Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [145]
During the actual race, I was doing great and holding my own until nearly the end, when swimsuit model and actress Angie Everhart crashed into me and knocked me into the wall and out of the race. Afterwards, Angie came over to me and got down on her knees, begging my forgiveness. “Oh, Buzz, I’m so sorry. Please, I’ll do anything to make it up to you!” I just smiled as the photographers flashed pictures of us. Peter Reckell, star of the daytime television series, Days of Our Lives, was the celebrity winner and Jeremy McGrath the pro winner.
ON DECEMBER 17, 2003, Lois and I traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the nation’s celebration of the “Centennial of Flight”— one hundred years to the day since Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully got their 1903 Wright Flyer off the ground and into the air. But unlike their “first in flight” day, this December 17 was pouring buckets. In spite of it, the crowds still gathered, huddled together under tarps for the beautifully staged ceremony in honor of the first powered flight. President Bush came from Washington, D.C., to speak to the crowd. Our friend John Travolta served as master of ceremonies for the morning events, and I delivered the formal prayer at the opening. The security guards held an umbrella over my head as I went up to the podium. I decided on this occasion to share the words that had helped me through so much of my life over the last twenty-five years:
“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
It was a sentiment I thought we would all do well to remember, having come so far from the first powered flight and in the context of looking to our future challenges in space.
As the rain abated, the celebration was honored by a 100-plane flyby spaced throughout the day. All sorts of dignitaries, celebrities, and aviation legends were on hand to commemorate this occasion, including Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, as well as Neil Armstrong and Apollo 10 astronaut Tom Stafford. One of the highlights for me was being named as one of the top 100 aviators in history. Somewhere, I hoped my father was smiling.
The celebration culminated with a re-creation of the Wright brothers’ first heavier-than-air powered flight, which took off at precisely 10:35 a.m. and lasted twelve seconds, covering a mere 120 feet. Think about that—only twelve seconds in flight, but they were twelve seconds that changed the world. Naturally, I couldn’t help but think how far we had come—from Kitty Hawk to the moon in sixty-six years— and how far I dreamed of going.
To that end, the very next day after the Centennial of Flight, our ShareSpace Foundation held a one-day symposium to usher in the next century of flight. We called it “Next Century of Flight Space Imperatives,” held at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, D.C. Our goal was to inspire a new vision for America’s space exploration program. With a small, overworked staff, we secured sponsorships from Boeing, Lockheed, American Airlines, and others. We partnered with Aviation Week (publisher of the magazine of the same name) to host the conference, which also included an elegant gala affair the night of December 17 at the National Air and Space Museum. The conference took six months to put together, and was attended by numerous movers and shakers in the space and aviation world, including Senator E. J. “Jake” Garn, a former U.S. senator from Utah, who had been the first member of Congress to fly on the space shuttle; the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the world-famous Hayden Planetarium in New York; Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal, now turned aerospace entrepreneur with his space