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By Root 1372 0

that human beings had ever landed on the moon. The Soviets exhibited posters showing their lunar rovers, vehicles that were far more comprehensive than anything we had used. Their official position was, “It’s so expensive to send people to the moon; we can send rovers there and get the same thing done.” That was their public line, anyhow. The truth was that the Soviets had tried desperately to beat us to the moon, and to land one cosmonaut, but they just couldn’t get their big rocket, the N1, into orbit. They tried three times that we know of, and they failed all three times—the first one less than a month before Neil and I walked on the moon, followed by two more attempts in 1971 and 1972.

In Moscow, we had an appointment with the head of the Soviet space program, who assigned one of their cosmonauts to be our guide, and for a while I thought that we might be able to finagle a tour of Star City, where the cosmonauts trained. As sort of a trade-off, the Soviets wanted me to participate in a future space meeting in Austria that turned out to be motivated by Soviet propaganda. When I realized their intentions, I declined the invitation, and that, of course, ended any possibility of an excursion to Star City. That was simply the Soviet way.

I had several purposes for going on the trip, not the least of which was an opportunity to meet with an Alcoholics Anonymous group in Poland and to encourage them in their work. We also enjoyed a whirlwind detour to Sweden to visit our relatives, and we stopped over in Budapest, Hungary, and Nuremberg, Germany.

I did a few interviews, and once again attempted to answer the inevitable question of how my life had changed after traveling to the moon. There was no sharp edge to my answer, as there might have been ten or fifteen years earlier. No doubt, the German reporters were not prepared for my more subdued yet poignant answers.

Q.—Has your life and attitude changed as a result of being on the moon?

BUZZ—It’s very difficult to separate out the changes that have come about in me personally, not necessarily from the experiences of being on the moon—which in themselves were very exhilarating and filled with a sense of responsibility—but also a wonderment and thankfulness for being so fortunate to be, as I think I was, at the right place at the right time when opportunity came walking by.

The experiences that caused changes in my life were not particularly because of the technical parts of our mission, or the specific actions of being on the moon, though they do contribute in some way, but they were more the response of me to people, and of people to me that changed totally from before and after. There was a gradual change in being a part of the elite astronaut crew before the mission, but there was the total change in being placed on a pedestal that came about afterward, and trying to live up to that.

Human beings are just many different varieties. And the astronaut group … we have the same differences that exist in any segment of people. We just happened to be pilots with the desire to fly faster and higher, and to be involved and to take opportunities as they come along, to seek out areas of achievement. But as far as our personalities go, there’s a tremendous variation.

I think that perhaps I had a more sensitive personality that was more susceptible to being affected by the impact of a great change in notoriety.14

Unquestionably, the highlight of the trip for me came when we stopped in Feucht, Germany, in the vicinity of Nuremberg, where we visited Hermann Oberth, one of the four early rocketry and space-travel pioneers: the Soviets had Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; America had the brilliant Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun; and the Germans had the Austrian, Hermann Oberth. Of the four, Oberth was in many ways the most important pioneer of space technology, with his focus on both the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry. What a thrill it was for me to meet this man who not only believed early in the 1920s that we could travel to outer space, but designed the