Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [104]
Lois’s response surprised me. “No, that won’t work,” she said. “I’ll be glad to go out and have a good time once in a while, but if we are to have any other kind of relationship, I require total exclusivity.” She clearly was not going to allow me to break her heart again. “We can still go out, and you can go out with your other friends, and I’ll go out with mine, but I don’t want to get too involved if you plan to date other people as well.”
Something about Lois intrigued me and appealed to me. The woman had class and character. She was unlike so many women that I had dated who spent most of our time fawning over me, or trading on my celebrity. Lois did neither. The basis of any relationship with her, she made clear, was one of equanimity
In May of that year I presented some of my latest ideas regarding my Mars Cycler in NASA’s backyard, when I spoke at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. There was no reason why America, with all its ingenuity, could not begin to plan for lunar and Mars colonies over the next fifteen to twenty-five years. We needed to start thinking about how to get there. No doubt, NASA types in the audience squirmed in discomfort as I readily acknowledged that the Soviets were leading the way to Mars and beyond.
First, I explained my concept of lunar cyclers, spacecraft that travel in a constant orbit between the Earth and the moon, ferrying crews, supplies, and commerce to and from a lunar colony’s research and manufacturing centers. These cyclers would not land, but would transfer personnel and cargo to “ports” placed in low Earth and low moon orbit. The second phase would be to build a port in a low Martian orbit to serve as a staging area for expeditions to the red planet below, or alternatively to land on one of the two Martian moons. For travel to Mars, I had designed my Mars Cycler system to fly in continuous orbits between Earth and Mars, with a 400-ton spacecraft rotating at either end of its long struts to create the centrifugal force necessary to produce an artificial gravity environment. The outbound trip to Mars would take about five and a half months, while the return leg would last twenty-one months to take advantage of the relative position of the planets and the natural gravity-assist trajectories serving as an orbital transit-way The Mars base itself would be staffed by twenty crew members, with half of them exchanged with each cycler arrival, meaning that each crew member would spend more than four years on the planet. The Mars-orbiting “cycla-port” could be maintained with a crew of as few as six, I told the crowd. I was back to the orbital mechanics I loved from my early days as an astronaut, and it was fueling my enthusiasm. To an audience that had grown bored watching American astronauts orbit the Earth, my words were either revolutionary or sheer lunacy.
MEANWHILE, I WAS off to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1986. I was accompanied by my youngest son, Andy, who was in the process of earning his master’s degree in science technology and space policy at George Washington University. He would later follow that up with a Ph.D. from UCLA in political science, with a focus on Russia’s space program. Andy spoke fluent Russian, and he had arranged an invitation for me to meet with Raoul Segdev, the head of Russia’s equivalent of our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I talked to Segdev about my cycler orbits, and the idea seemed to pique his interest. It was clear to me that the Russians were surging ahead of America in space exploration. While we were content to keep orbiting around the Earth in our shuttle, the Russians were eyeing Mars and its moons.
Interestingly, as Segdev showed me around some of the Soviet space facilities, I noticed numerous posters touting the various Soviet space achievements since Sputnik. They had indeed accomplished quite a bit. Strangely, it was almost impossible to find any reference to Apollo 11 or the fact