by Buzz Aldrin
The tragedy was particularly grievous, since the brave crew members who died included Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had been chosen from more than 11,000 educators who wanted a chance to participate on a shuttle flight under NASA’s Teacher in Space program. She had taken a yearlong leave of absence from her teaching position to prepare for the mission. Through no fault of her own, NASA’s first attempt to take an ordinary citizen into space had failed abysmally.
The evening of the explosion, President Reagan paid tribute to the fallen astronauts. “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us in the way in which they lived their lives. We’ll never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God.”
Manned spaceflight is dangerous and dramatic. When an ambitious mission succeeds, as did the moon landing flight of Apollo 11, astronauts like me are hailed as triumphant national heroes for doing our jobs, and the flight directors, contractors, and engineers responsible for the success are applauded as visionary geniuses. But when a supposedly routine flight, like the January 1986 mission of the Challenger, ends in disaster, the accident assumes the proportions of epic tragedy, replete with victims and villains. The Challenger incident certainly had its share of both, and as a result, America’s space program was literally grounded until an investigation was conducted into the causes of the disaster. It would be 1988 before the next American shuttle launch.
Leading up to Challenger, America had pinned bright hopes on the new shuttle orbiter fleet, with its runway landings and seven-to eight-person capacity, to enable people other than NASA’s professional astronauts to fly into space. In 1982, NASA’s Advisory Council even established a task force to select private citizens for extra seats that might be available on each flight, and applications soon arrived by the scores. In the year before the Challenger accident, NASA flew two members of Congress, Senator Jake Garn and Representative Bill Nelson, on two separate shuttle missions, hoping, I’m sure, that they would bring back glowing firsthand accounts of the shuttle program and how taxpayer dollars were being well spent.
James A. Michener, noted author of the book Space, which was later made into a thirteen-hour miniseries for television, had conducted a study group and recommended that NASA include teachers and journalists on space shuttle flights. I was quite supportive of that idea, but wanted to take it one step further, allowing on board creative artists, musicians, singers, movie producers, and anyone who could connect to a large segment of the public. One person who genuinely wanted to fly in the space shuttle was my friend, the singer, songwriter, and actor John Denver.
Denver, who had written such hits as “Rocky Mountain High,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” was fascinated with space travel. John attended the launch of the first internationally manned spaceflight, Apollo/Soyuz 1, as well as the launch of Apollo/Soyuz 2, and the landing of the space shuttle. He passed NASA’s physical examination to determine mental and physical fitness needed for space travel, and he became one of the leading candidates to be the “first civilian in space.” John was planning on writing a song while up in space, but Christa McAuliffe was chosen to make that flight instead. He did, however, get to fly and land the Space Shuttle simulator. An airplane accident took his life before he was able to realize his dream of flying into space. Because of his tremendous support, NASA awarded John its public service medal for helping “increase awareness of space exploration by the people of the world.”
Unfortunately, after Christa McAuliffe died in the 1986 Challenger accident, NASA lost its nerve for putting civilians into space. In my opinion, barring any accidents, sending somebody like John Denver into space would be much more effective in the long term than putting schoolteachers and journalists into space, as fine as that might be. My reasoning is that artists such as John Denver and others like him reach far more people than do most teachers and journalists. Certainly, I believe in educators, and have spoken at numerous schools in attempts to inspire the next generation of explorers, and I will continue to do so. And of course I know the power that journalists have to get out a message. But to truly touch people where they are, nothing can do it better than a song or a movie or some creative work that lands squarely in the heart. I felt that NASA missed a golden opportunity when they did not include John Denver on a space shuttle mission.
AS WINTER GAVE way to spring, there remained an emptiness in my life that could only be filled by one person. I decided to break down and call Lois. Near the end of March, I knew that Lois would be returning to California, and I hoped that she might be willing to see me. I truly missed her. About two days after I thought she might be home, I called and was pleasantly surprised when she answered the phone. Acting just as casual as if our last meeting had ended on a high note, I spoke congenially: “Well, I see you’re home. How would you like to go out tonight?”
Lois hesitated a few moments, but then answered, “Okay!”
At the conclusion of our date that night, I kissed her politely, but not passionately as we had before. We went out several more times, and I suggested, “Let’s get together more often.”
Lois’s response surprised me. “No, that won’t work,” she said. “I’ll be glad to go out and have a good time once in a while, but if we are to have any other kind of relationship, I require total exclusivity.” She clearly was not going to allow me to break her heart again. “We can still go out, and you can go out with your other friends, and I’ll go out with mine, but I don’t want to get too involved if you plan to date other people as well.”
Something about Lois intrigued me and appealed to me. The woman had class and character. She was unlike so many women that I had dated who spent most of our time fawning over me, or trading on my celebrity. Lois did neither. The basis of any relationship with her, she made clear, was one of equanimity
In May of that year I presented some of my latest ideas regarding my Mars Cycler in NASA’s backyard, when I spoke at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. There was no reason why America, with all its ingenuity, could not begin to plan for lunar and Mars colonies over the next fifteen to twenty-five years. We needed to start thinking about how to get there. No doubt, NASA types in the audience squirmed in discomfort as I readily acknowledged that the Soviets were leading the way to Mars and beyond.
First, I explained my concept of lunar cyclers, spacecraft that travel in a constant orbit between the Earth and the moon, ferrying crews, supplies, and commerce to and from a lunar colony’s research and manufacturing centers. These cyclers would not land, but would transfer personnel and cargo to “ports” placed in low Earth and low moon orbit. The second phase would be to build a port in a low Martian orbit to serve as a staging area for expeditions to the red planet below, or alternatively to land on one of the two Martian moons. For travel to Mars, I had designed my Mars Cycler system to fly in continuous orbits between Earth and Mars, with a 400-ton spacecraft rotating at either end of its long struts to create the centrifugal force necessary to produce an artificial gravity environment. The outbound trip to Mars would take about five and a half months, while the return leg would last twenty-one months to take advantage of the relative position of the planets and the natural gravity-assist trajectories serving as an orbital transit-way The Mars base itself would be staffed by twenty crew members, with half of them exchanged with each cycler arrival, meaning that each crew member would spend more than four years on the planet. The Mars-orbiting “cycla-port” could be maintained with a crew of as few as six, I told the crowd. I was back to the orbital mechanics I loved from my early days as an astronaut, and it was fueling my enthusiasm. To an audience that had grown bored watching American astronauts orbit the Earth, my words were either revolutionary or sheer lunacy.
MEANWHILE, I WAS off to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1986. I was accompanied by my youngest son, Andy
, who was in the process of earning his master’s degree in science technology and space policy at George Washington University. He would later follow that up with a Ph.D. from UCLA in political science, with a focus on Russia’s space program. Andy spoke fluent Russian, and he had arranged an invitation for me to meet with Raoul Segdev, the head of Russia’s equivalent of our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I talked to Segdev about my cycler orbits, and the idea seemed to pique his interest. It was clear to me that the Russians were surging ahead of America in space exploration. While we were content to keep orbiting around the Earth in our shuttle, the Russians were eyeing Mars and its moons.
Interestingly, as Segdev showed me around some of the Soviet space facilities, I noticed numerous posters touting the various Soviet space achievements since Sputnik. They had indeed accomplished quite a bit. Strangely, it was almost impossible to find any reference to Apollo 11 or the fact that human beings had ever landed on the moon. The Soviets exhibited posters showing their lunar rovers, vehicles that were far more comprehensive than anything we had used. Their official position was, “It’s so expensive to send people to the moon; we can send rovers there and get the same thing done.” That was their public line, anyhow. The truth was that the Soviets had tried desperately to beat us to the moon, and to land one cosmonaut, but they just couldn’t get their big rocket, the N1, into orbit. They tried three times that we know of, and they failed all three times—the first one less than a month before Neil and I walked on the moon, followed by two more attempts in 1971 and 1972.
In Moscow, we had an appointment with the head of the Soviet space program, who assigned one of their cosmonauts to be our guide, and for a while I thought that we might be able to finagle a tour of Star City, where the cosmonauts trained. As sort of a trade-off, the Soviets wanted me to participate in a future space meeting in Austria that turned out to be motivated by Soviet propaganda. When I realized their intentions, I declined the invitation, and that, of course, ended any possibility of an excursion to Star City. That was simply the Soviet way.
I had several purposes for going on the trip, not the least of which was an opportunity to meet with an Alcoholics Anonymous group in Poland and to encourage them in their work. We also enjoyed a whirlwind detour to Sweden to visit our relatives, and we stopped over in Budapest, Hungary, and Nuremberg, Germany.
I did a few interviews, and once again attempted to answer the inevitable question of how my life had changed after traveling to the moon. There was no sharp edge to my answer, as there might have been ten or fifteen years earlier. No doubt, the German reporters were not prepared for my more subdued yet poignant answers.
Q.—Has your life and attitude changed as a result of being on the moon?
BUZZ—It’s very difficult to separate out the changes that have come about in me personally, not necessarily from the experiences of being on the moon—which in themselves were very exhilarating and filled with a sense of responsibility—but also a wonderment and thankfulness for being so fortunate to be, as I think I was, at the right place at the right time when opportunity came walking by.
The experiences that caused changes in my life were not particularly because of the technical parts of our mission, or the specific actions of being on the moon, though they do contribute in some way, but they were more the response of me to people, and of people to me that changed totally from before and after. There was a gradual change in being a part of the elite astronaut crew before the mission, but there was the total change in being placed on a pedestal that came about afterward, and trying to live up to that.
Human beings are just many different varieties. And the astronaut group … we have the same differences that exist in any segment of people. We just happened to be pilots with the desire to fly faster and higher, and to be involved and to take opportunities as they come along, to seek out areas of achievement. But as far as our personalities go, there’s a tremendous variation.
I think that perhaps I had a more sensitive personality that was more susceptible to being affected by the impact of a great change in notoriety.14
Unquestionably, the highlight of the trip for me came when we stopped in Feucht, Germany, in the vicinity of Nuremberg, where we visited Hermann Oberth, one of the four early rocketry and space-travel pioneers: the Soviets had Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; America had the brilliant Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun; and the Germans had the Austrian, Hermann Oberth. Of the four, Oberth was in many ways the most important pioneer of space technology, with his focus on both the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry. What a thrill it was for me to meet this man who not only believed early in the 1920s that we could travel to outer space, but designed the methodology to do so. I enjoyed sharing with him some of my space concepts, such as my approach for missions to Mars, and the elderly gentleman nodded knowingly. I think it pleased Herr Oberth to know that someone in the next generation was carrying on his work. We walked and talked, and I held the elderly professor’s hand to steady him as we walked in the garden pathway in front of his house, and then on our way to the Hermann Oberth Raumfahrt Museum named in his honor. Just as the efforts of the rocketry pioneers made it possible for me to plant America’s flag on the moon, their examples have inspired me to work for the next generation, to enable them to plant our flag on Mars.
To that end, I returned home more inspired than ever to find a way to see my Mars Cycler get into the hands of people who could combine their technological expertise with the political and economic capital to make the cycler a reality. I also had another brainstorm that had been stirring in my mind for some time.
THE COSTS OF putting people into space were skyrocketing, so to speak, and with the shuttle grounded, we were losing more time every day in our attempts to take ordinary people into space. But what if cost was not an issue? What if we didn’t have to depend on Congress to vote the money into the budget? What if we could finance space travel some other way? How could that be done? My mind was teeming with ideas, and the one that I settled on seemed like a plausible approach.
I envisioned a nonprofit venture called ShareSpace, intended to help get ordinary people into space. My initial plan was to sell “shares” at ten or twenty dollars each, with the proceeds going to fund long-term exploration and tourism studies of space travel. Then, every so often, there would be a drawing to award winners with space-related prizes. Initially the drawings could involve more of the public by offering all sorts of prizes including space camps for kids, suborbital jaunts into space, and perhaps, one day, trips into Earth orbit to visit space stations, space hotels and space resorts, and ultimately even trips to fly around the moon. I was convinced, and still am, that by getting more people into space, and giving them that direct experience, the public’s involvement, rather than government’s, will spur the major advances in space exploration.
Much of my plan was still ruminating in my mind, and I was sitting in yet another mundane meeting discussing these matters, trying to convince another group of skeptics, when somebody said, “Why don’t you have a lottery?”
The notion struck me like a lightning bolt. Yes! A lottery is a great idea. Have a lottery in which millions of people contribute money for a chance to win the big prize: a trip into space! We could have other, minor prizes to keep the interest up for those who didn’t win the main trip, so I talked with adventure travel groups about providing prizes such as a trip to the North Pole and other exotic prizes. Everyone seemed interested—cautious, but interested.
I attended several national lottery “conferences” in Washington, D.C., gatherings in which people who knew how a legal lottery could be run shared their expertise and advice. Almost immediately, as my mind raced ahead to the possibilities, the obstacles and potential landmines seemed to pop up. I discovered that lotteries came under the jurisdiction of the attorney general in each individual state, so it would be difficult to have a national lottery. The most significant problem to overcome was that the lottery could not appear to be ga
mbling.
A few years later I went to Las Vegas and talked with Sig Rogich, a casino mogul, and other people who had money and influence; a number of them seemed interested in the ShareSpace lottery. The power brokers in Las Vegas suggested that we come up with a game show in which a person could win a trip into space. That got me thinking about the possibility of a television show similar to modern-day “reality” shows, in which a group of people could compete to win an opportunity to take a short trip into space, traveling as passengers, similar to those wealthy individuals who, as of 2001, started purchasing such trips with the Russians for fees of $20 million and more!
GRANTED, WITH THE nation still reeling from the horror of the Challenger tragedy, and Christa McAuliffe’s schoolteacher-astronaut image firmly embedded in our minds, convincing the public of the possibility and the rationale for everyday folks going into space was no easy sell. Persuading Congress to pass legislation in favor of a national space lottery to be administrated by ShareSpace would be challenging. But I knew a time would come, and when it did, I would be ready. The notion stirred me then, and still does today.
Through a series of connections, I had become a visiting adjunct professor of space studies at the University of North Dakota (UND) in Grand Forks. UND wanted to develop an astronautical curriculum, and I was willing to help structure it with the goal of preparing future astronauts, engineers, and scientists to contribute to the ongoing development of next-generation spaceflight alternatives. John Odegard, a good friend of mine, was the head of the aerospace sciences department, and I was thrilled to help him set up this new program.
At the same time, Jack Anderson, communications director for President Reagan, was announcing in Washington the formation of the Young Astronauts Program, an exciting new venture intended to inspire elementary school-aged children, arouse their spirit of adventure, and help prepare them for the challenges and opportunities in space. I gladly attended the first meeting and took the idea back to John Odegard at UND, and we helped create the first chapter of the Young Astronauts at the Viking Elementary School in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I enjoyed teaching young people about space, but after the first frigid winter in North Dakota, I quickly decided that California was a better location for me. I recruited another fellow from Tom Paine’s National Commission on Space to take my place, and that ended my college teaching career. I guess some of the students were listening in my courses; just recently I received an e-mail out of the blue from a former student, who married his sweetheart, also a fellow student in the program, and now they are both Continental Airlines pilots. Perhaps soon they’ll be flying Continental Spacelines!