by Buzz Aldrin
The option clearly was a flexible path, somehow. At the time I felt that we had an option of extending space shuttle flights, perhaps developing a shuttle-derived capability. But soon it became clear that extending the shuttle program was not an economically viable thing to do, so now we have a gap in America’s independent access to space.
I did believe the Bush vision for space was a good, albeit flawed, notion. It moved away from the space shuttle and the International Space Station and back to exploration, somewhere—even though back to the moon with government astronauts was not to my liking. I did concur that Constellation required extensive reevaluation. Obama’s action to cancel Constellation, however, has morphed into the Space Launch System (little more than the canceled Ares V booster in the Constellation Program) and Orion, which is ill named as a multipurpose crew vehicle. Why? Overall, it is because of short-term, vested interests in political and industrial circles. It’s my opinion that some of the large aerospace contractors are far from truthful in working with NASA.
At the moment NASA’s own website on Constellation tells the story as an editorial note: “The Constellation program is no longer an active NASA program. The program information on these pages is for historical use only.”
So be it for historical artifacts. But first a little history about my own space journey to today.
Beyond the Boundaries
I know firsthand that challenging times often come first before the most rewarding moments. Over the centuries we have seen powerful reminders of those who explored beyond the boundaries of what they knew, from Copernicus and Galileo to Columbus. Jumping to the 20th century, it was on a windswept morning in 1903 at Kitty Hawk that the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. That same year, my mother, Marion Moon, was born.
My father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was an engineer and an aviation pioneer—and a friend of Charles Lindbergh and Orville Wright. Taking a job with Standard Oil, my dad flew his own plane coast to coast. He later served in World War II in the Army Air Corps, coming home for visits.
Born in 1930 and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, I finished high school there. Aviation was pretty much in the family. When I was all of two years of age, my dad took me on my first flight, the two of us winging our way from Newark down to Miami to visit relatives. My aunt, in fact, was a stewardess for Eastern Airlines. The Lockheed Vega single-engine plane that I flew in was trimmed in red paint to look like an eagle. How could I have grasped then as a child that decades later I would find myself strapped inside a very different breed of flying machine—Apollo 11’s lander, the Eagle, en route to the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity?
Aldrin family holiday card signed by all, including “Buzzer”
(Illustration Credit 1.2)
The heritage that led me into aviation and the appreciation for higher education came from my father. Dad had gone to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His physics professor was Robert Goddard, regarded as the father of liquid-fueled rocketry.
After graduation from high school, I became a cadet at West Point and took to heart its motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.” It’s a maxim that remains part of me today. Surrounded by the influence of aviation, I entered the U.S. Air Force after graduating from the Military Academy. After fighter pilot training I was stationed in Korea, where I flew 66 combat missions in my F-86 Sabre fighter jet, shooting down two enemy MiG-15 aircraft.
Following the Korean War, I was sent to Germany and was on alert, flying F-100s that carried nuclear weapons. In the late 1950s the Cold War was escalating between the then Soviet Union and the United States. To be sure, tensions were high. While posted in Germany, I learned of the Soviets’ surprising technological feat—the launch of Earth’s first artificial satellite in October 1957, a 184-pound sphere called Sputnik. As the import of Sputnik sank in, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the political and public reaction spurred on the space age. It became the starting gun for the space race, leading to the creation of NASA the following year.
Buzz climbs into his F-86 Sabre Jet in Korea, circa 1952.
(Illustration Credit 1.3)
The Soviet Union achieved yet another triumph on April 12, 1961, by sending the first human into Earth orbit, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. As a comparative note, a few weeks after Gagarin’s mission of 108 minutes duration, NASA flew on May 5 America’s first Mercury astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a 15-minute suborbital flight that touched the edge of space.
A mere 20 days after Shepard’s mission, President John F. Kennedy boldly challenged America to commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of that decade. Many of those at the helm of a newly formed NASA thought the challenge to be impossible. The know-how just wasn’t there. The nation had little more than 15 minutes of spaceflight experience under its belt.
But what America did have was a President with vision, determination, and the confidence that such a goal was attainable. By publicly stating our goal and by establishing an explicit time period on a very clear accomplishment, President Kennedy offered no back door. We either had to do it or not make the grade … and no one was interested in failing. Even then, failure was not an option.
Kennedy’s audacious objective was further reinforced by his speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962. That seminal speech included the famed line: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” That presentation, even today, remains riveting.
Kennedy’s empowering words from over 50 years ago are worth recalling in terms of the technical challenges we face today.
In part, he said,
we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall … made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun … and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.
Rendezvous With Destiny
If space was going to be our next new frontier, then I wanted to be part of getting there. After completing my tour of duty in Germany, I decided to continue my education and receive my doctorate of science in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT was the same university my father had gone to. For my thesis, “Guidance for Manned Orbital Rendezvous,” I adapted my experience as a fighter pilot intercepting enemy aircraft to develop a technique for two piloted spacecraft to meet in space. I dedicated that final paper to the American astronauts.
Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin makes headlines.
(Illustration Credit 1.4)
First American into space: Alan Shepard, May 1961
(Illustration Credit 1.5)
The first time I filled out the forms to be a NASA astronaut, my application was turned down. I was not a test pilot. Determined to seek a career as an astronaut, I applied again. This time, my jet fighter experience and NASA’s interest in my concept for space rendezvous influenced them to accept me in the third group of astronauts in October 1963. I became known to my astronaut peers as “Dr. Rendezvous.”
In reacting to President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon by decade’s end, there were many alternatives discussed as to how we could get there and return to Earth. A very gifted NASA engineer, John Houbolt, trumped even the revered U.S. space program leader, Wernher von Braun, who favored a huge monstrous rocket, a multipurpose spacecraft, and direct flight to get to the moon and back.
Houbolt backed a lunar-orbit rendezvous plan. It called for not a multipurpose crew vehicle ar
chitecture but a segmented way to achieve the moon landing feat. When the Apollo moon landing method was finally scripted, it adopted segmentation of the mission: using an Apollo command module as discreet from the service module, and segmenting the lunar ascent stage from the lunar descent stage.
Houbolt’s master plan became a plus for me in terms of my MIT rendezvous work. The critical key to this approach would be our ability to reliably rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit around the moon, a very dangerous maneuver. For if that rendezvous failed, there would be no way to rescue the astronauts. Luckily, my MIT expertise was exactly what was required.
It’s essential to note the insertion of the Gemini program. It was a fundamental stepping-stone, a bridge between the one-man Mercury and three-person Apollo programs, primarily to test equipment, to do trial runs of rendezvous and docking scenarios in Earth orbit, and to train astronauts and ground crews for future Apollo missions.
On November 11, 1966, I made my first spaceflight as pilot of Gemini 12, alongside James Lovell, the mission command pilot. That nearly four-day flight brought the Gemini program of ten piloted missions to a successful close. During the flight, I was able to establish a new record for spacewalking, spending five and a half hours outside the spacecraft. To be honest, up to that point, we had failed miserably in the Gemini program to show that an astronaut could easily and effectively work outside his space vehicle. We used microgravity training in parabolic flights of airplanes, but that didn’t solve the Gemini spacewalking problems at all. It took underwater training that I introduced, later to become a fixture in simulating extravehicular activity (EVA) here on Earth in special underwater buoyancy facilities. Thanks to underwater training, and the use of appropriate restraints, I chalked up my successful EVA without taxing my space suit.
During my Gemini 12 tethered space walk, I photographed star fields, retrieved a micrometeorite collector, and did other work. And there were a few lighter moments. Once in orbit, I just couldn’t wait to get into my personal preference kit and get my small slide rule out and have it float there in front of me. Being a pipe smoker at the time, I also brought my pipe along, putting it in my mouth (unlighted, of course!), with Lovell taking a picture of that episode.
The first astronaut to do so, Buzz trains underwater for weightlessness in space.
(Illustration Credit 1.6)
On Gemini 12’s landing, there was an unequivocal realization by all astronauts and NASA itself: We only had three years left to accomplish Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yes, Gemini was the link that prepared us for the Apollo missions to the moon, but we still had major work to do.
In all, there was a team of 400,000 people working together on a common dream. NASA managers, engineers, and technicians who were designing and building the multistage Saturn V booster to propel us to the moon worked side by side with industry contractors. It was a unified enterprise, a synergy of innovation, effort, and teamwork that was unstoppable to transform a long-held dream into a reality.
Buzz Aldrin on Gemini 12 space walk, November 1966
(Illustration Credit 1.7)
Eight years after President Kennedy committed us to strive for the impossible, Neil Armstrong and I walked across the sundrenched terrain of the moon. Nearly a billion people all over the world watched and listened as we ventured across that magnificent desolation. With Mike Collins circling above us, and even though we were farther away from our planet than any three humans had ever been, we felt connected to home.
But, as they say: “That was then, this is now.”
Collaboration
What should we be reaching for now … and why? Space leadership, technology development, private-public teaming, free market savvy, and national security preeminence … those attributes still define us, or should define us, as a nation.
Many decades have passed since I climbed out of the cockpit of a supersonic F-100 armed with nuclear weapons, became an MIT egghead, and then a space traveler. Nowadays, my dedication, indeed my passion, is focused on forging America’s future in space, guided by two principles:
• A continuously expanding human presence in space
• Global leadership in space.
Let me be up front on this point. A second race to the moon is a dead end, a waste of precious resources, a cup that holds neither national glory nor a uniquely American payoff in either commercial or scientific terms. How do we frame our collaborative or international effort to get to the moon again? Let me reemphasize: Certainly not as a competition. We have done that, and to restart that engine is to rerun a race we won. Let’s take a pass on that one. Do not put NASA astronauts on the moon. They have other places to go.
Gemini 12, mission complete: Buzz Aldrin and James Lovell
(Illustration Credit 1.8)
The better plan is to cooperate with international partners who also want to reach the moon, to offer a hand—and to establish some form of Lunar Economic Development Authority. The idea is to spread the costs, but also spread the wealth. In sum, we can afford to be magnanimous. America was first to set foot on the moon. Now let us make it a first step for all humankind.
So, how do we layer this enterprise, while also making it affordable and as gratifying to America as Apollo?
First, we let partners such as China and India tie into the International Space Station family of countries. The risk is low and the value on the political and collaborative front is high. Second, I encourage collaborative projects like utilizing the Chinese Shenzhou crew-carrying spacecraft to help us burden-share in low Earth orbit. Why, if we can make use of Russian spacecraft, why not Chinese?
What else can we do to make space development more universal, more valuable for all nations, and more internationally accessible? For one thing, we can offer incentives to make the private sector—not the taxpaying public sector—the primary tenant in low Earth orbit.
There is an important step under way. An Obama Administration priority has been the development of a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability with the goal of achieving safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to and from the International Space Station and low Earth orbit. NASA has awarded contracts to private firms to reach that very goal.
In 2012 NASA announced awards worth up to $1.1 billion to those companies—Boeing, SpaceX, and the Sierra Nevada Corporation—as they vie for a final contract. After capability matures, it is expected to be available to the government and other customers. NASA could contract to purchase commercial services to meet its station crew transportation needs later this decade.
I’m incensed to some degree that these selections are all capsules, save for Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, a crewed suborbital and orbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing, lifting-body space plane. I am very supportive of higher technology and government investments, but only of those that don’t rip out a page of the space history books to make everything look like a 1960s Apollo-era capsule.
The Dream Chaser design is based on many years of previous work on the NASA HL-20. It would carry from two to seven people and/or cargo to orbital destinations such as the International Space Station. The vehicle would launch vertically on an Atlas V and land horizontally on conventional runways. Ideally, I would like to see international use of Dream Chaser, of benefit to Japan, the European Space Agency, and the Indian Space Research Organization.
Why hasn’t anyone built a reusable booster yet? NASA hasn’t because its flight rate isn’t high enough. The now scuttled space shuttle program, being partially reusable, was intended to be the workhorse of America’s space program, reducing costs and making flight into space routine. Needless to say, these goals proved elusive.
When I look back on my life, the biggest mistake that I ever made relative to the future of the space program was in the early 1970s. I should have argued fervently for a two-stage, fully reusable system. The country didn’t do that. We built the space shuttle. That decision will come back over and
over again—haunting the future of American leadership in space.
The space shuttle itself was a bad judgment. It placed humans and cargo together—a fundamental error. That compromise of a design meant the crew flew alongside cargo—both wrapped in safety standards that unnecessarily boosted the cost of access to space.
China’s Tiangong-1 space lab module, illustrated at left, and Shenzhou-VIII spacecraft
(Illustration Credit 1.9)
I believe that the two-stage, fully reusable booster that we started and then gave up for the shuttle would have ended up separating crew and cargo, not putting the two together. Also, honestly, I’m not a supporter of humans riding large, solid rocket motors, a technology that keeps popping up out of the casket.
Commercial launch companies haven’t put forward reusable launchers either, because it’s cheaper for them—in the short term—to throw away the rockets.
One of my prime directives is to launch humanity into a new era of affordable access to space. In the late 1990s I put together a dedicated team of experienced rocket engineers and aerospace entrepreneurs to form the rocket design company Starcraft Boosters, Inc. Over the years, I have valued, in particular, the counsel of my business partner Hubert Davis, the company’s chief engineer, a former NASA engineer who has wrestled some challenging assignments in defining space transportation systems. I’m proud to say that we hold a U.S. patent issued in 2003, Flyback Booster With Removable Rocket Propulsion Module.
Our collective company goal focused on developing next-generation space launch systems that would reduce launch costs and build upon existing and emerging technologies.
The Starcraft Boosters team’s first initiative was to develop the “StarBooster” family of reusable flyback rocket boosters. A vertically launched, two-stage-to-orbit system, the StarBooster design is essentially a hollow aircraft-type airframe into which a booster rocket propulsion module—such as a liquid-fueled Atlas V, Delta IV, or Russian Zenit—is inserted in order to launch a payload.