When I was at summer camp they divided the campers into two groups,” Buzz
Aldrin recalls. We are high up in a New York hotel — the city is one stop on
a world tour to promote his new book, its publication tied to the 40th
anniversary of first Moon landing. “It was called Trout Lake Camp. There
were the Ts and the Ls, and they competed. And at the end, one team won: and
they ate chicken and the other group ate beans.” He looks slightly rueful,
despite the upright, West Point posture that hasn’t left him even at the age
of nearly 80. “That’s not a good example,” he says, although to my mind it
is, since I’ve asked him as politely as I can what the difference is between
what it might have been to be the first man on the Moon, and to have been
the second. Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin — he changed his name by deed poll to
simply Buzz some years ago; it was the name his sister called him, a
childish mispronunciation of “brother” — climbed out of the lunar module 14
minutes after Neil Armstrong made his one small step. Maybe because I too
went to an American summer camp, I can vouch for the humilation of that
end-of-year ritual. It’s one of the very few times during the course of our
two-hour talk when Aldrin veers in the rough direction of the personal.
He was clearly a brilliant technician — graduating third in his class from
West Point and receiving a Doctor of Science degree from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology — and a skilled pilot: he flew 66 missions in his
F-86 Sabre during the Korean War, and shot down two Russian MIG-15s, all
this before he was chosen for the Gemini and the Apollo programmes in the
1960s. Such abilities were family traits: his father, also Edwin E. Aldrin,
had been an aviation pioneer, and studied physics with Robert Goddard, the
American genius of rocketry. (His mother Marion was born the year the Wright
brothers made their first flight; her maiden name was Moon.) Buzz’s second
autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, has been written with Ken
Abraham and, with its clear, straightforward prose, doesn’t give me a sense
of what it’s like to talk to Buzz. Fortunately I’ve read Andrew Smith’s
terrific book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth: Smith
captures the complex, fragmented syntax that is uniquely Aldrin’s; I’m glad
to have been warned. I mention how his father seemed to feel his son was
slighted after the 1969 landing, protesting to the US Postal Service when it
issued stamps with a picture of Armstrong and the legend, “First Man on the
Moon”; Aldrin Sr even took his protest to Washington, carrying a placard in
front of the White House that said, “My son was first, too.”
Was that hard? “Well, yeah, that’s a whole. . .” he tails off. “It’s hard to
tell what other influences may have singled out to there being an emphasis
of — of more of a one man show. More of a gold medal, and not much for the
silver. But that’s America.” It is America indeed; and Aldrin’s is an
American story through and through, complete with depression, divorce, a
battle with alcoholism (now won: he has been sober for 30 years), and a
scarring encounter with the kind of celebrity that was rare then. More than
a fifth of the world’s population watched the Moon landing on television; an
estimated 600 million people. It was an event that changed history, and yet
the three men who made that history were absent for the change. As Aldrin
says in Magnificent Desolation: “It seemed like the entire world was
having a party, and I couldn’t resist turning to Neil and saying, ‘Hey,
look. We missed the whole thing!’ ”
Meeting Aldrin is a poignant experience. He was a pioneer — not just as an
astronaut, but in speaking openly about his depression and alcoholism. Both
his mother and his grandfather commited suicide, though his family would not
acknowledge the nature of his mother’s death.
In 1972 he wrote in the Los Angeles Times about his hospitalisation for
depression; that, and his first memoir, Return to Earth, led to his
being made chairman of the National Association of Mental Health in 1974.
But even in that endeavour, it seems, he feels slighted: “It’s hard to be a
real vocal leader in recovery,” he says. “If it’s a mental health issue,
well, say, depression — many more people suffer varieties of depression than
they do alcoholism. But, the, ah, nobleness, the way that say Hollywood has
evolved, the nobleness of being a mental health champion has never risen
very high, whereas those who have recovered from alcoholism, they get more
of a feather in their cap.”
He takes a breath; I feel as if he draws comfort from complex language, that
long words are a better defence than short ones. “It’s kinda hard to say
that in the mental health arena, with depression, that I’ve dispensed with
the ingredient that gives me the problem — with alcohol you can say that. I
don’t drink any more. The terminology is to be involved in the dry drunk,
where you suffer the same inabilities to cope that you do when you are
drinking. I’ve learnt that I am susceptible to: ‘How’s it going?’ And if
it’s not going too well, then I don’t feel too well. You can’t necessarily
penetrate that — except to try to do well.”
And Aldrin has not always done well. But who can blame him? He was 39 years
old when he returned from the Moon — where could there have been to go next?
He was catapulted into a stratosphere of fame for which anyone would have
been ill-equipped; his treatment by the military in which he served didn’t
help him. Reproduced in Return to Earth, his first autobiography, is
the military travel voucher for that July voyage, his authorised route “Cape
Kennedy, Fla./Moon/Pacific Ocean (USS Hornet)/Hawaii” — the sum of
his compensation a grand total of $33.31. Yes, really.
“We could have just been flying around the country; it didn’t matter to them,”
he says now. Afterwards he and his fellow astronauts travelled for two
months on a victory tour: “But we didn’t even get a clothing allowance.”
The lack of a financial reward commensurate with his fame clearly troubles
him: “If I was a quarterback I would be a multimillionaire,” he says. “But
that’s not the case in the civil space programme where you bring in military
people, and especially if you get divorced in California.” He was divorced
from his first wife, Joan, in 1974. “There’s community property, and you
lose half of that. And civilians in Nasa were paid more than the military.”
His post-moon career wasn’t what he had hoped; he was made commandant of the
USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1971, a commission that
might have ended more happily had he ever been a test pilot.
At one point he found himself working as a Cadillac salesman; he has written
one memoir and two science fiction novels (collaborating with author John
Barnes). Of all the Apollo astronauts he is by far the most vocal in arguing
for a return to deep space, most particularly a manned space flight to Mars,
although he acknowledges that his plan — for astronauts to travel to Mars,
never to return — may be a hard sell. It would take too long to get there
for round-trips to be worth the effort, to his mind; a permanent settlement
would be the only viable solution.
“You don’t out and out say that we’re going to Mars on one-way trips” — though
of course he just has — “because that shocks people, but that’s what it is.
So you have to select people in 2016, 2018, on the basis that if they are
successful as an astronaut, their career is going to be on another planet.
You want to volunteer for that, it’s up to you.”
This sounds like science fiction. But consider that “Dr Rendezvous”, as he was
known in the early days of the space programme for his pioneering work in
the way space vehicles could dock with each other in orbit, has been out
there: you can’t say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In the 1980s
he developed the Mars Cycler system, which would fly in continuous orbits
between Earth and Mars; the outbound trip would take five-and-a-half months,
the return nearly two years. Part of me thinks it sounds crazy; but in truth
the greater part of me considers the Vikings, considers Christopher Columbus
and Francis Drake and even Darwin, who all set out on voyages of discovery
that did not necessarily carry hope of return.
NASA’s current programme isn’t ambitious enough for Buzz; I can’t help
wondering, however, whether the current economic climate will favour any of
the developments he’s after for a good while to come.
But his tenacity is striking. He’ll do anything to publicise the cause of a
manned return to deep space — the latest stunt has found him rapping with
Snoop Dogg (see his website, buzzaldrin.com; it’s all there, from “Rocket
Hero” merchandise to publicity for his non-profit foundation promoting space
travel, ShareSpace).
He’s being, as he says, tutored on Twitter (twitter.com/therealbuzz) and has
in the past found himself being asked by Ali G what it’s like to walk on the
Sun. Does he enjoy that kind of self-mockery? I wonder, and find pathos in
his answer that: “Well, it’s a challenge.” It’s a challenge he has met,
since he remarried in 1988, with the help of his wife, Lois: “Finding the
Love of My Life”, he entitles the chapter devoted to her. His paean to her
is somehow more moving for its contorted expression.
Keeping himself in the public eye post-Apollo, arguing for manned space flight
against a host of objections (including the reasonable one that automation
may well be more effective in space than humans) he says that “participating
in that does exact a toll of change on people. And their abilities to deal
with that. And it opens the door to, to, how does help come along that makes
a big difference? In terms of a partner that’s able to sufficiently
counterbalance — so that one and one is more than two.” I meet Lois briefly:
a tiny, energetic blonde who is just his age, clad in turquoise and clearly
Buzz’s biggest cheerleader.
Only once do I sense a spark of anger, or perhaps it’s simple frustration; for
I ask him how it is to have to deal with the people who, over and over
again, want to know “what it was like” on the Moon. His jaw sets, and he
sits up even straighter. “What is their background when they ask that
question?” he demands. “What is my background leading up to the point where it
was like. Okay? I trained for a while and then specifically I did this,
and then — it was like. So how can I communicate whatever that was to this
person who led a life along here, and all of a sudden he meets somebody and
he wants to know what it was like! What can you say? I can physically
describe things, but that’s not what they want to hear. And we’re not into
feelings, we’re not into emotions, we’re not into tears, because as soon as
you do that you screw up.” Fair enough, I think, as I consider my own desire
to know what it was like; and how I would answer anyone who asked me what it
was like to have a baby, or to see my father die. What was it like? There
are no easy answers to this question — but people expect Buzz to have one.
He’s been angry in the past, though. In 2002 he socked a guy called Bart
Sibrel in the jaw when Sibrel tried to get Aldrin to swear on a Bible that
the Moon landing wasn’t a hoax. These days, he’s a little calmer around the
subject, although I admit I raised it with trepidation. “Claims can be made
very easily,” he says evenly, “and it brings out the human desire for the
bizarre, the unusual, the mystical; and I think the counter to that is to
point out the shame of gullibility, of being caught up in sham
propositions.”
Buzz is amenable to the photographer’s demands, staring up at the sky as
requested (“there’s not much up there”) though keeping an eye on the time.
His zest for the next meeting, the next possibility, does make me think of
his not-quite-namesake, Buzz Lightyear (something else he didn’t make money
out of, incidentally). There’s a TV interview next, all part of his project
to get the world excited again about venturing back into deep space. An
unlikely prospect, maybe, in the face of poverty, war, global warming — but
I have to admire the indefatigable Buzz.
People in power never sought his advice in the way he thought they should; but
still, coming up to his ninth decade, he’s ready to lend a hand. “I was
deprived of effectiveness at a crucial transition from one major career
field to another. In the government business, when you are no longer a part
of the Establishment, your advice is not always sought. I always thought I
could be more an effective adviser to people than I was; but I like to think
it was just not the right time. Maybe the right time is just around the
corner, now.”
