Magnificent Desolation

by Buzz Aldrin

  In recent years I’ve been approached by as many as ten separate television production companies and high-profile television producers who want to develop a space “reality” show or a competitive game show similar to American Idol, along the lines of Who Wants to Be an Astronaut? If we can put the right ingredients together, who knows? I might get back into space yet! But, even better, I’m working to find a way to give you a chance to travel in space!

  20

  A BLOW HEARD

  ’ROUND the WORLD

  LIKE MOST AMERICANS, I’M QUITE SKEPTICAL ABOUT CONspiracy theories. I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon—that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace—has to rank among the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet somehow the media has given credence to some of the kooky people espousing such theories, and my fellow astronauts and I have had to put up with the consequences.

  This is almost a no-win situation. If you ignore the panderers of nonsense, they say, “See! Buzz is afraid of the truth.” If you attempt to correct their error, you automatically lend undeserved credibility to their ridiculous suppositions. I am passionate about passing down accurate history to the next generation, so I must confess that I’ve had little patience with the conspiracy nuts. To me, they waste everybody’s time and energy.

  Nevertheless, since I’m probably the most publicly visible of all the astronauts who walked on the moon, I get more of the close encounters of a kooky kind than my colleagues, although any one of them has a collection of stories they could share as well.

  Because of the publicity the hoax theorists have garnered, occasionally even in a serious interview a reporter will broach the subject. One September morning in 2002, I was in Beverly Hills at the Luxe Hotel, filming a television interview for a Far Eastern TV network, when the interview began going in a direction that I knew was out of bounds. At first I tried to be cordial, adroitly answering the question, assuming that the interviewer would recognize my reluctance to talk about inanity, and bring the focus back to a bona fide space subject. Instead the interviewer began playing a television segment that had aired in the United States on the subject of hoaxes, including a section suggesting that the Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. I was aware of the piece and had been livid when it originally aired. I did not appreciate the interviewer’s attempts to lure me into commenting on it. Lisa had accompanied me to the interview following her early morning triathlon training in the Santa Monica Bay, and she immediately recognized that this was a flagrant violation of our willingness to conduct the interview in good faith, so she called a halt to the production. We weren’t belligerent, but we did not linger long over our good-byes, either.

  We left the hotel room and walked down the hall to catch the elevator, only a matter of seconds away. I pressed the button for the ground level, and Lisa and I looked at each other and smiled. It had been a strange morning already. When the elevator doors opened on the ground level, it got worse.

  As we stepped out into the hotel foyer, a large man who looked to be in his mid-thirties approached me, attempting to engage me in conversation. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” He had his own film crew along, with the camera already rolling to document the encounter.

  I greeted him briefly, acknowledging his presence, and kept moving— standard procedure for life in Hollywood. As Lisa and I walked through the foyer toward the front door of the hotel, however, the man kept getting in my way, peppering me with questions, none of which I answered. Lisa took my arm and glared at the man. “That’s enough,” she said, as I could feel her pressure on my arm guiding me toward the door. “Please let us alone; we’re leaving now.”

  We stepped outside under the hotel awning, and the film crew continued right along with us. Lisa’s car was parked across the street on Rodeo Drive, but there was no crosswalk nearby, and the traffic was brisk.

  Meanwhile, the “interviewer” had taken out a very large Bible and was shaking it in my face, his voice becoming more animated. “Will you swear on this Bible that you really walked on the moon?”

  I looked back at the man and gave him a look as if to say, Will you swear on that Bible that you are an idiot? The man was becoming more virulent, inflammatory, and personally accusatory in his outbursts. I tried not to pay any attention, but he was saying things like, “Your life is a complete lie! And here you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!”

  Lisa approached the cameraman and insisted, “Please turn off that camera! We’re just trying to get across the street to our car.”

  I’m a patient man, but this situation was silly. “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  Lisa spied a break in the traffic, so she grabbed me by the arm again, and said, “Buzz, let’s go.” We started walking across the street, but the large man kept getting right in front of us, standing in the middle of Rodeo Drive, blocking our path as his cameraman kept rolling film. Lisa seemed nervous about trying to go around him, while searching for her keys to unlock the car with the man in such close proximity, so we turned around and walked back to the bellman’s station outside the hotel.

  “Okay, this is ridiculous,” I said to Lisa and to the bellman. “Call the police. This guy is not letting us get to our car.”

  I was under the awning, and Lisa turned away from me to approach the cameraman again. “Please turn that camera off,” she said. Meanwhile the large man was nearly screaming at me, “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin! You’re a liar; you’re a thief!”

  Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force fighter pilot, or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character assassination, but whatever it was, as the man continued to excoriate me, I suddenly let loose with a right hook that would have made George Foreman proud. WHAAP! I belted the guy squarely in the jaw.

  While I prided myself on staying in relatively good shape, it was doubtful that my septuagenarian punch did much damage to the fellow, except perhaps to his ego. But he was not at all concerned about the punch, anyhow. It was obvious that he had been goading me in that direction, and he seemed ecstatically happy that I had finally grown exasperated and hit him.

  “Hey, did you catch that on tape?” he called out to his cameraman. That was all he cared about.

  Lisa turned around and walked back to me. She cocked her head slightly, looked up at me, and asked quietly, “Buzz, what happened?”

  I looked back at my stepdaughter rather sheepishly, and said, “I punched the guy.”

  “You what?” Lisa’s hand instinctively flew to her mouth in disbelief, as though already postulating in her mind any potential legal ramifications.

  The film crew and “interviewer” hastily packed up and headed for their vehicle. They had gotten what they were hoping for—and more. Before the night was over, the film of me punching the guy was on the news and all over the Internet. The interviewer went to the police, threatening to file assault charges against me.

  In the meantime, Lisa contacted our legal representative, Robert O’Brien, and told him everything that had happened. Robert suggested that we hire a criminal lawyer, just in case the encounter actually led to charges.

  On the following Tonight Show, Jay Leno included the incident in his standup routine, cheering, “Way to go, Buzz!” They doctored up the video of my punch, and edited it to make it appear as though I had given the guy about twenty rapid-fire punches instead of the one.

  David Letterman also came to my defense in his opening remarks for The Late Show, and threw in a double feature on the story the next night, since they had “dug up” some old archival footage of a reporter accosting Christopher Columbus, accusing him, “You didn’t really cross the ocean and land in the New World. You’re a liar!” And of course, Columbus decked the guy.

  By then, televis
ion networks and evening entertainment news programs were calling, suddenly wanting me to appear on their shows. Ordinarily I would have been delighted, but our legal advisers said, “No interviews.” Eventually the matter died down. The city of Beverly Hills did not bring charges against me, and there were witnesses to the harassing behavior that provoked my response. It still cost me money to hire a lawyer to defend myself, and the hoax advocate received the publicity he sought, so I suppose, in the end, he won. But the punch provided me with some satisfaction, at least, and I was gratified by the calls and notes of support. CNN Crossfire commentator Paul Begala gave me a thumbs-up, and many others sent encouraging messages. Ironically, some of the most supportive words came from my fellow astronauts, to the effect of, “Hey, Buzz, I wish I’d punched the guy! Finally, somebody has responded to these hoax theory perpetrators.” More than my knowledge of rendezvous techniques, more than my actions under pressure during the initial lunar landing, more than anything in my career as an astronaut—it seemed as if nothing elevated me more in their estimation than “the punch.” From that day on, I was a hero to them.

  ON JANUARY 29, 2003, I was in New York to celebrate General Electric Plastics’ fiftieth anniversary of the invention of Lexan at its “Innovation Day,” held at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Lexan is the highly durable polycarbonate material used in everything from plastic water bottles to space helmets. I donned a replica of my Apollo 11 space helmet with a visor made of the Lexan resin, and shared my space stories with more than 500 sixth graders. As part of the anniversary celebration, I made a spotlight appearance on NBC’s Today show, and talked about the space shuttle Columbia, which was due to land in a few days, and of course how excited I was about the progress we were making toward getting ordinary citizens into space.

  Back home, I arose early on the morning of February 1, 2003, and turned on the television. I had penciled into my handwritten calendar the time that the Columbia shuttle was expected to return from its mission to the ISS for its runway landing at the Kennedy Space Center at around 9:00 a.m. (EST), 6:00 a.m. (PST). I brewed some coffee, poured myself a cup, and sat down to watch the reentry. But I could tell that something wasn’t right; it was suddenly too quiet, and at this point in the landing, such a silence was highly unusual. Normally the radio transmissions between ground control and the shuttle would be constant back-and-forth confirming critical data and readings. I turned the television’s volume higher, thinking it might be something malfunctioning on our set, but the interruption of communication from the Columbia was real—and alarming. Unknown to me or to most of the world at that moment, the space shuttle Columbia had already begun to disintegrate as it streaked high above Texas during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. All seven crew members died in the catastrophe.

  Apparently the shuttle had been damaged either during or shortly after launch when a piece of foam insulation, no bigger than a small briefcase and weighing slightly more than a pound, broke off from the main propellant tank. The debris struck the edge of the left wing, damaging Columbia’s thermal protection system, which guards it from the intense 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures generated during reentry. Making matters worse, it was later discovered that NASA engineers suspected the damage the entire time the shuttle was in flight, but it was determined that there was little that could be done to repair the problem. Nobody bothered to tell the Columbia’s crew of the danger they were in as Commander Rick Husband, an experienced shuttle pilot who had flown one of the first missions to the International Space Station (ISS), ran the spacecraft through its final burns.

  The Columbia spread bits of debris across parts of Texas and as far away as Arkansas and Louisiana. My heart sank as I watched the television coverage of the tragedy.

  I had little time to grieve, however. Within minutes, all six telephone lines in our home and office were lighting up, with what seemed like every television network and news agency in America wanting to ask me about the chain of events. Several television networks wanted me to sign on as their exclusive news commentator to help viewers understand more about this horrific incident.

  I knew I couldn’t help everybody, but felt compelled to do what I could. I decided to work exclusively with NBC, and within two hours I was on the air with various NBC commentators, discussing the catastrophe. I tried to remain stoic and scientific in most of my comments, but at one point during my appearance on NBC’s Nightly News, while discussing the disaster with Brian Williams, I could no longer hold back the tears welling in my eyes, as with trembling voice I recited a lyric from the song, “Fire in the Sky,” written by Dr. Jordan Kare that seemed so appropriate to me:

  Though a nation watched her falling

  Yet a world could only cry

  As they passed from us to glory

  Riding fire in the sky.15

  I knew the natural result of such a tragedy would be for NASA to pull back, to say, “We aren’t going to do anything until the investigators’ report is released and we find out why this horrible accident occurred.” That was understandable, but we dared not put life on hold as we waited.

  Months later, when their report came out, the Columbia accident investigation board mandated that the remaining three shuttle orbiters in the fleet, Discovery, Endeavor, and Atlantis, be permanently retired by the year 2010. NASA had been struggling with the issue of how long to fly the shuttles; some claimed they were never meant to have a thirty-year lifespan when they began flying in 1981. This mandate made it all the more urgent for America to put into effect a strong new vision and start building the next generation of spacecraft to replace the shuttle program. The report also recommended that the astronaut crew be separated from cargo in the launch vehicle in future space transportation systems. I saw this as a red flag that might prove a costly limitation as we moved forward.

  With that premonition in mind, I initiated a conference call between two key admirals to raise the issue, Admiral Hal Gehman, who chaired the Columbia accident investigation board, and Admiral Craig E. Steidle, NASA’s associate administrator in charge of exploration systems. I told them that the separation of crew and cargo would restrict and limit the flexibility of configuring our future launch systems. We reviewed the issues, but in the end the accident board was not going to change its position due to underlying crew safety considerations. As it turns out, NASA implemented the board’s report by developing two completely different launch vehicles (the Ares I and the Ares V) to launch crew and cargo separately in its new Constellation program. Though it may take a rocket scientist to understand the ramifications, in my opinion—one shared by many others—NASA’s development of two completely different launch vehicles has strayed far from the shuttle-derived designs that make the most sense. This approach is what lies at the crux of our space program’s challenges today.

  It saddens me to know that we have fallen short on our progress as a nation to lead the world in space. As I write these words, we do not have in place a new space transportation system to take over when the shuttle orbiters are retired. At NASA’s current pace with the Constellation program, America will experience a gap of at least five years in which we will have no capability of launching humans into space. We will have no direct ability to send our astronauts to the $100-billion investment in the International Space Station. We will be completely dependent on the Russians to fly to the ISS, or possibly the Chinese, once they are invited to participate in the station. Moreover, we will have no capability to get back to the moon or on to Mars.

  Although the space shuttle would fly again following the Columbia disaster, NASA’s position regarding the future use of the shuttles has not changed. I have suggested stretching the existing schedule to retire the shuttles by one-year intervals, and flying at least one of our shuttles back to the International Space Station and docking it there as a permanent part of the structure, but so far these ideas have not been well received.

  We have experienced hiatuses in human space launch capability in the
past, following Apollo and Skylab, before the new shuttle fleet was developed. It was a fallow period in which we could not venture into space. After the Mercury program, NASA might have faced a gap before fully developing Apollo, but instead, we filled it with the Gemini program. We have existing technology today to prevent another pause in exploration, but only if NASA partners with commercial aerospace companies currently developing such spacecraft. Furthermore, it would indicate true progress if after almost thirty years of landing the shuttle fleet on the runway, NASA were to adopt a gap-filling technology of a heavy-lifting spacecraft with wings that could land on the runway, rather than the simpler, nonprogressive way of landing space capsules in the ocean to be recovered as we did in the early days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Development of such a spacecraft is still barely possible to bridge the gap, but time is running out.

  PARTIALLY TO TAKE my mind off the Columbia disaster, and partly because it was something that I had never previously done, I accepted an invitation to be a celebrity participant in the Twenty-seventh Annual Toyota Grand Prix, held in Long Beach on the first weekend of April 2003. The event pits celebrities against professional drivers in a high-speed race for charity, with proceeds benefiting children’s hospitals in Long Beach and Orange County, California. I’ve always loved cars, and I love speed, and I love driving fast. But I had never really raced cars, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, even though I was seventy-three years of age. I was assured of having at least one distinction: being the oldest driver on the course.