EXCLUSIVE: Buzz Aldrin wants to go back to the moon — as a first step to putting settlers on Mars – Washington Examiner

Dr. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin is on an urgent mission: Get man back to the moon, and fast.

And Aldrin isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers to advocate for what he sees as America’s next big leap.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of Aldrin’s becoming the second man to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 lunar mission, the 89-year-old sat down with the Washington Examiner in his Washington, D.C. office to talk about his vision for America’s next 50 years in space.

That starts with going back to the moon.

“Neil’s statement — ‘one small step’ and ‘a giant leap’ — well, we haven’t really had that giant leap yet,” said Aldrin, referring to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. “As far as a major program after Apollo, we haven’t seen anything that would come under the category of a giant leap.”

The U.S., he said, shouldn’t stop at the moon, though it’s an important first step. He wants to see the U.S. send a new generation of Pilgrims to space, as permanent settlers on Mars.

And yes, it would be a one-way trip, though Aldrin refuses to give in to the stigma surrounding the term. “That’s what people are going to call it if they don’t like it. It is a settlement. It is a migration,” he said.

He is confident there will be volunteers.

“Who’s gonna go down in history? The Pilgrims! The people who go and stay!” Aldrin said. “They are the pioneers for their country and humanity. The guys who went, came back, wrote a book or two, will be forgotten. And the crews know this.”

The true fame and glory will be not with the first crew to land on Mars, but with the first crew to stay there. And the president who “makes the commitment to go and stay,” he said, will have a historic legacy.

“If everybody comes back, there’s a fixed steady state number of people there. No more than that,” Aldrin said. “There’s no way you can look at the next 50 years on Mars and think that you’re going to be stuck with 50 people there, period.”

Aldrin has unyielding belief in America’s ability to overcome the technological challenges posed by space travel, but that’s tempered by a frustration that, for decades, the U.S. government’s leaders have failed to present and execute a real plan to get back to the moon and to Mars.

He spoke bluntly about those concerns when he met with President Trump at the White House on Friday, telling reporters he was “disappointed” with NASA and America’s progress in space.

“We kept giving the Russians a position of advantage and pretty soon our shuttle wasn’t as safe as we thought it would be, so now the Russians are the only way to get up to the Space Station,” Aldrin told the Washington Examiner, pointing to U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the International Space Station. “That’s not too smart.”

There have been other problems and delays in recent years, too. The Constellation program, proposed under President George W. Bush, was supposed to get the U.S. back to the moon by 2020. It was ultimately canceled, although it helped birth the Orion spacecraft.

Then came the Journey to Mars proposal under President Barack Obama, which relied in part upon the idea of a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station designed to stay in lunar orbit and to assist in lunar landings. The Orion Spacecraft, intended to be a key component of trips to the moon and Mars, is “overweight and underpowered,” Aldrin says, and the Space Launch System, a heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle, “over budget, over schedule, and perhaps a little unsafe.”

Aldrin instead advocates for travel between the Earth and the moon, with a transit vehicle moving between the Earth’s orbit and the lunar orbit through what he has dubbed a “TransWay Orbit Rendezvous.” Earth’s own lower orbit could be a staging area before sending spacecraft toward the moon and, perhaps eventually, toward Mars.

This would allow smaller NASA-based or commercial rockets to bring supplies or fuel or crews up into lower Earth orbit, where they would transfer onto a transit craft, with the original vehicle returning to Earth and the transit vehicle then making a journey between the Earth’s orbit and the moon’s orbit in a round trip. When it gets to the moon, the transit vehicle would meet with a lander, exchange the supplies or crew, and then head back. When the vehicle returns to Earth, it would not need to come back to a fixed object or a specific point in Earth’s orbit, Aldrin said, but could instead return to whatever point in Earth’s orbit is most convenient for its trajectory, and then a launch vehicle could come up and meet it again to start the process over again.

(Washington Examiner / Graeme Jennings)

Aldrin also proposes three different space labs in Earth’s orbit — one focused on science technology research, a second focused on microgravity, and a third focused on artificial gravity — “to begin to do what the space station can’t do.”

Establishing a scientific outpost on the moon, including learning to turn the hydrogen and oxygen pulled from the moon’s limited ice into fuel, is key to Aldrin’s plans for Mars, which has much more ice than the moon. If hydrogen and oxygen can be converted into fuel on the moon, then Aldrin believes the process could be pulled off even more successfully on Mars.

Much of the scientific experimentation on the moon could be done from Mission Control on Earth.

The ultimate goal is to learn how to “refuel a lander on Mars from the Earth,” Aldrin said. The hope is that landers will be able to refuel themselves, jet back up into orbit, grab a crew, and help bring people back down again, which would mean spacecraft wouldn’t continually need to lug landers back and forth across space.

Aldrin says standing in the way are those vested interests and lobbyists with too much control over American space policy.

“Vested interests don’t want to have a roadblock put in their way. The proponents of a gateway are vested interests. Big companies. Old ideas,” Aldrin said. “They grab hold of an old idea … Now we’ve got a big rocket and a big spacecraft. Lockheed here. Boeing here. They don’t want to let go of those things. They’ve got lobbyists.”

His sees his own efforts as needed for an end-run around those vested interests, which influence the House and Senate budgets and policy at NASA. “Congress only knows what something from a company tells them,” he said.

As a result, U.S. space policy was “not new fresh stuff,” and he was looking for ways to combat these vested interests, he said, also praising SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos for their “independent thinking.”

A coalition of government agencies, private companies, and other spacefaring nations will be a key part of making a permanent human settlement on Mars successful. He calls it the Next Step Space Alliance.

“All these other countries want to get to the moon anyway, so let’s cooperate with them,” he said. “That would save us money.”

Aldrin pointed out that prior NASA missions including “Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were an all-U.S. effort” and that “we had a fair amount of money then,” but “we don’t have that kind of money now.” Aldrin believes burden-sharing will be critical for this massive undertaking and that “an alliance that will carry that out.”

Aldrin sees Mars exploration, and, more importantly, permanent Mars settlement, as the ultimate goal in human space exploration. But for such a Mars settlement to work and to not be insurmountably expensive, not everyone can return to Earth.

“Yes. That doesn’t mean people go [to the moon] and spend the rest of their lives there, but it does mean that on Mars.”