THE MAN ON THE MOON
Talking with Buzz Aldrin about a legendary
The 60th-anniversary celebration of the Speedmaster featured plenty of stardust (I mean celebrities), but the event also saw the attendance of the space hero who wore Omega’s rigorous test-racing watches to the Moon. Looking resplendent in a jazzy American-flag tie, with three Omega watches on his wrist and a highly unexpected number of rings for an 87-year-old, Buzz Aldrin is still a hoot when talking about his mission 48 years ago. With a laugh, the man insists he is living proof that the concept of selfies existed in his time too. After all, he first decided he wanted to take a photo of himself in space in 1966. It’s only fitting that such a character inspired the name of Toy
Story’s Buzz Lightyear.
As the second man on the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, it’s no surprise that
USA Today has named Aldrin one of the top three moonwalkers of all time, along with Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson. All the stars seem to have aligned to give the astronaut a life in space exploration: his mother was born the year the Wright brothers first flew, her maiden name was Marion Moon, and his father was an aviation pilot in World War II. Now retired from the US Air Force, Aldrin’s adventures on our own planet are also impressive, right up to a trip he made to the South Pole last December. In this interview, conducted in London at the Omega Speedmaster’s 60th-anniversary celebration, the legendary moonwalker talks about some of the most iconic space photos known to mankind, and his experiences in space.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE FOR YOU TO TAKE YOUR ICONIC BOOTPRINT PICTURE?
It was on this talcum-like surface, which was not like sand or dust. It made a very distinct print and it fascinated me, so I thought I would take a nice photo of it. It looked a little lonely, so I decided to take another one, but it wasn’t as famous as this. I put my boot down on the moon, and it’s of the boot itself and a little bit of the print. The print is fairly small, but each time you put your foot down, it sprays the dust to either side, and it changes the colour of the surface. Andy [my photographer son] takes thousands of pictures of me, and he says, ‘Dad, you don’t take very many pictures, but then you take pictures like that and it becomes famous’. He said it’s not fair. I said, once you get it right, why do you need to keep trying? Stick with it.
TELL US ABOUT THE PICTURE OF YOU ON THE MOON?
It looks posed, but it wasn’t at all. I was walking this way and Neil said, ‘Hold it’, and I stopped to look at him. If you look closely, the strap that’s hanging down is not hanging down straight. It’s hanging down at an angle, which means I was still turning. It’s so characteristic and iconic — you can see the reflection of the photographer which was Neil, of his white suit, the shadow, the lunar module, my shadow, the flag. People tell me about the photo and say, ‘I have three words to describe this picture: location, location, location’.
WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF THE WATCH ON THE MOON?
It was a little difficult to activate the stopwatch to time things, and we didn’t need to do that, really. We were in communication with Earth all the time, so we felt at home and like we could talk to each other. But we wore the watches and we kept them set to the time of the people back in mission control. They were on 8-hour shifts. So, there we were on the Moon, going around, but we knew what time it was in Houston, Texas, all the time.
WHAT OTHER ADVENTURES HAVE YOU BEEN ON LATELY?
I went to the South Pole back in December, and I had been waiting quite a while [to go]. I’ve been down to the Titanic before, and it’s quite a few miles down. It takes an hour-and-a-half just to sink down. Not scuba, though, but on a yellow French submarine. But when you finally get to the South Pole, believe it or not, all this winter gear makes it a lot harder to manoeuvre than in a space suit. We were in this ancient airplane, and you may not realise but the South Pole is at 9,000 feet (2,700m), and we were unpressurised. We got there and they didn’t park that close, so we were walking with all this heavy stuff on and all this snow, and I was out of breath walking from one gate to another. They evacuated me because I was a little out of breath. But we don’t do things because they’re easy, we do things because they’re hard. That’s what the president [John F. Kennedy] said years before.