Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [148]
By the time we got to zero-gravity, I was having the time of my life, somersaulting with ease, propelling through the air like Superman, and giving the ABC newscaster some great sound bites. But the interview questions didn’t last long, since the brave female reporter found herself succumbing to the effects of nausea. Of course each flight suit came equipped with a little plastic bag for that purpose.
About one hour and ten parabolas later, we landed on the tarmac. All the participants, even the reporter, were now officially initiated zero-g flyers, and each was presented with a certificate of weightless flight. The next group for the second flight was in training, being prepped for their first experience.
“Hey, Buzz!”
I heard my name being called out by one of the Zero G marketing guys. He took me aside to say, “We’ve got a bit of a problem. All the footage ABC shot of you on the flight didn’t turn out because the camera wasn’t working properly. Would you be willing to go up again on the second flight?”
“Why not?” I said. “But this time I want Lisa to join me.”
Lisa had a blast, doing all kinds of cheerleader gymnastics from her youth, and learning pretty quickly some of the acrobatic movements I was showing her. We somersaulted together, cartwheeled in pairs, and even pulled off a human windmill with each of our hands stretched upward and out, spinning as we held on to each other’s ankles. She had no side effects, though she may have overdone it for her first time, admitting that if the pilot had performed an eleventh parabola, she might have lost it. As for me, the second flight was even more fun than the first. My seventy-four-year-old body felt thirty-nine again!
Since those two flights venturing into weightlessness, I have participated in several others—most recently at seventy-eight years of age— to help promote the experience to the public, and as the featured Apollo astronaut on the “Platinum Zero G Experience” for Zero Gravity Corporation in flights out of the Kennedy Space Center and Las Vegas. It has been a real thrill to see the enthusiasm with which the participants have embraced the experience, and I recommend it highly. Just make sure you eat a light meal before you go!
I WAS HOME in Los Angeles when Burt Rutan, founder of the aerospace development company Scaled Composites, called and invited me out to the Mojave Desert. He was about to have another of his test flights of a new suborbital spacecraft he was developing. I had been out a few times earlier during the development phase, and had enjoyed seeing the progress he was making with the unique winglet design. His approach to liftoff was also unique. The suborbital craft would not be launched vertically or horizontally on its own, but would be carried under the belly of a larger, broad-winged, jet-powered carrier airplane called the White Knight. At an altitude of about ten miles, the suborbital craft, christened SpaceShipOne, would separate from the White Knight and fire its rockets to continue another fifty-two miles upward and reach the sixty-two-mile mark where the blackness of space begins and the curvature of the Earth is clearly visible, and the pilot would experience weightlessness for about five minutes before reentry.
On the day that I joined Burt to watch the test, a large crowd was expected, including media, since SpaceShipOne was a key contender for the $10-million award being offered by the X PRIZE Foundation for the first privately developed craft to be piloted on two consecutive suborbital flights within a two-week period. In creating the prize, the foundation took a cue from the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 award created in 1919 by the New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig, to the first aviator to fly nonstop between New York City and Paris. For nearly eight years nobody claimed Orteig’s prize, but then, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh won it in the Spirit of St. Louis. To stimulate competition, ingenuity, and innovation