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By Root 1504 0

resembled the Crystal Cathedral than a bank. The sun’s rays streamed down from the sky on this Arizona winter’s day, as if straight from heaven. A fountain flowed through waterways at the main entrance; amid the stately palm trees, it made for a magical setting. I wore my dress whites, and Lois looked beautiful, beaming in a long bejeweled gown, her silvery blonde hair sparkling in the lights, dazzling everyone with her fantastic smile. We entered the wedding by descending a majestic upper staircase to the song “Stairway to the Stars,” slowly stepping down to the first floor, where 300 guests and family members had gathered. A dear childhood friend of Lois’s, a Mormon bishop, officiated at the ceremony, and was brief and to the point. Then he playfully concluded his remarks, saying, “I hope this marriage will be a new high for you, Buzz.” After he pronounced us husband and wife, the building filled with the sounds of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Later, as I sipped Perrier with a lime, I said to the crowd, “I was thinking of a phrase I heard from a guy I took a trip with. He said, ‘One small step …’ Seems to me that Lois and I have launched a giant leap.”

IF MY MIND wandered up into the clouds before our marriage, I spent even more time envisioning new possibilities for space exploration now that I was enjoying my new married life with Lois. I progressed with my Mars Cycler orbits, but for now, what America most needed was a space station to continue its leadership role in space. At the time, NASA and Congress were struggling with the funding required for building the U.S. space station Freedom as proposed by President Reagan. Perhaps if we had a “Starport” facility attached to the station, which could serve as a permanent port for spacecraft venturing back to the moon and cycling ships arriving from and departing for Mars, then the station would greatly expand its usefulness and justify its cost.

I began to think of the best way to design such a Starport. A few years earlier I had met Buckminster Fuller while living in Los Angeles, and was well acquainted with his use of geodesic domes in architecture. Bucky had an inspired sense of engineering, and we used to trade insights on our latest inventions. Playing off his geodesic forms, I used everything from basic toothpicks to elaborate vector and styrofoam modeling materials to experiment with the shape of an external framework that would house tubular habitat modules large enough for a ten-astronaut crew, and multiple berthing ports where spacecraft would be assembled, repaired, checked out for missions, and refueled. The habitat modules themselves would be adapted from spent fuel tanks already launched into space and guided into position rather than falling back to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. For the framework, I started with triangular pyramid tetrahedral shapes, then twelve-sided dodecahedron forms. I finally settled on an eight-sided framework—a “cubo-octahedron”—that would offer the greatest flexibility, strength, and stability to protect the Starport from collisions with docking spacecraft and from harmful movement caused by rotating solar panels. I figured that even if NASA did not go for the design, at least I might adapt it as a set of toy modeling kits for children, to inspire them and get them excited about our future in space. For this Starport design I was awarded my first U.S. patent on a “cubo-octahedron space station,” just as America decided to adapt elements of the proposed space station Freedom for construction of the newly designed International Space Station.

SOMETIMES THE NOTORIOUS blue funk still descended over me for no explicable reason, and I would withdraw from the world for periods of as much as several weeks. But Lois continually bolstered me, filling my life with all sorts of encouragement and events. As she did, my mind began to open up, allowing me to be creative once again. I was going to need that creativity for the work I would be doing that summer with Malcolm McConnell on my next book project, Men From Earth, a tribute to the