Astronaut eyes permanent life on Mars

Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon.
Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon.  (mark wilson / getty images)  

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is passionate about Mars. In his new book, Mission to Mars, released earlier this month, he offers a long-range program that could get humans to the Red Planet , and allow humanity to establish a permanent presence there. Aldrin recently shared his thoughts about the book and the present state of human space flight.

How did you come up with the title Mission to Mars?

National Geographic came to me and wanted to do this, 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 mission?” Because my travel mate Mike Collins had a book that was very good, shortly after Apollo 11, that was called Mission to Mars.

How are we going to afford to go to Mars?

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 toward permanence, not temporary occupancy of Mars.

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How do you motivate these countries to invest in space?

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.

What did you think about the loss of NASA’s space flight capability after the space shuttle retired?

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.

So the space flight gap is not acceptable to you?

Orion (NASA’s replacement vehicle) isn’t going to be crewed until 2021. Now that’s absurd.

How do you think President Barack Obama has handled the space program?

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 Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, is wrong. (Wernher) Von Braun’s big, big, big lander was a 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.

