Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [91]
On July 22, 1984, in conjunction with the fifteenth anniversary of Apollo 11, I penned an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times with the title, “Let’s Return to the Moon for Good.” I felt the time was opportune to send explorers back to its dusty surface, but this time we would establish a lunar base and develop the moon’s natural resources in support of space operations. To establish an ongoing method of lunar sorties, I introduced my cycler concept of “coasting trajectories in a translunar rendezvous” space transport system. In one way of looking at it, I saw the moon as one big resource, a natural space station, the ultimate space station orbiting the Earth—and one that already had six American flags on it!
Tom Paine, who had been NASA’s chief administrator when I went to the moon, now lived in and operated out of Santa Monica, California. I visited Tom frequently during this period when there appeared to be a resurgence of interest in a return to the moon. I shared my lunar cycler idea with Tom.
Tom liked what he saw, but he said, “Buzz, you know they are thinking about Mars, and there are some interesting ways of getting to Mars. Why don’t you think about your lunar cycler and make it go to Mars?”
Oh, I thought, that’s very complicated.
“Mars?” I asked. “Are you serious? I thought NASA’s plan was to support a permanent base on the moon.”
Tom raised his eyebrows. “That will never motivate the American people again. We need something bigger, something beyond the moon.”
I understood what Tom was saying, so I went to work adapting my ideas. It was only 1985, and a select few were thinking about going to Mars, but I knew that if we focused our minds and technology in that direction, we could achieve that goal. From Mars we could reach other places around the solar system. My basic operating principle was, how can we do it better?
Not surprisingly, most people didn’t see the need or the relevance of going to Mars, and I began to get a reputation for proposing harebrained ideas. “Are you serious, Buzz? Do you really think you can shuttle people on a cycler back and forth between the Earth and the moon, much less to Mars?”
“No, I guess not,” I’d reply. But I really did.
I started doing basic computations, drawing the relative orbits of Earth and Mars, and by the summer of 1985 I discovered that there was a way to transport people to Mars on what I developed as the Aldrin Mars Cycler. Like space trolley cars, the spacecraft would continue in perpetual cycling orbits between the two planets, picking up and dropping off detachable “taxi” transfer vehicles that could then carry crews and supplies to and from the surface of each planet. The trolley systems could use the planets’ gravitational pull as a slingshot propelling the cycler spacecraft back and forth. I estimated that a trip between Earth and Mars could take as little as five months using this technique. The way I figured it, we were halfway there—I was ready to go!
MEANWHILE, I WAS also traveling to various locations on Earth to engage in another of my passions—scuba diving. The first dive I ever took was with my 22nd Fighter Squadron off the coast of Tripoli, Libya, where we were on gunnery training in 1957 while stationed in Germany. Our squadron leader had some diving experience, so on our recreational day he took us to the French Sur Mer Club, where we strapped on some scuba tanks and dove off the pier into the clear Mediterranean waters off the north coast of Africa. Enamored with the underwater