It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.
“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”
“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”
“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”
I always thought it was baloney.
I think they were more trying to state that he was one of the the “loneliest” people ever in the literal sense. Yes he could talk on the radio, but when he was on the opposite side of the moon from the lunar module, he was the person who was furthest physically removed from any other human being that anyone has ever been. It’d be impossible to get 2000+ miles away from any other person on earth, and even solo astronauts in earth orbit were way closer.
You could call him the alonest person, but not loneliest.
I would say there were, at the time, plenty of much lonelier American pilots in Hanoi.
Could have been the most satisfied person alive at the time, to finally get away from everyone and get some peace and quiet and free to walk around in his underwear without anyone saying anything about it.
And he could pull his own finger with impunity.
Maybe “isolated” is a better word.
The Oscar Meyer Wiener Song over an open mike…. Definitely….
Baby Shark… just sayin’…