ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 22, 1996 TAG: 9601220081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: Associated Press
Neil Armstrong said his historic walk on the moon was the result of a challenge from President Kennedy years earlier and important advances in computer and rocket technology.
Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, the first man on the moon and the last, respectively, were the stars Saturday of a panel discussion at the University of Richmond as part of the Richmond Forum lecture series.
They were joined by one of the first people to fly around the planet nonstop, Voyager experimental aircraft pilot Dick Rutan, and moderator David Hartman.
Hartman recalled Kennedy's challenge to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1961 to land a man on the moon and bring him back.
Armstrong said when that goal was set, ``we had the technical will to do the job.''
But America did not yet have the equipment or the know-how to make the trip a success, he said. Walking on the moon in 1969 required advances in rocket science and significant advances in computer science to handle the complicated navigation, Armstrong said.
It took the Saturn rocket to put an Apollo spaceship in orbit, a 38-story rocket that Armstrong called ``a fire-spittin', go-to-the-moon rocket.''
Hartman asked Armstrong about his famous statement when he put the first footprints on the surface of the moon: ``That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.''
Did the radio transmission cut out an ``a'' in front of the word ``man,'' Hartman asked. Armstrong said he doesn't know whether the radio cut him off, but he did mean to say ``a man'' and thought he did.
``I think everybody'll forgive me if I missed it,'' he said. ``It was a pretty exciting time.''
The astronauts narrated as the audience watched motion pictures of their flights on large overhead projection screens.
Armstrong and Cernan scored laughs just talking about being on the moon - something no one has done since Cernan's voyage in 1972.
The films included a shot of Cernan's Apollo 17 spacecraft taking off. They also showed the Earth rising above the lunar horizon and the planet moving in its precise orbit - a sight that Cernan said was ``just too beautiful to have happened by accident.''
He said that was a spiritual observation, but not necessarily a religious one.
On the other hand: ``Did I say a prayer before we lit that ascent engine? You bet I did,'' Cernan said. ``I wanted all the help we could get.''
Rutan talked about his nine-day flight with co-pilot Jeana Yeager. Loaded with 1,800 gallons of fuel that weighed three times more than the plane, for the first few days of the flight Voyager was so fragile and hard to handle that Rutan said just a little turbulence would have torn the wings off.
When it was dark, Rutan used night-vision goggles and radar to spot storms up ahead. But to save the batteries, he just looked a few seconds at a time and then flew blind for 10 minutes.
He said it was like being in a forest and taking 10 seconds to memorize where the trees are, then tying a bag over your head and running forward at full speed.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB