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By Root 1447 0

we might have had with the Soviet Union as a nation, and focused on science. We all agreed that Mars was mankind’s next destination, but we also knew it was a question of national priorities, and ultimately a question of cost. I knew the United States had the technical capability, and that we could most likely overcome our ideological differences with the Soviets. But I knew there was little hope of such a joint venture without the will of the people to move it forward. As it turned out, the U.S. Soviet venture never materialized, and it wasn’t until nearly ten years later that NASA sent the Mars Pathfinder on its first robotic landing mission.

Besides a few attentive ears at JPL for my cycler concepts, not too many in the space community were seriously interested in planning human missions to our red neighbor. America didn’t even have a space station yet, so it looked as though bringing my ideas to fruition might be many years off into the future. Every so often, when these realizations sank in deeper and deeper, I could feel myself losing a sense of what I was shooting for, and how to make it feasible. Without a solid track to move forward on, it seemed I had nothing to do, no real purpose to my efforts, no hope of seeing them realized. The dark mood that I had periodically struggled with over the years reared its ugly head at a very inappropriate time.

Lois had seen a bit of my downside while with me in Hawaii, but after I took up residence with her in Laguna Beach, she got the true, full picture. There I was, with the woman of my dreams, in the beautiful surroundings of her warm and inviting home. And yet I could not find a reason to charge ahead in my normal activities. Mostly I did a lot of catching up on CNN and other cable news programs, getting some serious shut-eye, or reading the space journals to which I subscribed. Somehow I felt I needed to extricate myself from the demands of the world, and on those days I did not want to attend the evening social events with Lois that we had been invited to. On other occasions I went along with her, but I felt subdued and out of place, trying to fit in with the cocktail banter.

Once a reporter came all the way from Spain to do a magazine interview with me, but it was one of those periods where the last thing I wanted was to share myself with the world. I decided I wasn’t going to do the interview. I stayed in the bedroom, while Lois talked with the reporter in the living room, but I never came out even to say hello. Lois made excuses as long as she could, but after a while it was pointless, so the reporter interviewed Lois instead. Actually, Lois gave a pretty great interview on my behalf.

Although Lois had read Return to Earth, in which I revealed the medical saga I had experienced prior to meeting her, she refused to see me as a depressed person. She simply didn’t believe in it. Instead, she viewed my depression as the result of discouragement and disappointment, a lack of confidence in myself, and the lack of a good cheerleader to keep me going. So she began a one-woman crusade to remind me on a daily basis what a good man I was. At first I didn’t believe her for a minute, convinced that my down times were beyond my ability to surmount until they gradually dissipated on their own. But I enjoyed hearing what she had to say. Slowly, very slowly, her words began to sink in and have an effect, not just in helping to change my attitude about the blue funk, but often in avoiding it altogether.

Lois loved to look over my shoulder as I spread out my notes on the kitchen table and drew my orbital trajectory sketches of the Aldrin Mars Cycler. To a non-rocketeer my schematics must have appeared more like an abstract pattern of undulating waves intersecting one another in crazy-eight patterns. But she’d exclaim, “Oh, Buzz, tell me about that!” She was loaded with questions, and I enjoyed teaching her about space. Lois had deliberately avoided taking science, math, and astronomy courses at Stanford, thinking that she would never need them in her life. How wrong she was! When