodes on an optimistic note optimistically okay well but so Tom before we let you go and thank you so much again for coming on the rest of history the
That beloved producer, Theo, has banned us from saying goodbye to you until we've asked you a few questions about history. Bring it on. Don't worry, they're not quiz questions. All right. So I have my hand on the buzzer now. Okay, very good. Were you interested in history as a child? And if so, what particular bits of history did it for you? Is this my starter for 10, Dominic? I just want to make sure. Exactly so. Get this wrong and you're out.
Yes, I've always been fascinated by history. For some reason, I didn't have to take notes in history classes. I just felt as though with a good teacher, I was hearing a story that was kind of like unforgettable. Math was beyond myself. I was too lazy for English. But history, it always used to be a version of a great story.
that I was hearing. And I think I was aware, I guess, as a young man, that I was living in historic times. First of all, and I've gone back and I've revisited, certainly, World War II, the war, because every adult in my life
talked about the war in three very distinctive phases. That was before the war, that was during the war, or that was right after the war. So I knew that I had come into the world after this great conflagration that had really identified this entire generation. I was aware of that. Then when I was seven, John F. Kennedy was assassinated and
to be seven years old and to witness something that was the equal to, I don't know, Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima or
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, any incredible moment of history. It's like, wow, I witnessed that. And I don't think I'll ever forget where I was when I heard about it, nor the atmosphere of those three or four or five or six days that went along with it. The world was sad, and I was sad too, because history had occurred in front of our very eyes. Now, after that, I will tell you, and this is...
this is no joke. I was very much of the historical impact of four lads from Liverpool that came over not long after that. Oh, very good. Brilliant. Because, because they, they removed from us that burden of sadness that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had placed upon us.
on us. We literally were reintroduced to joy when we needed it very, very badly. Now that my generation, but actually the generation of probably anybody from seven to 27 was aware of the, hey, a corner has turned. So I've always thought that, well, is this a historic moment or not?
I'll go back to that crossing of a Rubicon image. It's like, hey, we have crossed the Rubicon. We used to be over there, but now we're over here. Dominic and I disagree about whether the Beatles are a historic moment. So I'm glad that you agree with me that they are. I never disagreed with you. That's a total lie. Oh, no, Dominic.
So you mentioned Lincoln there and you mentioned JFK. Could we just ask you which, if you had a choice, which US president would you most like to play? Oh, none. I've read a very interesting book about Calvin Coolidge. You ready for this? Crikey, I didn't see that coming. Yeah. Didn't see that coming. Yeah. Calvin Coolidge, I think, forgive me, I may be wrong about it. I believe Calvin Coolidge, nothing much more than, he was like the governor of Vermont.
Vermont and ended up serving as president of the United States for two terms during which the country was almost destroyed economically. And in this collection of essays in a volume, I read that he lived out his life, Calvin Kuhlman, retired back in his Vermont small town, and he apologized to people.
for what he had done as president because he had a very laissez-faire hands-off kind of thing yeah he knew that he was a root cause of the great debacle that turned into the uh the great depression in 1929 and that sort of self-awareness from a politician i think somebody to be that humble at the end of his life saying you know i'm sorry i blew it sorry should
I should have been on it better. I hope that's true. That is a tremendous choice. So there you go. I'm declaring right here. The rest is history. Okay. If you have a movie about Calvin Coolidge, sign me up. That's got blockbuster written all over it. So what about, because I know you do production as well. If you went to some big studio or whatever, and they said, listen, Tom, we want a historical epic movie.
but the subject of your choice. And since you've done a lot to do with the Second World War, I'm going to ban you. But Masters of the Air, presumably is that. Well, I was about to say, I'm going to ban you from a Second World War or World War theme choice. So you have to go back a bit further in history. All right, I'm good. What are you going to choose? All right. Are you ready for this? Yeah. Maybe like yourselves. I know a number of people, men and women of all ages. Some of them are peers and some of them are not.
Yeah.
And that was in the 1930s, 1940s, and it really came about in the 1950s. Now, no one makes money off of my understanding of Alcoholics Anonymous, but if you were going to say, has there been a life-altering movement that has really changed, in some ways, the world for the better by way of defining and enlightening people in the realm of human behavior?
I'd say Alcoholics Anonymous has. And I think it's a fascinating story that has, I haven't read a lot about it, but there's a number of things like the history of that organization. It's about as vibrant and as vivid as any that you're going to come across. And the funny thing is that there are how many millions of members of Alcoholics Anonymous are there out there? And the most you can get out of any of this, well, how does it work? And they'll all say, well, quite nicely. Thank you. That's all you're going to get out of it.
That would be something that if someone wanted to throw down and say, let's examine that. Right. You heard it here first. Well, let's say they're listening. Yeah, of course they're listening. So I would be remiss. I would be letting myself down and my family down if I didn't ask you one last question. And it is this.
Is there any chance that you might put on the hat once more and bring Woody back to the screens in another Toy Story film? Now, everybody loves Toy Story, except one person, would you believe? Who? That person is with us right now, Tom. John Holland. He is Tom Holland. Can you believe it?
So shocking. Anyway, let's put that. We were very much, as I think I've mentioned, very much a Forrest Gump family rather than a Toy Story family. Unbelievable. I just wanted to put that on record. I just wanted to shame Tom. But also, would you play Woody again? Please say yes. This is in the hands of the great overlords of commerce. Absolutely. Matter of fact, I will tell you this. Tim Allen and I,
Still get together about once a month because we knew that we were part of something quite profound that started 20, more than 25 years ago. That's when we did the first Toy Story. And there has been some jungle drums that why not do it? Why not try to do it a fifth time? But I will say, I think the gatekeepers of all things, Woody and Buzz and Bo Peep and Slinky Dog and whatnot, do not take their tasks lightly.
No one is going to just rush something out. Quite right. If they do it, if it happens, boy, it's going to have to go through a hothouse atmosphere and pass all sorts of very, very rigorous sort of tests before we would do that. But I'm game. I'd love to. Great. Great news. I hope my voice is still high pitched enough in order to get there.
Buzz Aldrin, was he thrilled? Oh, God, yes. Oh, I'm sure he was. Buzz came to, I think, every premiere there was for any of the Toy Story movies.
I love it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, Todd, thank you so much for doing that. It's been absolutely wonderful. And it would be remiss of me at this point not to mention the brilliant show which you narrate, Moonwalkers, which is on at the Lightroom in London, King's Cross, until the 13th of October 2024. Exactly right. And you tell the whole astonishing story, actually not just of people walking on the moon, but of humanity's obsession with the moon.
It's wonderfully done. So thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much, Tom. You're quite welcome. I will tell you this. This is just a warning to perhaps to some of your audience members. I was just in London. I jumped in a cab to get out to King's Cross. It was fabulous seeing a London black cabbie. I hopped in. I said, I'm going to a place called Lightroom. Do you know it? It's out in King's Cross. Well, I know what King's Cross is. That's what he said.
So we're on our way. And he said, where are you from? And I said, I'm from Los Angeles. Oh, I can't quite understand. But he says, well, you go to King's Cross? I said, well, I'm going to this place called the... What is that? I said, well, it's kind of like an exhibit kind of thing. There's a show there that we put on and it's called the Moonwalkers. He said, what, Moonwalkers? Well, is that a Michael Jackson thing? LAUGHTER
I said, no, actually, it's not. It's about the Apollo program. Oh, Spice Man? Yeah, Spice Man. Oh, all right. That was it. And in the words of that London cabbie, it's not a Michael Jackson thing. No, it's not the Michael. No, it's not.
Brilliant. So on that bombshell, thank you so much to Tom Hanks for joining us. Thank you to everybody for listening. And I think, Tom, this experiment with Hollywood stars talking about historical subjects has been an absolute triumph. Yeah, it's worked, hasn't it? Let's keep it up. You know what's sad about this? This is what we talk about down at the office all the time anyway, guys. This is just a Friday for me. I'm glad you were a part of it.
Thank you. Well, listen, next time we will be back with the Franco-Prussian War and we'll be doing that with Zendaya. So we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Take care, guys. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.
