Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [122]
During the day as we traveled, the president of the Explorers Club presented lectures along the way. He had been a Navy captain who commanded submarines during the Cold War, and had charted the northern coast of Russia for American spy subs. Once he had actually surfaced a U.S. sub at the North Pole, bringing it up through a break in the ice.
I enjoyed the lectures, but I spent just as much time sketching out new rocket ideas on a Sovetsky Soyuz scratch pad. I knew that at some point the U.S. space shuttle program would come to an end, and we would need some sort of program to get us back to the moon and on to Mars, so I constantly doodled ideas for new rocket designs. Perhaps because I was on a Russian ship, I thought a lot about the Soviet five-engine rockets, wondering how we might be able to adapt those ideas for American rockets. Some of the configurations I scribbled on those scratch pads later formed the basis of my StarBooster rockets, developed by the band of engineers at my rocket design company that I had formed a few years earlier.
Despite the freezing temperatures, all of the passengers were on the bridge when we reached 90 degrees north, the latitude of the North Pole relative to the Earth’s equator, and 180 degrees east-west, where the Earth’s longitudinal lines converge. There’s nothing like being “at the top of the world, looking down on creation,” and I could almost hear the soulful voice of my favorite singer, Karen Carpenter, as I took in the wide, frozen expanse. When we had gone as far as we could aboard the icebreaker, two helicopters flew the passengers over to where we were served a meal on the ice. We set up a baseball diamond and played a game of softball at the North Pole, and a group of younger passengers even took an extremely brief swim.
The photo of the bright red-and-yellow “North Pole” sign planted on the 90N spot surrounded by the nondescript sea of white ice, with our red-and-black Russian nuclear icebreaker in the background, was worth far more than a thousand words. The experience was priceless, causing me to become even more excited as I thought about all the adventures I wanted to share with others by sending them into space.
I came home invigorated and inspired to formally organize my nonprofit foundation, ShareSpace, with a team of advisers to build upon my lottery concept. It was time to take regular citizen explorers, or “Global Space Travelers” as I would come to call them, up into space for the adventure of a lifetime. We just needed to find the spaceship to take them, and a legal lottery mechanism. But that’s what the American dream is all about, right?
17
ADVOCACY for
AMERICA
AS THE WORLD WAS APPROACHING A NEW MILLENNIUM, I seemed to catch fire myself, with renewed energy and passion to promote space exploration. Thanks to Lois’s upbeat attitude and positive influence, I felt like a totally changed man, with a beautiful wife and a new life. I was miles above where I had been when I landed on the moon. Certainly, being sober helped me think more clearly, and the organization and comfort Lois provided in our business and at home allowed me to be more creative, all of which gave me more confidence to stand up in public and express my ideas about returning to the moon, creating workable spaceports, and moving on to Mars.
What I wanted people to understand was that we needed to be talking about a comprehensive vision, a master plan. It wasn’t an either-or proposition—either we go to the moon or we go to Mars. Instead, everywhere