by Buzz Aldrin
Even a price tag of $100,000 for a suborbital trip would be exorbitant for most, although I’m sure the seats would be in high demand for those wanting a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Nevertheless, I became more convinced that the lottery was the best way to get the “average Joe” involved, selling lottery tickets at a reasonably affordable price and offering various prizes leading up to the time when we could offer actual spaceflights. I kept talking about it everywhere I went, and increasingly people began to say, “Yes, why not?”
LOIS AND I were still living in Laguna Beach, but we weren’t there often. We crisscrossed the United States and hopscotched all around the globe. Traveling as much as Lois and I do sets you up for some unusual experiences. Once, on our way home from Europe, I stopped over in Houston for some meetings. Lois decided to go directly to our home in Emerald Bay to do some catching up on our business with our secretary. It was October 1993, and fires were raging all along the California coastline beginning in the Thousand Oaks area of Los Angeles, and then jumping northward toward Santa Barbara. South of L.A., fires broke out in the Anaheim Hills and worked their way toward Laguna Beach. The line between houses that could be saved and those that were lost was determined often by only a few feet. In Laguna, the fires engulfed one home after another, many of which were valued in the millions of dollars. Fanned by the Santa Ana winds, shooting embers drifted from house to house, setting the roofs on fire and then quickly torching entire homes. Many of Laguna Beach’s residents had to flee in the face of the flames.
As the fires crept closer, Emerald Bay’s volunteer fire department issued an evacuation order. Lois’s secretary left immediately. Lois needed to evacuate, as well. The sky was dark, and Lois knew that fires were raging in Laguna Canyon; yet, she wasn’t too concerned or afraid. She assumed the danger was still a good distance away. But when she opened the front door that faced up the hill, she saw huge waves of flames widely surging over the top of the ridge, heading straight toward our home. The fire was only about six streets up from where Lois stood, dangerously close to the highest tier of hillside homes, moving fast, and consuming everything in its path.
Lois grabbed a large box of memorabilia that we had recently filled with some of my more precious items, including some of the envelopes that we had taken to the moon, signed by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and me, and some stamped envelopes that we had arranged to have canceled on the day of our lunar landing. Originally, my fellow astronauts and I had signed these “first day cover” envelopes as a sort of “insurance policy” for our families. When we went to the moon in 1969, NASA had no extra insurance built into its program to cover our families should anything catastrophic happen to us, so, as morbid as it might sound, we signed some of the envelopes and left them behind. Others we actually took with us to the moon. Upon our safe return, we split up all the envelopes between us and signed each other’s while in quarantine. For some reason, rather than keeping the valuable treasures in a safe deposit box in a bank vault, Lois and I had simply put them in a box in the closet “for safekeeping.”
When it came time to escape the fires, Lois didn’t look for money, jewelry, or clothing. She left with only the clothes she was wearing and the one box containing the precious items that had flown all the way to the moon and back. She drove to the Balboa Bay Club where she was a member and could stay in one of the Bay Club rooms for the night.
More than fourteen fires raged around Los Angeles and Orange County Not one had yet been brought under control, despite firefighters using helicopters to dump huge loads of water and planes to drop chemical fire retardant. The flames burned all around our home, too, gutting expensive houses only a few yards away.
The following day, Lois awakened not knowing whether our home had survived. Logic told her to expect the worst, but she continued to hope for the best. That afternoon, Lois received a call from Stone Philips, a reporter from NBC’s Dateline. Stone asked if he could pick her up the next morning and take her to Laguna to tour the region and do an interview for Dateline in some of the burned-out areas. Lois wasn’t thrilled about being on nationwide TV without makeup and in the same casual clothes she had been wearing the day before, but it was an opportunity to check on our home, so she agreed. No vehicles were allowed on the Pacific Coast Highway except those of firefighters and reporters. Once they entered Emerald Bay, to her great relief Lois saw that our home was still standing, with only a bit of roof damage. The two houses next to ours were burned down completely, but our home, with the rest of my Apollo 11 moon paraphernalia inside, was intact.
I arrived back in California the following evening, and met Stone Philips and Lois at our home. He wanted to film me being greeted by Lois with the good news that the house was okay. Our home had been saved, we learned, because the Emerald Bay fire chief had stood on the roof with a garden hose, watering it down to battle the flames. As deeply grateful as we were to him, we were commensurately saddened for our friends who had lost so much—more than sixty homes had been destroyed in Emerald Bay alone, with nearly four hundred lost in surrounding Laguna Beach.
Furniture, clothes, even the house itself could be replaced, but those envelopes and other Apollo 11 items could never be duplicated. One of our first stops the following day was at the bank, where we deposited my moon memorabilia in a safe deposit box.
For once, it felt good to simply stay at home.
Shortly thereafter, I completed my book Encounter with Tiber, a science fiction novel of epic proportions involving space travel to the stars. I had been ruminating about the story line and characters since the mid-seventies. In Encounter with Tiber, I included in fictional form many of my ideas for space travel in the next millenium. The futuristic spaceships I envisioned, that flew by solar winds close to the speed of light, were actually based on the science as we understood it at the time. No warp-speeding through wormholes. My story line in Tiber was what I like to call “science-fact-fiction,” incorporating full appreciation for the physical laws of the universe, combined with a healthy dose of imagination. I grew up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories that seemed outlandish when I first read them, but today might seem terribly blasé. If our minds can conceive it, the possibility exists that we can do it.
LOIS WAS COMMITTED to keeping her promise to me, to learn how to scuba dive. On one of our first scuba-diving trips together, she and I were in Australia on Hamilton Island, where she took a five-day scuba-diving course. For her initial dive, we weren’t far off Hamilton Island, but it was at night. I thought, Well, Lois is doing great, and she’s a fast learner, and we do have some time, so why not go for a dive? Lois had never before had on scuba gear outside of a swimming pool or just off the beach, certainly never out in the open sea. But I had confidence in her, and felt she could do it.
We went out on the boat just after sundown, as the moon was coming up. We plunged into the water in the dark with our only light coming from the moon, our flashlights, and some floodlights shining down off the boat.
Lois started out courageously, but under the surface in the darkness she became disoriented. Floundering around for a few minutes was enough for her. Within a short time, she signaled me that she was returning to the boat. It wasn’t the longest dive, but it was a great first effort on her part.
On another of Lois’s early dives, we were in the Caribbean off the coast of Florida with Jimmy Johnson, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, and about twenty other people who were treasure-recovery specialists. The group was dredging for rare coins and gold bullion. On one of the days while the others were treasure-hunting, Lois and I went for a dive alone. We dove in a shallow area only about twenty-five feet deep, but the currents were brisk.
We were underwater for about forty-five minutes when Lois looked up and couldn’t see our boat. She poked my arm and nodded toward the surface. We both surfaced, and when I looked up, much to my dismay, I saw that the boat was about a mile away. We had drifted in the current during our dive, and hadn’t even been aware of
it. We tried to get somebody’s attention aboard the boat, but with the whitecaps rising higher at the end of the day, our efforts were in vain.
“We’re going to have to swim for it, Lois,” I said.
“What?” I wasn’t sure if it was surprise or sheer horror in her voice, but time was of the essence.
“No time to explain,” I said, “but I think we can make better time swimming underwater.” We put on our masks, and dove below the surface, swimming as hard as we could, trying to catch the boat. Swimming against the current was extremely tiring. Then our air ran out, and we had to swim on the surface, making it even more difficult. My heart was pounding, and I’m sure Lois’s was, too. Our energy was dissipating rapidly. Finally somebody aboard the boat saw us, and realized that we were in trouble. The boat swung around hard, and within a few minutes we were clambering on board. That ended Lois’s interest in scuba diving for a while.
When she finally consented to give it another try, we were on a Sea Space Symposium dive off the Mexican coast of Baja, California, in which the guys were off on one dive and the women were on a supposedly tamer version of it. Lois, in her zebra-striped wetsuit, was trying desperately to follow the directions of the divemaster in the heavy seas. They dropped a rope line to the bottom as the women made their way down to where they were going to begin exploring underwater. As Lois and the women were waiting at the bottom, they suddenly saw a school of about ten hammerhead sharks passing by just a few feet away. The divemaster signaled to be still, and the lady divers froze. The moment the sharks passed by, the women made a beeline back up the rope and tumbled into the boat.
When the men returned, I told Lois, “We barely saw a thing.”
Lois had seen all she needed to see. Over time, however, she developed a love for scuba diving and became my best diving buddy.
WHEN IT CAME to skiing, Lois could beat me hands down. Having never skied until I was in my fifties, I might not have had the most graceful style, but I picked it up relatively quickly. Lois was an excellent teacher, with her unmistakable quick-turning, deep-knee-bending style. We did most of our skiing in Sun Valley, where Lois had a home. I became familiar with the slopes, and with all of her ski buddies there. The year before Lois and I met, she had attended a gala celebrity event celebrating Sun Valley’s fiftieth anniversary. It was produced by Marjoe Gortner, a onetime child evangelist and movie star, now turned premier event producer. Supposedly named for Mary and Joseph by his minister parents, Marjoe could preach a sermon and quote scripture when he was only four years old. With his angelic yellow curls, he went on to pack revival tents throughout the South until he was seventeen.
Since 1987 he had devoted most of his time to producing several invitational celebrity sports events per year in locations such as Sun Valley, Lake Louise, Cabo San Lucas, Hawaii, Jamaica, and other resorts. These events often brought together a diverse group of entertainment and sports celebrities to compete in ski races, target snow-golf, snowshoe races, tobogganing, and water sports, but the weekend always revolved around an auction that raised money for a charity.
Our team leaders were Winter Olympics stars, and at one such event I was expected to be one of the slalom racers. Spectators didn’t care whether I had ever been on skis before or not, they just loved to see the celebrities slipping and sliding and tumbling their way down the mountain. But, thanks to Lois giving me ski lessons that first Christmas we were together, I fooled them, and although I was older than most of the competitors, I held my own. I didn’t win any of the races, but I sure didn’t lose, and I rarely fell on my face.
I’VE BEEN A member of The Explorers Club for years, meeting and interacting with such world-class explorers as the Cousteaus, Sir Edmund Hillary, and many more. At one of the annual galas, Lois and I met Lady Alexandra Foley a woman who worked with RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that had been granted “salvor-in-possession rights” to the Titanic. They had the right to explore the wreck and surrounding ocean areas, to obtain oceanographic material and scientific data from the area, and to retrieve artifacts from the sunken ship. The RMS Titanic folks had arranged for two cruise ships, the Royal Majesty, which would depart from Boston, and the SS Island Breeze, embarking from New York in August 1996, to sail to the area above the wreckage. Among the 3,000 passengers aboard those two ships would be survivors from the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912, when, on April 14, it struck an iceberg and sank with the resultant loss of 1,522 lives.
More than eighty years later, passengers aboard the two ships would watch the live video feed on giant screens, as a tiny three-man titanium submersible, the Nautile, would descend to the Titanic to raise a section of the ship’s hull that was lying in the debris around the wreckage, and explore the bow section of the ship for the first time. I was invited to be one of the three men to make the two and a half mile dive to the Titanic. At the time, I was in the midst of an international book tour, promoting Encounter with Tiber, so it probably took me at least half a second to accept that invitation to include the cruise itinerary in my tour and explore the Titanic!
Since Encounter with Tiber was released to rave reviews, I had been doing a whirlwind tour of the Planet Hollywood restaurants and entertainment complexes across the country. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as many other works of science fiction, had started the buzz with his kind comments, lamenting facetiously that although I had written two nonfiction books, I was now moving into his territory. “It doesn’t seem fair,” Clarke wrote in the foreword to the book, “There was a time when we science fiction writers had Space all to ourselves and could do just what we liked with it. Not anymore…. People like Buzz have been there, and can tell us exactly where we went wrong. And now, to add insult to injury, they’re writing science fiction themselves. Even worse—it’s darn good science fiction.” I preferred the term “techno-thriller,” but I certainly appreciated such a glowing endorsement from one of the world’s best SF writers. We had begun negotiations with Paramount Pictures to do a miniseries based on the book. The script was snatched up by ABC Television. But Disney, ABC’s parent company, had already begun production on their Mission to Mars feature film and determined that the projects would be competing, so ultimately the Tiber series was tabled.
The RMS Titanic organizers planned several special events for Lois and me to meet our fellow passengers aboard the the Royal Majesty and Island Breeze, and to promote my new book. Then we rendezvoused with the utility ship carrying the Nautile. Looking at the tiny yellow submarine, it was almost impossible not to think of the Beatles song by that title. But the Beatles could not have imagined climbing into such a minisub and slowly descending through the darkness nearly three miles below the surface. The submersible was spherical, with small portholes of glass on the left and right sides, built to withstand the enormous pressure of the water at such a depth. It was one of only a few submersibles in the world able to make such a dive.
The inside of the sub was extremely tight, even smaller than the command module Columbia. A claustrophobic person would not have lasted three minutes once the hatch was closed. To maneuver the sub, the pilot had to sit and work the controls, while his copilot and I had to lie flat on our stomachs on boards just off the floor to remain dry, due to the wet floor area. If nature called, we had a pail on the floor for collection purposes. It was not a luxurious ride.
My fellow divers were French, so they could speak a bit of broken English to me, but most of the communications with the surface were in French. Although I could probably order a decent meal in Paris, that was the extent of my French, so in addition to the odd feeling of dropping toward the ocean floor through darkness, I felt a bit at a loss to understand the instructions and conversations of my colleagues.
Meanwhile, a British film crew was making a documentary, Explorers of the Titanic, that they planned to air on the Discovery Channel. They had asked me to provide the audio commentary as the submersible made its way down to the Titanic. Visibility was extreme
ly poor, perhaps less than 150 feet at best, so my live transmissions were rather limited until we got down to within 150 feet of the vessel. Even then, because of the depth, it was impossible to see far beyond whatever was immediately in front of us. But the television folks asked me to describe the lonely darkness on the bottom of the ocean as compared to what I had experienced on the moon. I gave it my best shot.
It took us more than an hour to descend to the Titanic. We were not attached to the ship above us by a tether, but moved under our own power as we dropped through the darkness. I was on the right of the pilot, with my face pressed against the porthole-type window, straining to see as we made our way down. I caught sight of the eerie remains of the sunken ship, like a ghost rising through the hazy darkness. The Nautile’s pilot eased the sub forward until it hovered just above the Titanic’s bow. We were 12,500 feet below the surface. I grabbed a camera and started snapping pictures of what I thought was probably a place where passengers had once stood and looked out over the sea. The algae and other organisms covering the rusty bow gave it a strange whitish, surreal appearance, almost as though it were made of crusty gingerbread covered with frosting. We continued all the way down to the ocean floor. Color means nothing on the ocean’s bottom, since no sunlight ever makes it that far down. But in the lights from our submersible, I saw a sight almost as fascinating as the Titanic itself. Some pure white sea creatures that looked like a cross between a crab and a starfish were swimming all around the vessel. They had no eyes, which made sense to me, because there was no light to see anything by. In all my diving experience, I had never seen such unusual creatures.