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13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

13 Minutes to the Moon: 1. ‘We choose to go’, Apollo 11

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

9.54.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President John F. Kennedy boldly vows that America will land the first astronaut on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. It’s the height of the Cold War. But with superpower rival the Soviet Union leading the space race, after launching the first human spaceflight, the odds seem stacked against them. The Apollo programme, the USA’s daring answer to the race to the Moon, is an epic journey of innovation and exploration. Can Nasa change the course of space history?

Hosted by Kevin Fong.

Starring: Michael Collins Steve Bales Margaret Hamilton Jim Lovell Charlie Duke

Theme music by Hans Zimmer for Bleeding Fingers Music

#13MinutestotheMoon www.bbcworldservice.com/13minutes

This episode was updated on 14 May 2019.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's social media investigations correspondent.

0:06.0

In my podcast, I've been investigating what happened to the daughter of a conspiracy theorist who died having rejected chemotherapy.

0:13.0

It would mean the world to me if I could make it that she wasn't just another in the long line of people that die in this way.

0:19.0

How does this reflect the rise of health conspiracy theories on social media and beyond?

0:24.8

The new series of Mariana in Conspiracy Land.

0:27.9

Listen on BBC Sounds.

0:36.8

So I remember when we first started recording the interviews for this podcast, we'd arrived in the United States in Florida, on the western side of the Everglades, and I was in a car park of a cheap hotel, getting out of the car on a clear night, and I looked up into the sky and I could see the moon there hanging a quarter of a

0:56.4

million miles away and I had this thought that the next day would see me interviewing someone who had

1:01.8

actually flown there as part of the first mission to land people on the moon. That person was Michael

1:08.0

Collins. He along with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, completed the Apollo 11 crew.

1:14.0

He'd been keeping watch over them in orbit around the moon as they undertook their attempt at a landing on the surface.

1:20.0

And I was excited about meeting this 88-year-old veteran astronaut, but a little nervous too.

1:26.5

And I spent a somewhat restless night, tossing and

1:29.7

turning, wondering how the whole thing would go.

1:32.7

Where are you guys coming from?

1:34.2

London, England.

1:35.2

So I arrived two days ago.

1:37.6

Andrew arrived yesterday.

1:39.0

But when we got to his house, he had plenty to say.

1:42.5

I never needed to worry about that. And he was particularly

1:45.7

clear about who and what he believed Project Apollo had been for. The subject of nationalism

1:53.2

comes up frequently today, and it is sometimes applied to the Apollo program. I think that

...

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