Former astronaut Aldrin sets his sights way beyond moon Earth and sky
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is passionate about Mars, and wants humans to go there. Earlier this month, a book on this topic he authored, “Mission to Mars,” was published. In the book Aldrin offers a long-range program that could get humans from Earth to Mars, and allow humanity to establish a permanent presence there. Aldrin recently spoke with Chronicle science writer Eric Berger about the book and the present state of human spaceflight.
Q. How did you come up with the title “Mission to Mars?”
A. National Geographic came to me and wanted to do this, Eric Berger has it covered at blog.chron. com/sciguy and we also wanted to do a documentary, but we haven’t quite worked out the details on that. They picked the title and after looking at it awhile, too late obviously, I said could I make just a small change? Like adding an “s” to missions? Because my travel mate Mike Collins had a book that was very good, shortly after Apollo 11, that was called “Mission to Mars.”
Q. How are we going to afford going to Mars?
A. It’s got to be an international effort. Specifically I would say it would have to
include countries like China, Japan, Germany and India, with the United States overseeing and lending support. We should define leadership towards permanence, not temporary occupancy of Mars.
Q. How do you motivate these countries to invest in space?
A. There are five things that are key to understanding outer space: exploration, science, development, commercial and security.
Security gets more money and attention, but if you put it first you’re warmongering. You’ve got to explore something before you know what science is there, and then hopefully you commercialize what you’ve developed, and all of those things ought to contribute to national security.
Q. What did you think about the loss of NASA’s spaceflight capability after the space shuttle retired?
A. Before the shuttle was retired I said why not consider flying the orbiter once a year after 2010? You really pay attention to the orbiter three months before, and three months after.
There would have been six months in between when the workforce could have been developing a replacement vehicle. You continue to do that until we develop commercial transportation.
Q. So the spaceflight gap is not acceptable to you?
A. Orion (NASA’s replacement vehicle) isn’t going to be crewed until 2021. Now that’s absurd.
Q. How do you think President Barack Obama has handled the space program?
A. Obama didn’t cancel the space program. Now I’m a conservative and always have been. But I’ve worked with whoever is overseeing the space program.
Unfortunately Orion, renamed the MultiPurpose Crew Vehicle, is wrong. (Wernher) Von Braun’s big big big lander was multi-purpose crew vehicle in Apollo and we segmented the mission into a command module and a service module. At the moon we had to have a descent and an ascent stage.
We really stripped the weight off. Von Braun’s vehicle required two Saturn V rockets. The plan we used required one Saturn V. The big fact is that we went to the moon with one rocket, not two, because we didn’t use a multi-purpose crew vehicle.
Orion doesn’t even have enough propulsion to put itself and a lander into a lunar orbit. It puts the United States at a distinct disadvantage even in going to the moon. We’ve got to do more than just Apollo 11 or Apollo 17.
eric.berger@chron.com