First of all, the Apollo 13, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Jack Wagner, they are Jason and the Argonauts. That is a story that is ripped right out of the great sagas of all of humankind. This is what it comes around. I’m sitting at home actually, it was 1968 on Apollo eight. Jim Lovell was orbiting the moon with Fred Borman and Bill Anders.
And on my mother’s couch, I saw a live broadcast of what? Oh, the planet Earth in black and white on my television in my mom’s house over Christmas vacation. Something in my feeble little brain could not quite fathom that I was watching us on Earth from an orbiting spacecraft that was around the moon pointing a television camera back at us, and the only three people that were not in that photograph were the crew of Apollo 8, or the crew that in that broadcast. I had some sort of cranial plate shift, some sort of, like, sense of out of body experience, which I thought we are magnificent humans, we are magnificent creatures if we can make this happen. And, look, to be 12 years old and watching that on TV and have a spiritual artistic moment of enlightenment, that an impactful thing, and I’ve carried it with me forever since, because I still quite can’t fathom that the guy named Jack Schmidt was walking around on the moon just like that and brought home some rocks for us to study.