Carolina QuotesI was so excited, I couldn’t get out “Tranquility Base.” It came out sort of like “Twangquility,” you know. And so it was, “Roger, Houston. Twangquility Base here.” Let’s see, what did I say? No, it was, “Roger, Twangquility Base. We copy you down. We’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. But we’re breathing again.” And I believe that’s true—was a true statement. It was spontaneous, but it was true.
Charles Duke
Carolinian
Source
Oral history interview by Doug Ward, 12 March 1999; NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
- form
- interview
- work
- NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
- year
- 1999
Cite this record
“I was so excited, I couldn’t get out “Tranquility Base.” It …” Charles Duke. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7BF8E88747. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7bf8e88747
More from Charles Duke
But of course the rover’s still there. Dead—battery dead. Experiments there. Power source gone. But unless a meteorite’s hit there, I—those old footprints are still there.
And I looked up in—one afternoon and there was a contrail going over. And—early days of jets, you didn’t see many contrails back then. And I said, you know, “Gosh, it’d be nice to make a contrail. I wonder what that’d be like?” And I started dreaming about flying airplanes then. I went on to the Naval Academy. They gave me a couple of rides in a open-cockpit, bi-wing seaplane called the N3N Yellow Peril. And I was hooked from that moment on.
I like to participate in these kinds of things, so hopefully, we can change one life to motivate a kid to stimulate them to study in science and engineering.