by Buzz Aldrin
I WAS BACK in Houston on April 11, 1970, for the launch of Apollo 13, carrying astronauts Jim Lovell, John “Jack” Swigert, and Fred Haise to the moon for what was supposed to be America’s third landing on the lunar surface. The first two days of the mission went well, with the crew encountering and overcoming a few problems, but overall the trip was looking good. Some people around Mission Control were regarding it as the smoothest Apollo flight yet.
Then, shortly after 9:00 p.m. on April 13, 1970, about 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded and the shrapnel punctured a second oxygen tank, causing that tank to fail as well, knocking out the Apollo 13 command module’s electricity heat, lights, and water. With classic understatement, Jack Swigert poignantly reported the emergency: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
The astronauts soon discovered how serious the problem really was; two of their three fuel cells, which were the spacecraft’s prime source of electricity, were lost. One oxygen tank appeared to be completely empty, and the oxygen in the second tank was depleting rapidly. Then, when Jim Lovell looked out the CM’s left window, he saw a truly frightening sight. “We are venting something out into space,” he reported to Houston. “It’s a gas of some sort.” Houston confirmed it was oxygen escaping from the second, and last, oxygen tank.
With the planned landing on the moon aborted, Mission Control frantically worked toward a “successful failure,” to bring the crew back home safely. It was no easy task, as they used the lunar module to power the command module back to Earth. Although the story has often been told, it is still a wonder of training, teamwork, and ingenuity that saved the lives of three brave astronauts.
As soon as the crisis developed, I received a flurry of phone calls. They had plenty of talented experts on hand at Mission Control, so they didn’t need me hanging around, but somebody suggested that Neil Armstrong and I go over to Jim Lovell’s mom’s home to be with her. Maybe we could allay some of her fears.
Neil and I were glad to help, so we went to the home of seventy-three-year-old Blanche Lovell. She welcomed us warmly and invited us in. “It’s so nice of you to come,” she said. “Are you boys part of the space program, too?” We stayed with her and watched the proceedings on television for a while, until some other friends and family members came to stay with her.
Apollo 13 left a lasting impression on America’s space program. Many people regarded bringing back Jim, Jack, and Fred alive as miraculous; from my perspective, it was a tremendous ending for a failed mission. That’s what our teams at NASA and the backup crews were trained to do—to deal with almost any possible problem that might occur in space. The people who worked so feverishly to get our astronauts home were doing exactly what was expected of them, what they had trained for. Even in the face of the oxygen explosion and the aborted lunar landing, if the astronauts hadn’t come back safely, then the NASA system would have failed.
The often-used phrase regarding America’s space program has been: “Failure is not an option.” We all understand the concept that the equipment and the people need to perform as planned, with no miscues. But if failure is not an option, then you need to stay on the ground. Everything about space travel is subject to failure, and if it is worth doing, it will involve taking calculated risks. We had risks in Apollo 11 as well, and that mission could easily have turned out similar to Apollo 13, but thankfully it didn’t. Only the possible rewards of exploration make the risks tolerable.
THAT SAME YEAR, I engaged in explorations of a much more earthy nature. While attending an Air Force gathering with my father at the New York Athletic Club, my attention drifted toward an attractive, bright-eyed woman with long brown hair. She was attending the event with another West Point guy, but the attraction between us was immediately obvious to both of us. Her name was Marianne, and my relationship with her nearly wrecked my life. Things at home with Joan had not been going well for quite a while, and I was vulnerable in more ways than I wanted to admit.
Joan was from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, not far from my hometown, and we had met on a blind date set up by our parents before I went off to war in Korea. When I came home, we went out a few times before I was transferred to Las Vegas, and I proposed to her shortly thereafter. We married on December 29, 1954. Joan had a master’s degree from Columbia University and a fascination with theater. Wherever we lived, she enjoyed participating in numerous local productions, providing a creative outlet for her talent. She had been a good military wife, adjusting to the many moves involved in my career. But we had long since grown apart, and we both knew it.
I knew that several astronauts had compromised their marriage vows. That was no excuse, but knowing that I was not the only astronaut to succumb to temptation made the rationalization to pursue Marianne much easier. I assuaged my conscience by reminding myself that we all had feet of clay, that a West Point cadet I knew could compromise the honor code and still be promoted to general, that a minister of the Gospel could preach against sin while indulging in it, and that a clean-cut, All-American astronaut could think of himself as above the rules while bending them to accommodate his own desires. I revisited my rationalizations each time I climbed aboard a T-38 aircraft in Houston and pointed it toward New York, ostensibly to keep up my flying time, but in reality to facilitate my relationship with Marianne.
AT THE SAME time, I was committed to using my newfound fame for good, to try to increase communication between generations that regarded one another with mistrust at best, and often with downright disdain. With the specter of Kent State still hanging over our nation, in the spring of 1970 I set about organizing a “Conference on Youth Representation,” a program in which young people could have ongoing opportunities to voice their opinions and articulate their views with adults. I secured commitments from a wide array of recognized leaders who were willing to meet with young people, and sent out invitations to leaders of college-aged young men and women around the country.
Hugh Downs was tremendously helpful, and hosted our first organizational meeting on the set of the Today Show at NBC’s studios in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Some of the adult leaders who agreed to participate included the anthropologist Margaret Mead; Fran Tarkenton and Lance Rentzel, two popular NFL superstars; Sargent Shriver, an in-law of the Kennedy family; Congressman Robert Taft; and members of academia such as Kingman Brewster, president of Yale University.
I proposed that the advisory group and the young representatives could choose an issue and discuss it in an open forum. The idea was, “If you have a gripe with the government or some other aspect of society let’s sit down and talk about it. Then together, we can decide how we might better approach the problem and hopefully come up with some viable solutions.” I hoped that through this interaction we could nullify some of the disenchantment younger men and women felt toward our country. Our goal was to provide an environment in which both students and adult leaders could have a dialogue about current issues that troubled them without fear of criticism, castigation, or condemnation. We wanted the youth group to address an issue during a broadcast on public TV, to be followed by further discussion at local levels, then a vote or sampling of public opinion, and a response during another segment on public TV. My plan was to make use of voting machines and other vote-counting methods that were unused between elections. Why not use that structure as a national polling device by which we could get a quicker, more accurate response to the questions and issues facing modern young adults? I thought existing high schools and colleges provided centralized locations where these issues could be addressed, and answers given by responsible leaders in society
We planned our kickoff event for June 16, 1970, at the American Friends Service Committee Building in Washington, D.C. We contacted national student organizations, as well as such groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and members of the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats. Surprisingly, a mere eighteen young adults accepted my invitation to the initial
Conference on Youth Representation in Washington, D.C., and I paid the lodging expenses for nearly half of them.
With Hugh Downs as moderator, I spent two days listening to young people pour out their complaints, attacking the adult participants, and telling them everything they felt was wrong about America, but at the end no one budged on their opinions or beliefs. In spite of this intransigence, I considered the conference a success, because at least the young people and adults were talking. I began making plans for another conference, and was disappointed when a number of our adult sponsors began to drop out; worse yet, the young people seemed uninterested in returning for a second conference.
Having three young people of my own to help keep me in touch with issues that burned in the hearts and minds of young America, I had hoped I might be able to act as a role model for this group, but it all fell apart when the young adult leaders wanted to have their own meetings without adult input. That seemed counterproductive to me, and the enthusiasm for my initial ideas dissipated, especially since I had held such high hopes for the conferences. It was a noble idea, but it ended in failure, and in some sense I assumed responsibility for the poor results.
Ironically, in recent years I have invoked similar approaches to initiating the ShareSpace Next Century of Flight Space Imperatives (NCFSI), a one-day space conference in D.C., after which I wanted to have a public opinion poll taken. While the conference was broadcast live by C-Span and concluded with success, the polling never did get that far. I have had similar ideas in connection with a Science/Space Studies/Math education outreach for youth that I have tried to initiate. And I envisioned a Lunar Renaissance series of panel discussions to be broadcast on public TV or networks such as Discovery, National Geographic, or even a ShareSpace Channel on YouTube, to raise awareness of the current challenges facing America’s space program. I am still convinced these efforts to communicate a vision to the next generation are vital.
ON JULY 20, 1970, Neil Armstrong and I celebrated the first anniversary of our moon landing by getting together at the state capitol building in Jefferson City, Missouri. The Apollo 11 capsule, the charred command module Columbia, was being exhibited along with an assortment of moon rocks in all fifty U.S. state capitals, and it happened to be scheduled in Jefferson City on the anniversary. It was the first time I had seen the Columbia since the crew of the Hornet had hauled it aboard the huge carrier following our splashdown. The spacecraft still looked mighty good to me, despite its charred and distressed metal. I remembered well how those markings got on that spacecraft, and I was deeply grateful for every one of them.
Neil and I addressed a crowd of about three thousand people. “We left some footprints on the moon,” I said. “They were made ideally for all the people of this country, and all the people of the world.” Following the celebration, Neil, NASA administrator Dr. Thomas O. Paine, and I flew to New York for a meeting at the United Nations.
We presented UN Secretary General U Thant with a four-ounce lunar rock sent by President Nixon as a “gift from all the people of the United States.” The rock was to remain on exhibit at the UN in perpetuity Neil, Tom, and I were surprised when the secretary general took this opportunity to chide the major powers, and in particular the United States. Referring to Neil’s first words on the moon’s surface, Thant said, “It is a cause for deepest regret and dismay that in the year since that act, man on Earth has not made even a small leap toward peace in those brutally war-torn areas of Indochina and the Middle East.”
We looked at each other in amazement, shrugged, and left. What did Thant want from us? We did our part. We felt that the UN secretary general had simply used us to make a political statement stabbing the U.S. government.
That was one of the last events at which I’d see Neil for a number of years. He became more private and less interested in being on stage as an astronaut, or degrading his lofty status by lending his name to endorse commercial products. Neil did not enjoy being in public; he attempted to hold himself aloof, just as Charles Lindbergh did for many years. Lindbergh was known as Mr. Aviation, an American hero Neil emulated. Neil loved aviation; even his e-mail address in later years was, at one time, OWright2, for Orville Wright 2. But he wasn’t really a space guy. He didn’t really like to talk about the intricacies of space, though he was the most qualified test-pilot astronaut, truly Mr. Aviation. For the next forty years, about the only time Neil showed up in public as part of an event promoting space was at each of the five-year anniversaries of our July 1969 lunar landing. These events were hosted by the President of the United States at the White House. Apart from that, I simply didn’t see Neil or Mike often, although Mike later took a job with the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and helped guide the development of the capacious Air and Space Museum. More recently, Mike joined me on a salmon-fishing trip to Alaska. I have reached out occasionally by phone about possible reunion dates to get all the Apollo astronauts together, especially the twenty-four who have been to the moon and the twelve who walked on the surface, but as the years went by, my hopes for such reunions grew dimmer and dimmer.
INDEED, FOR MOST of my life, success has come relatively easily to me. Certainly I had worked hard, and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was grateful to have had so many opportunities in which I had excelled and achieved at peak performance throughout my life. I had flown to the moon and gotten its dust on my feet. But what was there for me now? What new goal could I set? What could possibly top that accomplishment?
Sure, I had always come out smelling like a rose, but following the world tour, the bloom was off the rose in my life in almost every area. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I sensed things going from bad to worse in my marriage. Guilt and despair began to envelop me. I felt a growing sense of meaninglessness in my work as an astronaut, knowing that I would never return to the moon, or even fly another mission anywhere. I had been relegated to little more than a public-relations ambassador. NASA planned to return to the moon a few more times and then develop a reusable space shuttle. That pretty much closed the door for me as far as getting back to business as usual in the NASA routine and taking an active role as an astronaut in America’s space program. And as I would discover years later, as America’s space program flourished or languished, so did I.
How could I have gone almost overnight from being on top of the world to feeling useless, worthless, and washed up? I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume. There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had started drinking more. Life seemed to have lost its luster. On some days I couldn’t even find a reason to get out of bed. So I didn’t. Something was wrong; something within me was beginning to crack. I only hoped that I could figure it out before I broke down completely.
1 “Insurance Firm Chooses Aldrin,” Montclair Times (NJ), Thursday, February 26, 1970.
5
REALIGNMENT
NASA CONTINUED TO KEEP ME BUSY GIVING SPEECHES AND making other public appearances, and I always enjoyed challenging people to think beyond the stars, to reach for their own “moon” or “outer space,” whatever that might imply for them. Yet for me personally, by the autumn of 1970, there was a growing frustration and anxiousness at the center of my being that I could not resolve. I had hoped to continue working at NASA on future space developments, but came to realize that I would never be able to go back to “business as usual” in light of my moonwalker status. Public interest in the space program was waning, the Apollo program was ending, and NASA would soon be retreating for a period before refocusing on space activities confined to orbiting the Earth. Simply put, I was without a career, and I was feeling the aftereffects of it all. As always, I was standing by, ready for liftoff, but I needed to realign my direction and find a new runway.
I even made an oblique mention of my concerns in a speech at a conference of aerospace doctors in St. Louis. I reminded them that
a huge amount of time, money, and effort had been applied to determining the effects of space travel on the human body. All of the astronauts, and perhaps especially Neil, Mike, and me, were closely monitored medically after journeys into space. (To this day, forty years later, I still go back to NASA every year for a medical checkup.) Surprisingly, however, nobody from NASA and no medical or scientific study group has ever analyzed the emotional aftereffects of space travel, especially the effects of instant celebrity and the pressures of a public life on those who were pilots or scientists.
Becoming a public personality may sound like a laudable and rewarding goal to some people, and today I actually enjoy my public life for the most part. But at the time, the impact of Apollo 11 and the instant celebrity brought to us by the lunar landing took a toll on everyone in my immediate family. Besides my own frustrations and the increased tension between Joan and me, we could see the residual effects trickling down in the lives of all three of our children. Jan and Andy, although proud of their daddy, preferred their anonymity. Mike, our oldest, became obstinate and argumentative in his teens, displaying much more than the usual know-it-all attitude many teenagers adopt. Joan and I realized that he was crying out for love and attention, and with my being away so much, that created even more stress in our home. When Mike began developing chronic severe headaches, we sought medical help.
After examining Mike, the doctor quietly informed Joan that the attention Mike needed might be better received from a psychologist. Dr. Robert Prall began working with Mike and Joan, and at the doctor’s suggestion, I started attending the weekly sessions as well. Within six months, Mike’s issues—many of which stemmed from five years of age, when he had been separated from Joan and me for months, as we both were hospitalized with hepatitis—were fairly well resolved. But Joan and I continued to meet with Dr. Prall in an effort to grapple with some of our own problems. Eventually, Dr. Prall focused on me as the primary source of the problems. I was becoming increasingly moody and dismissive of other people, including Joan and the kids. A volcano was seething within me, below the surface of my life, the pressure building more with each passing week. The only relief I found was in another shot of Scotch—and then another.