The Real Buzz Aldrin

The scoop: Forty years ago, two astronauts landed on the surface of the moon, captivating the people on Earth. One of those men was Buzz Aldrin, author of a new memoir titled "Magnificent Desolation," in which he chronicles battles with alcoholism and depression after his famed foray on the moon. In an interview with Discovery News space correspondent Irene Klotz, Aldrin talks about the legacy of Apollo and his vision for the future.

Irene Klotz: I was struck in your book by how you were left with the impression that the most important part of going to the moon was the shared experience that it created for people on Earth. I'd like to know if you think that the space program is capable of pulling off that sort of world camaraderie another time.

Buzz Aldrin: Well not in exactly the same way. Those were very pioneering days. There was a world of facing off between the United States and the Soviet Union and challenging new capabilities and technology. We just charted a course into the unknown of space capabilities and were very bold about doing that.

IK: So do you not think that that could happen again?

BA: Not in exactly the same way. We have gone through various ways of different people getting into orbit, different countries, a very complex machine, the shuttle, not quite living up to expectations ... but I just kind of hate to see the future, when we retire the orbiter, to be going back to recovering people and cargo in the ocean.

IK: Why did you say that NASA's current plan to the moon is a detour?

BA: It's going back to do the things that we have done before and other nations are capable of doing that right now. It seems to me that we leave ourselves open to other nations being able to claim that 'Oh look, we beat the Americans back to the moon. They're just not going to be leaders in the 21st century.' We need to chart what I think is a new course.

IK: So you're saying that the United States wouldn't be respected for doing the same thing that it did before. It needs to do something different to gain world respect?

BA: I don't think we get our money's worth out of investing and doing something that other people can do, when there's rather questionable return -- commercial return or the knowledge that we get -- by having humans back on moon to justify the large expense of their habitation.

IK: Is there a reason why spaceflight is so personally important to you?

BA: (Chuckles) Well, I've devoted half my life to be a part of it.

IK: Why'd you stay with it?

BA: It's what I know best. And when I transitioned from NASA service and Air Force service, what I knew best was innovative ways of telling the public and working with other people on better ways of (developing) human exploration, whether it's cycling orbits to and from Mars, or the design of spacecraft, working with engineers on reusable booster rockets to increase the efficiency and reliability of what puts people into space and eventually reducing the cost through higher flight rates and then devising ways to go back to the moon for us and other people.

IK: So why did a guy who goes to the moon write a book about alcoholism and depression?

BA: Because I experienced those things in going from a very structured life into one that was not all that satisfying. I had transitioned back into the Air Force and I felt that that was not the path to pursue, even though it was a good idea in the first place.

IK: How did being unstructured lead to alcoholism and depression?

BA: When you don't know what it is you're doing, what you should be doing, what you're working for when you've been in a very goal-oriented existence up to that point, you begin to lose enthusiasm, lose a sense of purpose.

IK: So you would say that goal-setting is a really important thing to do?

BA: If you've had a very structured life, yes you should have in mind what is the end result of your day-to-day work.

IK: What's your goal now?

BA: To serve my country in the best way that I can with the experience that I've accumulated in almost 80 years of life.

IK: How have you decided to do that? What's the structure for implementing your goal?

BA: The structure is what I have and the companionship of meeting Lois a little over 20 years ago. We lead a life of complementary sharing with other people, and events we go to, my accepting offers of speaking engagements to share the experiences of my life and the hope for the future in our space program, as it motivates people to help to lend support to endorsing products that I think are worthwhile because of my technical background. People do that in many other ventures in life and I think that's an appropriate thing when I consider the not-exactly-high rate of compensation for retired service people with 20 years of service and if you happen to be fortunate enough to get divorced in California, you lose half your retirement pay -- NASA has no retirement for the time we put in there; that was all compensated by the Air Force.

So we have to live up to certain standards of activity and sharing with people and I do what I can, what is accepted practice to earn the best living I know how to by taking my experience and sharing it with others -- writing books, engaging in Twitter experiences through TheRealBuzz (www.twitter.com/therealbuzz), having a very handsome website (www.buzzaldrin.com), working with my nonprofit ShareSpace Foundation to enhance the understanding of the benefits of our past exploration and what we hope to do in the future, working on lottery-type selection awards with ShareSpace for experiences in space, and then working with the California Space Authority and other education institutions to help improve the accountability of the policies that have been set forth by the federal and state and the local governments.

IK: How's the Buzz business? Is business good?

BA: Well, it's reasonable. It certainly keeps me challenged and it's doing reasonably well. I never felt myself as a major business-type person. I get advice from others and we do reasonably well.

IK: You have a grandson?

BA: I have one grandson. We're not keeping up with populating the world with the Aldrin clan, unfortunately. He's kind of surprisingly inherited music tendencies from his mother, my daughter, who's the one musical person in my family. He had the male lead in Annie Get Your Gun a few years ago and he's looking into advanced physics. I'm exposing him to contacts that I have in the field of gravity waves. That's a very complex new understanding of the interaction of the force of gravity and the reaction of other particles.

IK: I just wrote a story about a new search for gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background.

BA: Yup, there's a lot of new things unfolding in astrophysics that are just kind of mind-boggling. We've come a long ways in understanding the extent of the universe around us from the time when I was born. We didn't even know what real energy was coming from the sun. Now we reasonably understand that and the behavior of other stars, the transmission of information, the limitations of the speed of light, all of these things have a bearing on our understanding what's going on in our solar system. As we explore activity on other planets, we begin to understand more what's going on and has been going on our planet.

IK: Do you think that when we learn about something different it changes the way we live?

BA: Why yes it does eventually. It kind of filters down from the understanding, communicated through universities and our education system and our technology advancements through think tanks determining what the government policy and the private industry promising activities are.

IK: If you could go back in time, would you do anything differently in your life?

BA: Uh, no, not major events. I can't think of a major change. Here and there I might be just a bit more reactive to what I see going around rather than being kind of quiet and just letting things happen. As I move on in age, if I see that we're charting a pathway that might be not quite understood by the American people -- if we have to purchase $50 million seats to go and visit our space station -- we haven't explained our mission very well.

IK: If you were going to give some advice to the Augustine commission, what would you tell them to do? What do you think is a good vision for human exploration of space?

BA: If we continue on the present path of Constellation and the destination of the moon as soon as possible without side issues, I don't think we have room for many changes at all. If we make modifications in the launch vehicle system, I think it really opens up potential change in a much more positive direction by assisting international human landings on the moon, but not putting our resources in support of that, but our experience, our knowledge and our assistance. We work closely with them and we chart a course of expanding our long-duration, life support capabilities so that we can have one-year missions flying by comets, station-keeping with asteroids and the initial major target is to occupy for a year and a half at a time during favorable periods, the moon Phobos of Mars so that we can control things on the surface at a much safer location and ascertain just what it is going to take further to settle people on the surface.

That's a progressive outward sequence of objectives, much like the increasing capabilities of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo program, where we tested the spacecraft in Earth orbit, then the lander in Earth orbit, then the manned module to the moon, exercised the lander in more advanced ways and then made the first landing and it began to expand our capability on the lunar surface. I think all of those were progressive, increasing capabilities. We can do the same thing in other directions.

IK: One thing about Apollo is that took place in a really heated political backdrop. If you take an assessment of the world situation today, do you think that the space program has as much a role as a foreign policy instrument as it did during the Apollo days?

BA: Well it's not competitive with one major power pitted against the other. It's the challenge of working out the procedures for friendly cooperation at the space station, inviting other partners to be a part of the space station and then developing an international organization to look at the development of the moon, which has been explored and which will continue to be explored robotically in the near term, to see just what the objectives are of other nations wanting to progress their space capabilities with human landings on the moon. We've already done that, we've exercised that to a considerable degree, we need to expand our capabilities for life support in long-duration missions for outer orbits where we begin to look toward the establishment of a growing settlement on another object in space. I really don't think the moon is that place to set up a growing permanence -- yet. If there are some developments that can come from human activity on the moon that justifies that expense, then I think we will pursue them. I don't see that those warrant our expenditures to get there 50 years after we did before.

IK: How often, on a personal level, do you go back to the moon in your mind?

BA: Well not very much. I can't change the past. It unfolded in a way that I'm pretty pleased with what we were able to do. There's not much ruminating about small little details here or there.

IK: When your grandson is your age, what would you like to see happening in the space program, when he's almost 80. Sixty years...

BA: That's a very long time in the future. I suspect we'll have growing settlements on Mars. We'll perhaps have some breakthroughs in transportation -- I'm not sure what they are. We're making slow progress, but it's still the major impediment, the cost of getting into orbit. Once we're there we can take our time as long as we have the protection of the human being from radiation and from deterioration of the bone and muscle. I think we can go many places.