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Jay Barbree:  Senator Glenn

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John Glenn:  I'm not sure I got the whole thing being the age I am.  [laughter]

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Jay Barbree:  Courage, the right stuff.

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John Glenn:  Repeat the question.

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Jay Barbree:  She wants to know where you get your courage from.

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To climb on an Atlas rocket that has probably blown up

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more times than it flew right,

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and you rode it into orbit.

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She wanted to know how you got that courage.

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John Glenn:  People say during launch, you know,

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that's the most crucial time and where you're changing things the most

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and where all the thrust is on there

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and what do you think about when you're getting ready to launch?

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And I think the question goes back to,

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"How do you think you'd feel if you new you were on top of 2 million parts

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built by the lowest bidder on a government contract. [laughter]

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That's the flippant answer.

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I think you develop courage in a couple of areas.

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One, you develop this by what your purpose is,

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the mission, your dedicated to the mission

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and by the preparation and that gives you confidence

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you can really do this thing that you've really tried

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to see all the aspects of it and all the things that can go wrong.

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You try to take care of all these things before you launch.

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John Glenn:  So I think it comes from two things.

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One, dedication to the country and what you think is important for the country.

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Back in the early days it was the competition with the Soviets

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who we weren't sure then they might be taking over the world.

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And then its preparation, and preparation, and preparation

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that gives you confidence to go.

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Jim Lovell: Well, sometimes when you're confronted with a problem

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and there is no alternative,

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you either had to have the courage to continue or your lost and consequently,  on Apollo 13,

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when the explosion first occurred, and we didn't know what happened,

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and at first we didn't think we were in that danger

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until I saw the oxygen escaping from the spacecraft

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and then I realized that we were in serious danger

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and we looked around to see what we had to use

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and the Lunar module, fortunately, was a part of our system

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and then we worked very closely

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with a dedicated group of people at the Mission Control Center,

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which indicated to me that the good leadership

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and the team work that evolved from that

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was the initiative of the perseverance and the motivation

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of these people working with the crew

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crew indicated that Apollo 13 was not just another space flight

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of dangerous situations but really a classic case of crisis management.

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Jay Barbree:  Neil Armstrong, you started to land Eagle on the moon.

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You found out I believe that they were heading you

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toward a crater that you didn't want to land in

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and you had to fly your ship across the surface of the moon

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until you could find a spot to sit it down.

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I think you had sixteen seconds of fuel left, can you tell us what that was like?

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Neil Armstrong:  No Pilot likes to land in a bad place.  [laughter]

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Jay Barbree:  Great.

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Neil Armstrong:  Pilots, by nature, will go to any extreme to find a good place to land.

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And that's what we did.  [laughter/applause]

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Jay Barbree:  And that's what you did.

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Jay Barbree:  What we would like to know from you, Neil,

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what it was like to step onto that moon

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and turn around and take your first steps,

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and really learn how to walk into reverse on that surface.

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Neil Armstrong:  We had a few people that thought it was going to be very difficult

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to walk on the surface for whatever reasons they believed that to be true.

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In our simulations sometimes were a little difficult.

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But the human is remarkably adaptive

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and what we found out was that by the

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time we had just stood around in the cockpit for a couple hours

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we were completely adapted

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and when we walked on off of the craft onto the surface,

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we already were right at home and you'd really like it. [laughter/applause]

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Mary Ellen Weber:  You know, a lot of folks have asked me, well you must be a real risk taker,

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and I really don't think that's true,

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I think I'm one of the most safety conscious people that I know.

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What I think I am is an opportunity seeker

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and I think that's what has lead me to be a part of the Astronaut Corps.

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and to some of the other things I've had an opportunity to do.

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And so I guess my only words of inspiration

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to an aspiring engineer and an aspiring astronaut is to seek out those opportunities.

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I recently had a newspaper ask me,

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What was a key formative thing that happed to you

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that you think lead you to where you got to?

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And I recalled being in college, at Purdue University,

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and I remember seeing in the Purdue newspaper

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a little article about the Purdue Skydiving club.

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And it really consisted of one guy with a car

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that would drive out to the drop zone each weekend. [laughter]

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But it turns out so I called that number

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and I started that and that's what got me into aviation

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and I'm still involved in aviation and skydiving even today.

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But had I not seen that little ad,

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had I not responded to it, had I not sought out that opportunity,

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this whole world that became open to me a decade later

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would not have become open to me.

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And so I guess that's my only words of inspiration

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is keep your eyes and ears open.

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Look for the tiniest opportunity to try something new,