Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [109]
At Thanksgiving in 1986, Lois and I announced our engagement at a small private party for family and close friends at the Wrigley Mansion, set upon a hill just above the new corporate headquarters office building of Western Savings in Phoenix. Lois’s family had recently acquired the mansion, under the Western Savings umbrella, to hold conferences and other events.
Then, early in December, Lois’s family hosted a grand engagement party for us at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel. We sent out invitations with a picture of the moon, inviting friends to help us celebrate the launching of a “galactic adventure.” Since we hadn’t as yet set a date for our wedding, we included a note on the announcement: “Terminal phase intercept is pending further event sequencing.” When Lois’s father stood to welcome everyone, he joked, “I see Lois has four hundred of her favorite friends here!” His estimate was right on target. Lois’s dad went on to announce our engagement, and that’s when the party kicked into high gear.
People magazine picked up the story of our engagement, and included my whimsical suggestion that Lois’s engagement ring include a moon rock. While it made for a nice story, the truth was, all moon rocks were government property. For me to have possessed a moon rock, even a sliver or a chunk large enough for an engagement ring, would have been illegal. Following the People story, I spent several months trying to convince Federal officials that I did not possess any lunar material, that I had actually presented my bride-to-be with a diamond engagement ring. When people asked to look at her “moon rock” ring, Lois would show the ring and say, “Well, don’t you know, the moon is made of diamonds.”
Originally, I suggested that we get married on Valentine’s Day 1987, but Lois balked. “Oh, I can’t pull together a wedding in two months’ time!” she said. “We’ll have to wait a year, then.”
“Okay,” I said. “In that case, I’m going to move in with you.”
“Oh no!” Lois cried. “We can’t do that.” I kissed Lois passionately.
I moved in with Lois at her cozy but elegant home overlooking the crystal blue ocean of Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach a few days after Christmas.
14 This quote is documented on Bill Haynes’s personal home movie video of this trip. The interview is with an unidentified German reporter.
15
EVERY SUPERMAN
NEEDS HIS LOIS
FOR THE NEXT YEAR, THE FUEL OF LOVE WAS PRETTY MUCH sending Lois and me into the stratosphere, as we dashed from one event to another, not to mention planning for our wedding.
Amid our activities, I continued to ponder my designs and strategies for space exploration, and kept returning to my Mars Cycler. I could see the spaceship with its trusswork connecting two pyramid-shaped crew modules at either end, spinning around its midpoint to create an artificial gravity environment, and carrying the first humans from Earth to Mars along a pathway of elliptical orbits. I took out my graph paper to chart the most efficient orbital trajectories between these two moving planetary bodies, so the trip could be made with as little fuel as possible, relying on the gravitational forces of the two planets to sustain the orbits.
In July, I headed up to the Rocky Mountains to participate in the “Case for Mars III” conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder where a live satellite link created a “spacebridge” to a group of Soviet scientists in Moscow. The idea being explored was whether the United States and the Soviet Union might go “To Mars Together?” and whether it should be a manned or robotic mission. Former NASA administrator Tom Paine and Cornell University professor Carl Sagan, who popularized science with his TV show in the 1980s and later wrote the book Contact, joined me on the five-man panel, and over the course of four hours we dropped any political differences