Buzz Aldrin was the second person to walk on the Moon. He says mankind is ready for its next leap – to Phobos and then on to Mars.

JULY 20, 1969 MAY be the most important date in human history. It was on that day, of course, that the Apollo 11 lunar module landed softly in the dust at Tranquility Base, and human beings took their first tentative step beyond planet Earth. Mission commander Neil Armstrong famously announced that historic leap for mankind, but it was Apollo 11 pilot Buzz Aldrin who offered the most poetic and enduring description of the alien surface: “Magnificent desolation.”
Aldrin has known his share of desolation on Earth as well. In the years after the Apollo 11 mission, his Air Force career was nearly derailed by drinking and depression – perhaps a species of the existential emptiness Tom Wolfe once described as “post-orbital remorse.”

Yet Aldrin fought back from the abyss, and has become, at age 79, a relentless, visionary evangelist for space exploration. Aldrin, who is visiting Hong Kong as part of a 40th anniversary celebration of the Moon landing sponsored by Omega watches, spoke with power’s senior writer Peter Ritter about the legacy of Apollo 11, the prospect of space tourism, and what NASA will do after the agency retires its space shuttle fleet next year.

I wanted to ask you about your poetic phrase, “magnificent desolation,” which I think everyone associates with the Apollo 11 mission.
I heard the word “beautiful,” I guess from Neil [Armstrong]. And I kind of disagreed. I didn’t see anything particularly beautiful out there. It was more that this magnificent achievement of humanity could be contrasted with arriving at perhaps the most desolate scene that human beings have ever seen, a totally lifeless void with the black sky and no atmosphere, no wind blowing, just the eerie stillness and different shades of gray, nothing that inspired humans to remind them of a living place. It was just total desolation.

Do you ever get frustrated when people ask you to describe walking on the Moon?
I guess I do. I understand the curiosity. That’s why I appear in mass media and write books. I get other people to help with expressions that I think are more satisfying.

As a scientist, you’ve spent your career thinking about the future. I wonder if it’s frustrating that people always want to talk about something that happened 40 years ago?
That’s true. We already know what happened. It’s history. And people can investigate that without asking the same question: “What did it feel like?”It felt like being there. There just aren’t very many ways of describing it. And the fact is, we were occupied and very busy with what we were doing and not subject to daydreaming or thinking of the bigger meaning of everything.

But I’ve always had a desire to look critically at how we can do things better and get more out of what it is we do. When we’ve done something in the past and there appears to have been maybe better ways of doing that, then I think we should learn from the past. We did not have a smooth transition from Apollo to the shuttle to a spacecraft that gives us flexibility and continuity. We had a big gap in our program. In retrospect, we probably could have flown Skylab 2 and joined those two together and sent crews up to that much larger space station for another five or eight years with Saturn 1 [rockets] and command modules.

In terms of exploration of space, where do you think we’ll be in 40 or 50 years?
I think we need to establish a permanent presence on a more suitable place than the Moon, and I think Mars is the most logical place. For the United States to go back to the Moon and get there 50 to 55 years after we first visited does not make sense to me. I think the US should help other nations go to the Moon and look at the development of the Moon for commercial products. But the US should be able to go to further orbits to visit comets, asteroids, near-earth objects, and practice and rehearse to be able to put a habitat on Phobos, the moon of Mars. We then could occupy it for a year and a half, for two or three times, before going to the surface of Mars to establish permanent occupancy.

In the past, you’ve warned that the US is falling behind or failing to plan for future space exploration. Do you think that’s still the case?
Yes, I do. We really didn’t have significant plans for the future. And I think we’re not stretching our opportunities as far as we should and taking advantage of enlightened cooperation with other nations to be able to assist other nations in going to the Moon. Then they could be of some assistance to the US in reaching out to comets and asteroids and practicing with preparation to have occupancy on Phobos as a precursor to landing on the surface of Mars.

A trip to Mars is likely to be one-way, at least for the first explorers. If you were a young astronaut today, would you consider doing that?
I’m not in that position. I have a family. I was given a great opportunity to participate in pioneering activities. I think there will be quite a few people who would have an interest, who have the willingness, the togetherness, the esprit de corps [to participate] in a great historical moment where creatures from the Earth begin to settle on another object in the solar system.

On the subject of the commercial development of space: you’ve worked for many years promoting space tourism. What are the most important things you’ve learned?
We need to bring the cost down, and we need to do that by having reusable launch vehicles and higher launch rates. Perhaps combining those higher launch rates with space-based solar power will boost the potential for tourism or adventure travel into orbit.

How far are we technologically from those reusable launch vehicles?
I think we need to have a basic launch vehicle that’s derived from the shuttle. Then we can upgrade it with perhaps four fly-back boosters, reusable boosters that are small in size. Then expand the tank to be perhaps five or seven engines on the bottom that are recoverable from orbit. The large tank would then go into orbit as a reusable objects in orbit. That way, that makes the entire first and second-stage of the vehicle fully reusable.

Do you think these advances are going to come from private industry or from national governments?
We need an enlightened partnership between the private sector and government, with governments encouraging the development [of technology] and helping standardize them over many different uses.

What was the most important legacy of the Apollo missions of 40 years ago?
The program evolved from not having any space capability to landing on the Moon. We had the flexibility to make the judgment between a very large single rocket and two Saturn 5s, or two spacecraft and one Saturn 5 using the, at that time untried and unproven, lunar orbit rendezvous mode.

I think that we can begin to look at lunar surface rendezvous as an additional way [to approach landing on the Moon], so that the ascent vehicle can be prepositioned on the surface and then the crew, when it lands with the descent vehicle, it can be much larger and carry a much larger payload because it doesn’t have to go back up into orbit. It can offload movable habitats as part of the descent stage. And then the descent engine, the rocket engines can be used to perhaps take back up into orbit some of the water or ice that can be processed into fuel in the vicinity of L1 [the gravitational midpoint between Earth and its moon].

Aside from the technological side of things, what do you think is the most important legacy of the Apollo missions psychologically? Was it national pride?
We set out with a clear objective and we accomplished that with minimum loss, on time, and within the cost they projected. Reacting to the opportunity to send Apollo 8 to the Moon gave us that experience even though it was perhaps a risky mission. It gave us an additional six-month lead-time because the [Apollo 11] lander wasn’t ready. We had considerable flexibility and we didn’t have gaps in the program. It flowed smoothly from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo.

You have a PhD in orbital rendezvous theory from MIT. A lot of people say that the US is falling behind in producing scientists and engineers. What should the US do to promote science education?
We have to work on earlier education to motivate young people to understand the benefits engineering and technology provides. I think we have insufficient motivation, and that’s why we need to have an inspiring space program that develops interesting science and motivates and compensates people well for making a choice to become engineers.

In terms of producing that interesting science, do you think manned or robotic missions are most productive?
Obviously we need a mixture of the two. I’m not sure I see the need of sending manned missions back to the Moon until we’ve identified sufficient products that can be developed that can begin to defray the cost of habitation [and] of people being sent there. I think humans need to go where they’ve not gone before. That provides the novelty, the inspiration for pioneering new opportunities. All of those things are more satisfying to the people who are financing the missions, the taxpayers and the American public.

In your autobiography, you wrote that you had a difficult transition from the astronaut corps back to the Air Force.
I thought that a better way to ease back into the Air Force would have been the Air Force Academy. But the top people in the Air Force had somebody else in mind for that. It seemed a little unusual for somebody who hadn’t had test pilot experience and had not sort of grown up in that community to then command the test pilot school [at Edwards Air Force Base]. Somehow that didn’t seem to be the most productive use of the experience that I had.

It was a hard time for you personally, as well as in your career. How did you recover from that?
I went from a very structured life, from growing up during World War II, and the stringent discipline we had, and from there to West Point, and then in combat in different Air Force assignments, and then the nature of the structured life within NASA, and then back to the Air Force. When I decided to retire from that, it wasn’t clear what the best plan for me was. I was sort of left on my own and not too satisfied with the opportunities that just didn’t really seem to be there. I inherited the tendencies for depression, as I understood later, and those led to the inherited disease of alcoholism. So there was a rather long, involved process of recovery. I had to accumulate more time and more ability to understand how you’re helping others and how they’re helping you. Then you begin to get more stability in your life, and more motivation and clearer performance. I think I have much greater thinking power now and much greater confidence in what I’m doing than I had 20 or 30 years ago.

What do you see as your mission now?
To take the best of the experience that I have, reflect upon it, and then chart a course into the future that makes maximum use of that, and to use the leadership opportunities that we have for unifying exploration, development and security and bringing together a broader spectrum of nations to work together in ways that promote each individual nation’s own security. We have debris problems in space, and I think we need to have greater regulation, and perhaps inspection and registration of payloads that are being scheduled to be launched, so that there’s an assurance of disposal, so that they’re recovered and not just left up there to accumulate and collide with other objects. I think that’s in the best interest of all nations, but especially the US, which relies on many of our assets in space for communications, security, reconnaissance, surveillance and other necessities of that nature.