E-mail a friendBuzz Aldrin
original airdate September 4, 2007
Buzz Aldrin is a leading advocate of space exploration. In ‘63, he became one of the early astronauts. He piloted Gemini 12 and the Apollo 11 lunar module—the first lunar landing—and was the second person to walk on the moon. Aldrin earned his pilot wings in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from West Point and flew fighter jets in the Korean War. He holds a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, has written numerous books and appears in the new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon.
Apollo 11 astronaut discusses President Kennedy's dedication to putting a man on the moon. (1:21)
Buzz Aldrin
Tavis: I'm pleased and honored to welcome Buzz Aldrin to this program. In 1969, he and his Apollo 11 crew completed the first-ever manned mission to the moon. Later that year, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Buzz Aldrin and the astronauts who followed him to the moon are the subject of the new documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon." The film is being presented by Ron Howard and opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 7th. Here now, a scene from "In the Shadow of the Moon."
[Clip]
Tavis: So for the first time I get a chance to shake the hand of a man who has walked on the moon.
Buzz Aldrin: High five?
Tavis: High five, to a man who walked on the moon.
Aldrin: We can do that, too. (Laughter)
Tavis: How are you, sir?
Aldrin: I've not felt better in a long time, really.
Tavis: And what's got you feeling so good these days?
Aldrin: Well, I was on a little bummer for a while because I thought I was just kind of - and I was - taking on more than I could really handle. And so now I've sort of organized it so some people are going to help me do some of the main things, and they're all looking really good. This is all future-oriented.
Tavis: Yeah, it does make you feel better when you got a little help to do what you're trying to (unintelligible).
Aldrin: Oh, man, yes, yes, it's a lonely world out there. I can't imagine why those Mercury guys would - Yuri Gagarin going around - but there was only one orbit, but they're going around and around. And of course Mike Collins spent a little time by himself.
Tavis: That's right; he didn't quite get out, did he?
Aldrin: Not quite, no.
Tavis: Yeah, not quite. If you see the documentary, you'll know what we mean. There were three people on that ship in '69, and two of them got to walk on the moon. The other guy had to stay back in the cabin, so (unintelligible).
Aldrin: But he's the extrovert, he's the joke-teller. Neil was the czar, and I was Dr. Rendezvous. (Laughter) So when we had to lift off from the moon and do a rendezvous, man, the heat was on.
Tavis: One of the things that - Neil and I were talking earlier; my producer -
Aldrin: Oh, you've got a different Neil here.
Tavis: Yeah, a different Neil - oh yes, I forgot - duh. (Unintelligible.) (Laughter) Yeah, I was talking to my Neil, not your Neil.
Aldrin: He's not mine, but we worked together really well backing up Apollo Eight. And then the controversy starts with the media, sort of - who's going to go out first? And all of that stuff is just disruptive, when somebody wants to interfere with maybe the smooth operation and the proper way of dealing things, and things were handled correctly.
Tavis: So I was saying - back to your point - I was talking to my guy, Neil, my producer, before you came out here today, and both of us were just kids - we were born in '64, so we were five years old when you guys did this in '69.
Aldrin: Right on, that's a good age, good age.
Tavis: Good age, yeah. So I don't recall this at five years of age, but when you see this documentary, one of the things that you realized - no matter who went out first, and of course Armstrong goes out first, you come out second - but you guys were like rock stars around the world when this happened in '69.
Aldrin: We may have been, and a lot was made, of course, of the Mercury people, and I was a fighter pilot when I saw "Life" magazine showing these guys - these test pilots who were going to fly in this thing that Chuck Yeager called Spam in a can. And I thought gee, that doesn't appear as though that's going to be part of my life. But see, I had elected not to go through test pilot training; my emphasis was more on professional education to top off my combat experience in Korea.
Tavis: We're seeing some footage here to prove my point of this rock star status you had when you came back.
Aldrin: Oh, man, yeah, that was not something that I looked forward to.
Tavis: You didn't like all that?
Aldrin: No, no, no. I had -
Tavis: Most folk love that kind of public adulation. Look at that, look at that. Come on, Buzz, look at that.
Aldrin: Well, this is Hollywood, see? You speak to a lot of these people out here and they just love attention. But I had a certain amount after my first flight - 40th anniversary was last November of my first flight in the two-man Gemini spacecraft with Jim Lovell. And came back and go back to my hometown and give speeches here and there, and you're sort of on your own. We didn't really have speech writers in those days.
And kind of the sad part about it, I could see that this really was a burden for my mother. She really just didn't like to see attention. Depression was in her family, and so was suicide, and she managed to take her life a year before I went to the moon.
Tavis: Your mother.
Aldrin: My mother, yeah, and I had to deal. After I left NASA I went back to the Air Force - first astronaut to leave NASA and go back to the service. And back in those days, it would have been a good assignment to be (unintelligible) cadets at the Air Force Academy, because I had been at the Air Force Academy when it first opened up - of course, I'm a West Point graduate - but the chief of staff at the Air Force had somebody else in mind.
A number of people thought it was good, but it would have been a good transition after 11 and a half years away from the Air Force to ease back, and instead what did they ask me to do? Be commandant of the test pilot school, and I hadn't gone through test pilot training. Sure, I was their test pilot because I flew in a two-man spacecraft and then a three-man spacecraft and we landed on the moon, so that qualified me as a test pilot.
But being commandant of the test pilot school was demanding and I just didn't see that that led to a great future in the Air Force, so after a little over a year I decided to sort of strike out on my own and write a book about my experiences dealing with - it wasn't my biographical book was not "Journey to the Moon;" it was "Return to Earth."
Because to me, returning to Earth was the biggest challenge, yeah. Now, that's really now 28, almost 29 years ago that I have been sober now, because it was not just depression, it was alcoholism. So I had to go through this and transition from age 45 to 55 from a very structured life into what do I do next?
Tavis: Let me jump in here, because you're putting so much stuff out and I was trying to - I started to let you go for a minute, but you got so many good things I've got to come pick up on. This is where I want to start. I hear your point; it's a deep, philosophical point about the real challenge being returning to Earth. Not going out there, but trying to live here - I got that point. I hear that loud and clear.
Aldrin: It's hard to live up to being (unintelligible).
Tavis: (Unintelligible.)
Aldrin: It's okay now; I know how to do that.
Tavis: I haven't been to the moon, so I can only imagine that it's hard to live up to.
Aldrin: No, you're a star (unintelligible) TV.
Tavis: Oh, get out of here. Stars, moon - two different things, though. (Laughter) Your mother, seriously - your mother commits suicide a year before you go up. I know how much I love my mother, and even though it ran in her family and you knew she battled with depression, how do you navigate that when you're preparing to do something historic and your mother takes her life?
Aldrin: Well, you don't say, "Geez, I think I'll get out of this business." You carry on. When I got into pilot training, not everyone survives and they haul back an airplane that somebody crashed and lost their life - you get used to that. In Las Vegas, where we had gunnery training after I got my wings before going over to Korea, as sort of an example of how fighter pilots treat something lightly, maybe, there's a sign on the BOQ - bachelor officer's quarters - it says, "Farms for sale - recent buyers."
You know what that means? In Air Force terminology, when you crash and die, you bought the farm, okay? So this was just a - not a cruel, not vindictive or anything - it's just the way you treat living with risky business. Farms for sale - recent buyers - sort of a tribute to the people who lost their lives in the training that you're going through now.
Tavis: What do you make of the NASA program these days? We just of course had a - and you've got your NASA hat on - we had a safe landing just recently. The program's in the right direction, or challenged right about now, or what's your sense of it?
Aldrin: Making a transition from a major program direction to another one is very difficult. When clearly we had landed on the moon successfully and it was clear that we're going to run out of rockets and the public was not just all that enamored with guys bouncing around on the moon, and you've got to have public support, and the president, Nixon, was not overly enthusiastic about what JFK may have put in motion, okay?
So we needed to ease into a new program, and we thought we needed two things - we needed a reusable rocket and a place to go. Well, that's two things, see, so we could only have one of the two, so the reusable rocket. And then we under-funded that, so then we used the moon rocket to put up a space station and then we flew to that three times, and we flew a mission with the Russians.
What we could have done is put up the other space station, joined them together, and kept flying - it would have been better. But that's hindsight. The fact of the matter is that we went almost six years without flying an American in space. And for having landed six out of six times on the moon and then sit down on the ground. Now, after the Challenger accident, we had to stand down about three years, because we didn't have something to fall back on.
Columbia accident in '03, February, took us about two years or more to finally get ready, and we're still not real sure about that foam coming off the tank. And now we're going to retire the space station, we're going to retire the orbiters, hopefully finish the space station in 2010, but probably not fly the next spacecraft, Orion, on its rocket, Ares, for five years. And that's liable to put us really behind the eight ball, because the Russians would love to fill in and take everybody up into space.
Tavis: Let me jump in again.
Aldrin: Sure thing.
Tavis: So I hear your assessment of where we are now, and how we may be on the verge of falling behind if these years pass too quickly. You mentioned Kennedy - let me take you back to Kennedy. What did you make of the fact that Kennedy stands up - because you made the point earlier Nixon wasn't crazy about what Kennedy committed, even though Nixon was there to greet you when you came back.
Aldrin: Mm-hmm.
Tavis: Okay, that said, what'd you make of the fact that Kennedy says in this bold speech, “Let's put Buzz Aldrin on the moon; let's put Neil Armstrong on the moon.”
Aldrin: Not Buzz Aldrin.
Tavis: Well, you get my point - let's go to the moon -
Aldrin: We're going to put a man -
Tavis: - before the end of this decade.
Aldrin: - on the moon, bring him back safely. I liked that last part of it, but -
Tavis: (Laughs) What'd you make of that - that was a bold speech. It happened, but what'd you make of that when he said that?
Aldrin: It was one hell of a challenge to the American people, and we needed, really, to boost up America because of Sputnik - coming up on 50 years ago in a little over a month - we needed to catch up. Now what happened? Yuri Gagarin makes one orbit. All we could do is Alan Shepard, 15 minutes - not into orbit. Twenty days later, 1961, May 25th, the president said, "We're going to go to the moon."
Man, that's about as bold as you can get, and then the second time we put Americans into space in the new spacecraft, the first time they ever flew in a big rocket, what'd we do? We sent them to orbit the moon. Oh, man, it's not like that today, but we were concerned that the Russians might out-stage us by sending somebody around the moon and back.
They already did send a camera around the moon and back early in the program, and they took pictures of the back of the moon and guess what? Every crater on the back of the moon is named after Russians. Now obviously, I'm a cold warrior, okay? During the Cold War, I was patrolling the border. During the Hungarian crisis, I went on alert.
Couple years later, we transitioned to attack fighters. An attack fighter carries a nuclear weapon. (Unintelligible) flies low-level into Czechoslovakia, Poland, as far as you can go, delivers a nuke. How many guys today realize that a lot of us were doing those things back in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies? It was in many ways a simple world, because there were two -
Tavis: Polar opposites, yeah.
Aldrin: Two opposites. And nobody would have predicted that the Soviet Union was going to come apart in the nineties.
Tavis: To your point now, because there was a sense in this simpler world - there was a sense of national pride around this - it caused the Cold War - a sense of national pride around whether or not we could outdo the Russians or beat them doing this or get to the moon first or whatever, I wonder -
Aldrin: Or mutual assured destruction.
Tavis: Exactly, fair enough.
Aldrin: If they hit us, man, we'll hit them.
Tavis: Hit them back, exactly.
Aldrin: That's not too peaceful a chess game.
Tavis: You're right about that, but there is a sense of national pride around what you can accomplish around these issues, and the question I want to ask is whether or not you think that there isn't the kind of sense of national pride around whatever NASA is attempting to do these days which might hurt the program.
Aldrin: Yeah, no there is not. There really is not, and I think that's why we had our last tragedy with Columbia in 2003 - February 1st, okay? And what did -
Tavis: You know this history pretty well. You know all these dates.
Aldrin: Now, what did the administration do? They started studying what should we do next? Through the spring and summer of '03, my group engineers tried to look at the problem too and we made a proposal to NASA, but the administration decided in December of '03 what to do about it, but they did not confuse it with the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers - December 17th, '03.
And he didn't confuse it with politics by putting it into the State of the Union. But guess what? At the very beginning of a contentious election year - it wasn't exactly a shoe-in in 2000 - but the beginning of an election year in 2004 the President Bush committed the nation to a multi-billion dollar space program, right? How many people really think of that today? And we're doing the best we can, gradually, with the funding that's available. Not an increasing budget, but relatively level, to do the best we can.
Tavis: On the one hand, you have the president, to your point now, committing billions of dollars to the space program. That's the good news.
Aldrin: I don't want to miss this one.
Tavis: Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
Aldrin: But that started in two four-year terms in the 21st century. We're going to need about five, six four-year terms from now on -
Tavis: Of that same kind of commitment.
Aldrin: Sustaining.
Tavis: Right, got you.
Aldrin: To be able to ever maintain U.S. leadership by reaching Mars. And when we reach Mars, it's not just once or twice, three times, and then cancel it - that would be a waste. We have to commit ourselves to permanence - growing permanence on Mars. That's going to be a colony. That's going to be where people - and not just the first missions but say the third or four - they commit themselves to a career.
They're going to retire and maybe come back or maybe stay there.
Tavis: Okay, so to make that happen, then, we have to have not just a commitment, to your point, from the powers that be in Washington, but I would think if we're going to build this national pride, this unit around what NASA (unintelligible) -
Aldrin: Yeah, you need (unintelligible).
Tavis: You need the people. To get the people, you have to have a healthy sense of respect for NASA, which raises this question. When you have -
Aldrin: Now -
Tavis: Hold on, hold up - my turn, one second.
Aldrin: I got the answer.
Tavis: (Laughs) My turn. When you have a story like the one involving the - what was her name, Yeager? The lady that went to Florida to try to allegedly harm the girlfriend of the astronaut? You know the story I'm talking about.
Aldrin: I know the story, yeah, yeah.
Tavis: Yeah, you know the story. When you hear that kind of mess -
Aldrin: I'm glad you didn't mention her name.
Tavis: Yeah, whatever works. When you hear that kind of mess that happens around NASA, how much damage, if at all, does that do to the reputation, how she got through the program, that kind of unity and pride you're trying to build around that?
Aldrin: Well, if we didn't publicize it and make it a media frenzy -
Tavis: It's a huge story, come on.
Aldrin: It'd have been okay.
Tavis: It's a huge story. You got a NASA astronaut who got through the program who's a little unstable.
Aldrin: But how many key people have a degree of domestic break-up and movement in other directions? I can think of -
Tavis: A whole bunch of them.
Aldrin: (Laughs) I can think -
Tavis: Some in this room, but go ahead, yeah.
Aldrin: - of a whole lot. Now the problem was that we got a very competitive bunch of people - A people, or whatever they call it. High energy, competitive people, and they need a certain amount of oversight. And I really don't believe that even right from the beginning there was quite sufficient oversight. Physical training was totally up to the person once he became an astronaut.
Do you realize that no exams were ever given to an astronaut after he would go through training to tell whether he absorbed the training? This is because these guys said, "Ah, we don't need to take tests, we absorb this. All of us will take care of our own physical conditioning."
Okay, so now one of them gets into a little trouble. Do the others come and try and advise somebody, "Hey, cool it?" What's-her-name, you're going off the deep end. And was there enough supervision? I don't really think so. But can you narrow that out by an exam, physical exam of some sort before somebody gets into the program? Can you tell when they are maybe getting a little over-stressed, or can you tell it at an annual physical exam? Man, I don't think so.
Tavis: I'd better ask you before - I like Ron Howard, he's a very nice guy.
Aldrin: Oh, I do, too.
Tavis: He sat in that chair before.
Aldrin: Yeah, he's got a red beard and a baseball cap, (laughter) and I got a white beard -
Tavis: A white beard and a baseball cap.
Aldrin: Now, are you going to ask me why I have white beard?
Tavis: Why do you have a white beard, Mr. Aldrin?
Aldrin: Well, it's really gray. (Laughter) See, in the aerospace industry, the sage, retired, wise, experienced rocket scientists or managers occasionally are called in, two or three or four of them, to advise or to review what a company is thinking about doing or what the government's thinking. And that's called bringing in the graybeards, okay?
Tavis: So you've got to have gray beard to do that.
Aldrin: Not necessarily, because they don't really.
Tavis: Let me ask you this.
Aldrin: But this to signify that I'm really a graybeard on tourism in space, going back to the moon, going to Mars, and then revving up the public about what we did and what we hope to do in the future, and trying to pioneer a lottery in space for space experiences. Not gambling, not gambling.
Tavis: I got you. To your latter point, I got a minute and 10 seconds, and because I don't want Ron Howard to dislike me, you better tell me something you like about "In the Shadow of the Moon." I don't want the studio mad at me.
Aldrin: I just love to hear Mike Collins talk about what he liked about the program and Al Bean. They had about two days of interviewing. For some reason, I had to cut short so I only was able to give them a half a day, and that's why my part of it is a little briefer. But I think it's the kind of thing that lets the humanity of these guys hang out. The public can just see the looseness that they have now about describing what was going on on the space program. The funny things.
Tavis: The piece is called "In the Shadow of the Moon," starting in New York and L.A. and then around the rest of the country. What a blessing it is, what an honor it is to spend a few minutes in your shadow, you graybeard, you. Nice to have you on.
Aldrin: Right on, I enjoyed it. Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: I enjoyed it, too. Pleasure to meet you. Buzz Aldrin.
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