Buzz Aldrin's Martian Dreams

In a George Washington University auditorium, an elderly gentleman stands patiently in a line behind a microphone, waiting for his turn to ask two of NASA’s most senior scientists a question about its plan to get humans to Mars.

When it’s finally his turn to speak, the man steps up and begins speaking about proposed propulsion systems and expresses disappointment at how the agency has pushed its program so far back. I think another plan would be better, he says. He speaks in circles, and for far longer than the panelists would like. He admits at one point that what he’s asking is not really a question at all. Finally, he stops speaking.

“I guess a yes or no won’t suffice,” William Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s human exploration team, says. He and his fellow panelist laugh it off and don’t address his comments.

The man, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to ever set foot on the Moon, sits back down.

The second man to ever set foot on the Moon.

“A wise friend of mine once told me that, no matter what you do, you’re always going to be known as the second man who walked on the Moon,” Aldrin told me in a Skype conversation. “I’ve always lived with that.”

Now, at 84, Aldrin—still sharp but maybe too idealistic for an agency that has become risk averse after losing two space shuttles and the 14 people inside them—has one last plan: To live until July 21, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, and to spend that day with the President of the United States, who, in his ideal world, will announce that NASA is imminently launching a manned Mars mission.

“I had hoped that all three of us would be there for it,” Aldrin said. “Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen.”

Aldrin is still an American hero, an icon, but he has increasingly become a thorn in NASA’s side. He has spent the last several years poking and prodding NASA, pitching them his vision for a Mars mission. This week, the Humans to Mars summit in Washington, DC may have been his best chance. And he wasn't going to miss it.

Aldrin sat in the front row of an auditorium half-filled with a hundred or so people whose singular focus is to put a human boot on the Martian surface.

After his questions for the NASA exploration panel, Aldrin gave a 40-minute presentation to pitch his plan to establish human permanence on Mars by 2035, a presentation that at times meandered and skipped around geopolitics of space exploration. Building a human colony on Mars in just two decades an ambitious plan to say the least, and it’s not something NASA has expressed interest in doing.

So maybe that’s why Aldrin was in Washington, speaking after NASA administrator Charles Bolden and Gerstenmaier have already come and gone, talking to a crowd that shares his vision and feels his frustration. He starts by telling us his plan to eventually set up international Moon bases with China (China!) before eventually traveling to the Martian moon of Phobos.

From Phobos, he says, we can set up a series of “cycling” spacecraft that will use the gravity assist from orbit to constantly send supplies back and forth from the Earth. We will eventually set up a permanent colony on Mars, he saays.

It’s all explained in his book, which he’ll be signing right after the presentation, he says. Many of the group of George Washington University students in attendance are checking their phones or nodding off. At one point, Aldrin says he’s forgotten what he’s going to say. At another, he’s pitching us his “latest scheme.”

“It takes one individual, one leader of one country on this Earth to say that we’re going to begin permanence on another planet,” Aldrin said. “That is a legacy that will last in history for a very long time. We need to convince people to do that.”

Even aging rockstars get more respect than those who never had a hit—the auditorium is more crowded for his speech than for any of the others. But the enthusiasm wanes until the end, when he’s done trying to explain an impossibly complicated timeline of mission plans, and thanks the crowd for being there. They give him a standing ovation.

Not one part of Aldrin’s scheme aligns whatsoever with what NASA has already said its current big goal is—to lasso an asteroid in the 2020s, and to go to Mars (how, or for what reason, we’re not too sure) sometime in the 2030s. (For his part, Aldrin has no interest in in the asteroid-snatching mission. "There’s a better way to look at an asteroid than to go out and grab a rock and bring it back," he said.)

I ask Artemis Westenberg, whose Explore Mars group invited Aldrin to speak at the conference, if Aldrin's Mars idea is remotely feasible.

“He really wants to do this. Come on, he’s still one of the 12 [men who landed on the Moon], so he means a lot to a lot of people. It’s great to see that someone did something great and then didn’t say—that’s it, it’s my retirement,” she said.

But really, is his idea feasible? “Some of it is definitely feasible. I’m not saying it’s going to happen,” Westenberg said. “I think if you told the engineers to do it, you could build it that way.”

Aldrin is frustrated with NASA, but the feeling is most likely mutual. During the panels in which Aldrin asked questions of NASA engineers, he was summarily shaken off. Why not talk to them about Mars in private? Surely Aldrin could get some of these guys in a room together?

“I’m not saying I haven’t talked to them behind closed doors,” Aldrin told me. But he’s also convinced that the agency has turned him into something of a figurehead. The only time they give much thought to him, he says, is every five years, when he’s invited to the White House to commemorate a Moon landing anniversary.

After Aldrin’s speech, I grab James Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, and ask him what it means that Buzz is here. “He’s an American hero, a smart guy,” he said.

What about the fact that he disagrees with NASA on just about everything? “We need the vision,” Green told me.

Later on, I talk to a woman who is waiting to meet Aldrin. “I just want to shake his hand,” she told me. “He’s the second man who walked on the Moon.”

Aldrin will spend the rest of his life trying to make sure that’s not all he’s remembered for. “Lots of people think this is an eggheaded idea,” he said. “I have to hang around to smarten them up.”