Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [154]
That’s why I know that one day my vision will come to pass. Share-Space will indeed find a way to manage a lottery or some other method of giving ordinary people a chance to travel into space. Space hotels will be constructed, providing the opportunity for people to take a truly “out of this world” vacation. One day my Mars Cycler will be put into practice; spaceports will be built along the way between Earth and Mars, and mankind will set up camp on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and then eventually on the red planet itself. Why? Because it is there, just waiting to be explored.
I look forward to seeing these things happening during my lifetime, but if they don’t, please keep this dream alive; please keep going; Mars is there waiting for your footsteps.
Exploration is part and parcel of who we are as human beings; it is wired into our brains, and although I don’t completely understand this, it is wired somehow into our hearts as well. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what’s beyond. If I can do it, so can you.
Today as I write these words, Lois and I are nearing eighty years of age, and both of us are still going, stronger and faster than ever, traveling around the world, attempting to inform future generations, and inspire them to venture outward in creative exploration of our universe. Indeed, the final frontier may well be human relationships, one person interacting with another. Lois and I believe in marriage, but we have no illusions about it. We both know that a great marriage takes enormous sacrifice. Marriage can eliminate a large measure of loneliness in life, but we’ve learned that the challenge of compatibility will always be there. On the other hand, we are convinced that our marriage has created a multiplication of purpose, that in our case at least, one plus one equals far more than two. We can say that confidently, because our marriage has been based on a great love and respect for each other, but also on a firm commitment to each other.
Perhaps even we did not realize how inextricably we were linked together until our friend, and my fellow astronaut, Pete Conrad, died of internal bleeding as the result of his motorcycle accident a few weeks before the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Pete was the third person to walk on the moon and, as he claimed, the first person to dance on the moon. After his first step off the lunar module onto the moon’s surface, he quipped, “That may have been one small step for Neil, but it was a long one for me!”
Lois and I attended Pete’s funeral, and went to Arlington National Cemetery for the interment. After the ceremony, I took Lois’s hand and said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” We walked up through the grass a short distance away, and I stopped and pointed at two gravesites. “There are my parents,” I said to Lois. “And that’s where you and I will be,” I said, pointing to the adjoining plots.
Lois was overwhelmed. “Oh, Buzz! That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me!”
Okay, so I’m not too big on mushy words, but it meant a lot to Lois to know that I was committed to our marriage for the long haul. In my own inimitable way, I was saying to her, “Lois, no matter what happens, we are in this thing for keeps.” When all is said and done, I’m grateful to the space pioneers, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, von Braun, and Oberth, but I will always be most thankful to my wife, Lois, for coming into my life in 1985, and boosting me far beyond where any rocket could take me, or anything I could ever have achieved on my own.
In truth, the real heroes of Apollo 11 were not Neil, Mike, and me, but the teams of thousands at NASA and across America who magnified their efforts and believed we could do it. Along with this concerted undertaking, it came down to individuals who were willing to say, “Maybe there’s another way, a better way, to do things.”
One of my heroes