

Al Worden: ‘The loneliest human being’ - JacobAldridge
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130401-the-loneliest-human-being/print/slide/0

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anigbrowl
Great article, but WTF is wrong with this journalist? Why is the article
titled 'the lonliest human being' when Worden says the _exact opposite_ was
true:

 _There’s a thing about being alone and there’s a thing about being lonely,
and they’re two different things. I was alone but I was not lonely. My
background was as a fighter pilot in the airforce, then as a test pilot – and
that was mostly in fighter airplanes – so I was very used to being by myself.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn’t have to talk to Dave and Jim any more,
except once they came around [when the orbiting command module was above the
landing site) and I said “hi”. On the backside of the Moon, I didn’t even have
to talk to Houston and that was the best part of the flight._

I was expecting to read an article about someone with crippling social anxiety
or suchlike. Instead, I got a quite interesting picture of an astronaut being
harassed by a journalist who just can't let go of his preconceived story
angle, to the point of using his headline to contradict his interviewee.

 _Your colleagues Dave Scott and Jim Irwin left footprints on the Moon – which
will be there for millions of years. Will you have left anything behind as a
memorial to your mission? Your urine maybe?_

Good grief. I feel like I'm reading _The Sun_.

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ggchappell
> Seven men in the history of humanity stand apart from the rest of us. These
> are the Apollo command module pilots who spent time alone in orbit around
> the Moon, while their colleagues walked on the lunar surface.

"Seven"? There were six Apollo missions that landed on the Moon: 11, 12, 14,
15, 16, and 17. Perhaps he gets seven by including Apollo 10, in which two
astronauts did take the lunar module out and nearly land it, leaving the
command-module pilot alone. But then the sentence is still incorrect; they did
not walk on the Moon.

