

By John Lavitt 08/02/16


Buzz Aldrin On Life After The Moon And Before Mars
Buzz Aldrin hopes for a clear-minded future.





























For your vision of the future to become a reality, what is needed most? How can you help make this vision successful?

We need people. We need people that can predict and realize the changes that we face while also being able to make those changes happen. A good bit of my role is being aware of the overall influences on the future that will happen well beyond my being there. My think tank is focusing on questions like, how did we get where we are and how should we operate in the future? We try to look at the evolution from a macro national perspective that includes all of humanity. Although my individual life lessons help, we need input from many different types of people. Macro questions demand that level of cooperation. We can learn together by employing a complimentary approach.

We need the input of multiple experts who have observed these things and know how to help. I don’t want to tell NASA or Congress what to do. We can use our combined life lessons to point out the good things and the bad things, and how did they happen that way. My objective in life is to be innovative in my thinking and to look at new possibilities outside the box. I believe that is the most valuable contribution I can make to the future.

It seems as if the missions you are discussing will take an enormous effort beyond the resources of any one country. What must happen first in order for such an expensive and complicated mission to truly succeed?

We need to come together as one world, but some nations don’t want to come together until it is to their distinct advantage. We can’t be competing against each other when the stakes are so high. It prevents us from coming together. Not every nation will view the challenge in the same way. Although competition can help during the conception and design phases of the project, it becomes detrimental as the project progresses into the latter stages of completion. We need to get the best plan and the best implementation of that plan. Once that is in place, it should be the beginnings of trust and joint cooperation. By working together as a world, we can achieve this goal.

As a kid, you have said in interviews how much you loved science fiction like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and you even wrote book reports on science fiction novels in school. Considering the difficulties of your childhood, was science fiction a kind of escapism? 

It definitely helped me to think less about girls and sports (Laughing). It was not so much escapism as much as it was a focus of thinking about impossibilities, and what was beyond and what might come along. I wanted to know how we would deal with what is to come. Science fiction was fascinating on that level, challenging the creators to dream of new worlds. As creators in the real world, people need to dream with relaxed, practical and conventional restrictions. For space travel, the biggest question was, how do I get someplace far away very fast without being boring? 

Later, I was motivated first by the realization that for a crew to carry out a mission like Apollo, we needed to understand how to get to the Moon and back. Although Mars is next, the major hurdle after Mars is how to get from one star to another star. I have found that complicated challenges can best be understood, particularly in book form, if you have a five- to eight-year-old child trying to explain the same thing to another five- to eight-year-old child. People can understand complex projects if they are explained in a simple and direct manner. It’s difficult to combine a practical story about what we know today with what we will need to know hundreds of years in the future. At their best, smart creators can accomplish this task when they emphasize very simple and basic ideas. On the Moon and on Mars, there are encyclopedias of advanced knowledge if we are willing to go and find them. It’s like a scavenger hunt to uncover the hidden data and discover what we need for the future.

Last year, you published Return to Earth, a courageous and candid memoir about what happened after the historic Moon landing and your personal struggle with fame and depression. In response to your newfound fame after the Moon landing, you said, “When I returned to Earth I became a celebrity, a hero, with ticker tape parades and speeches, but that's not really what I looked for or desired." What was your response to your newfound fame? 

It actually was written in 1973, when I had just left NASA and the military. I was struggling with what comes next. What was important to me was not the journey to the Moon, but the process of coming back and facing these challenging conditions. Now I have to reestablish myself again. I have to come back to an Earth where I fit in before, but I don’t know how I fit in again. That was really the first challenge.

Later, I began to summarize what I saw by looking into how far we had come and how far we had to go. In the early '90s, I became focused on what’s next. Not just beyond the Moon, but beyond Mars as well. What is the big picture? What would star travel look like and how could it be accomplished? I investigated tourism and adventure travel as well as tragedy and the conflict between nations. My experience helped me to predict what would happen in the Chinese and Russian space programs. I knew where the launch sites would be because they would follow our example and launch on the coasts to take advantage of the Earth’s rotation. By understanding world conditions and by learning the lessons provided by the past, you can begin to predict how people will do things in the future.

In a 2009 interview with the Telegraph, you said, "I have gained so much by facing adversity.” What was the most difficult part of being one of the first men on the Moon? How did facing adversity allow you to grow as a person? 

My choices were focused on future planning, but first I had to readjust and meld into society. I also was looking for opportunities that I could apply my life lessons to and do well. Maybe doing things with the Moon. Maybe doing things with Mars. Maybe doing things with commercial activities, opening the door to tourists in space. Today, I am still going in that direction and refining my role in what I think we need to do. 

There is an irresistible object. That is me. There is an immoveable force. That is the rest of the world. We have to work together to overcome the problems, both in our own country and in the greater world like in Russia and China. There is always a reluctance to change. When you focus on long-term goals, you always end up being resisted by the power of short-term interests. The survival of any one government is not as important as the greater goals of space travel. The people need to understand so they can be behind this project. 

There are so many new technological distractions in the world like video games and driverless cars. People need a simple and direct explanation of why what we want to accomplish is so important both for them and for the world as a whole. It is not about celebrity status or high compensation. I am doing what I am doing so I can carry this broad and comprehensive message to the people. I still want my voice to be heard, and I believe it needs to be heard. I want to be remembered for more than just kicking up moon dust. I want to be remembered for having enabled a permanent Mars settlement.

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