Buzz Aldrin returned to Earth from the Moon 40 years ago today. Read what he has to say now about the proposed NASA missions:
I had a splendid career at NASA
as an astronaut in the Gemini
and Apollo programs. The
capstone, of course, was my
moonwalk on the Sea of
Tranquility 40 years ago. I have
only two regrets from my NASA
days, and both were my own
fault: I failed to speak out
when I saw bad decisions being
made. The first came in 1966,
when NASA, in a fit of excessive
caution, canceled the Astronaut
Maneuvering Unit (AMU), the Buck
Rogers–style jet backpack I was
scheduled to try out on Gemini
12. Despite difficulties with
the AMU on Gemini 9, I was very
confident I could make it work.
But like a good astronaut, I
kept my mouth shut, and I’ve
regretted it ever since. As it
turned out, it took 18 years for
NASA to develop another jet
pack, the Manned Maneuvering
Unit, used on three space
shuttle missions in 1984.
My second bout of
wishy-washiness, however, had
more far-reaching implications.
In the early ’70s I was part of
a NASA committee to establish
the basic architecture of the
space shuttle. One of the
approaches we considered was a
manned booster that would have
its own pilot and glide back to
the Cape after giving the
orbiter its initial push. It was
a silly idea—way too expensive.
But I didn’t object strongly
enough, and we wasted a year and
millions of dollars on it.
That delay and expense
eventually forced a hurried
decision. Instead of the
customary liquid-fuel boosters
like the Atlas, Titan and
Saturn, which had flawless track
records on Mercury, Gemini and
Apollo flights, the shuttle
committee decided to go with
cheaper solid-fuel boosters,
which had never been used for
manned spaceflight. Solid-fuel
rockets are lower in performance
and can’t be shut off once
ignited—and when something goes
wrong, it tends to be
catastrophic. Fifteen years
after that decision, a
solid-booster failure brought
down Challenger, and the unhappy
legacy of solid boosters lives
on today in the underpowered,
vibration-prone Ares I, the
crew-launch rocket NASA is
developing.
As I approach my 80th birthday,
I’m in no mood to keep my mouth
shut any longer when I see NASA
heading down the wrong path. And
that’s exactly what I see today.
The agency’s current Vision for
Space Exploration will waste
decades and hundreds of billions
of dollars trying to reach the
moon by 2020—a glorified rehash
of what we did 40 years ago.
Instead of a steppingstone to
Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan
is a detour. It will derail our
Mars effort, siphoning off money
and engineering talent for the
next two decades. If we aspire
to a long-term human presence on
Mars—and I believe that should
be our overarching goal for the
foreseeable future—we must
drastically change our focus.
Here’s my plan, which I call the
Unified Space Vision. It’s a
blueprint that will maintain
U.S. leadership in human
spaceflight, avoid a
counterproductive space race
with China to be second back to
the moon, and lead to a
permanent American-led presence
on Mars by 2035 at the latest.
That date happens to be 66 years
after Neil Armstrong and I first
landed on the moon—just as our
landing was 66 years after the
Wright Brothers’ first flight.
NASA’s looming short-term
dilemma is the five-year gap
between the shuttle’s scheduled
retirement next year and the
debut of the Ares I rocket and
the new Orion spacecraft, in
2015. During that hiatus, we’ll
be writing checks to the
Russians to let our astronauts
hitch rides on Soyuz rockets to
the International Space Station,
in which we’ve invested $100
billion. I find that simply
unacceptable.
Instead, we should stretch out
the six remaining shuttle
flights to 2015—one per year.
Sure, that will cost money, but
we can more than make up for it
by canceling the troubled Ares
I. In its place, we should use
the old reliable Delta IV Heavy
or the Atlas V satellite
launchers, upgraded for human
flight. (It won’t take much.)
Then fast-track the Orion to fly
on a Delta IV or Atlas V as soon
as possible.
NASA should also step up its
Commercial Orbital
Transportation Services program
to subsidize private rockets
like the SpaceX Falcon 9, which
could make its first flight any
time now. SpaceX is also
developing the Dragon capsule to
fly seven astronauts to the
space station.
In the short term, some
combination of an extended
shuttle schedule and a new
Orion/Delta, Orion/Atlas or
Dragon/Falcon would fill the gap
and give us the kind of
continuity and flexibility we
had during the Mercury, Gemini
and Apollo programs. In the
meantime, we need to develop new
strategies, new launch vehicles
and new spacecraft for the years
beyond 2015 to bring us to the
threshold of Mars
The key to my medium-term plan
is simple: Scrap our go-it-alone
lunar program and let
international partners—China,
Europe, Russia, India, Japan—do
the lion’s share of the
planning, technical development
and funding. The U.S. would
participate, and we would
provide the technological
leadership. By renouncing our
goal of being first on the moon
(again), we would call off Space
Race II with the Chinese and
encourage them to channel their
ambitious lunar efforts into the
consortium. We should also
invite China to join the space
station partnership. Its
Shenzhou spacecraft could help
transport cargo and U.S.
astronauts to the station.
To encourage more partners for
both the lunar program and the
space station, we should develop
a manned spacecraft that other
countries could afford to buy or
lease. A compact, reusable
runway lander would have broad
appeal: a sort of minishuttle
that could carry eight
astronauts and launch atop an
Atlas V or a foreign-made
booster like the Japanese H-IIA
or European Ariane 5. Such a
space plane could be based on
dormant NASA concepts like the
X-38 lifting-body space-station
lifeboat or the HL-20 space
taxi. The Air Force’s X-37B
robot space plane, set for its
first orbital flight later this
year, could also serve as a
starting point for a world
shuttle.
We also need to develop a
heavy-lift launch vehicle to
support flights to the moon and
beyond. Here is where I believe
NASA’s current thinking is
seriously awry. After the
Columbia disaster, the agency
adopted the ill-advised policy
that in future space programs,
crew and cargo would be launched
on separate and different
vehicles. This severely limits
our launch options and
flexibility. The upshot of that
decision is our current mess:
two expensive rocket programs
that have undergone numerous
alterations. I’ve already
mentioned the woes of the Ares I
crew launcher; the gargantuan
Ares V cargo lifter, scheduled
to fly in 2018, keeps getting
bigger and more expensive with
every redesign.
My alternative plan is simple
math: Ares 3+3 is better than
Ares 1+5. In other words, two
medium-size Ares 3s would be a
more efficient way to launch
crew and cargo than a small
crew-only Ares I and a huge
cargo-only Ares V. NASA would
require just one much less
expensive rocket program.
This Ares 3 would use shuttle
components to minimize
development time and costs. Two
well-studied concepts could
serve as a starting point: the
Jupiter Direct 232 shuttle-stack
configuration developed by a
group of moonlighting NASA
rebels, or the Shuttle-C
side-mount cargo launcher that
NASA studied two decades ago.
Ideally, this Ares 3 would
slowly and affordably evolve to
be fully reusable.
The international moon program,
which I envision making a first
manned landing around 2025,
would eventually have to pay its
own way. (We should know after a
few landings whether there’s any
commercial or practical
potential.) Perhaps we’ll find
ice to make liquid-oxygen rocket
propellant, or the helium-3 that
my fellow moonwalker Jack
Schmitt believes can power
future fusion reactors. Maybe a
lunar solar-power station will
prove feasible. In those cases,
we should maintain a robotic
lunar surface presence with an
occasional visit by a human
“Maytag repairman.” If no
commercial or mineral
exploitation pans out, perhaps a
few wealthy space tourists will
pay $100 million for a lunar
flyby. If not, kill the program.
Our purely exploratory efforts
should aim higher than a place
we’ve already set foot on six
times.
To reach Mars, we should use
comets, asteroids and Mars’s
moon Phobos as intermediate
destinations. No giant leaps
this time. More like a hop, skip
and a jump. For these
long-duration missions, we need
an entirely new spacecraft that
I call the Exploration Module,
or XM. Unlike the Orion capsule,
which is designed for short
flights around the Earth and to
the moon, the XM would contain
the radiation shields,
artificial gravity and
food-production and recycling
facilities necessary for a
spaceflight of up to three
years. Once launched, it would
remain in space. The XM would
carry attached landers designed
for Phobos or Mars and an Orion
capsule for astronauts returning
to Earth.
A prototype XM could be based on
NASA’s canceled space station
Habitation Module. It could be
launched as early as 2014 and
attached to the space station
for a long-duration shakedown
test. Extended flights around
the moon with second-generation
XMs would serve as dry runs for
its first real mission, in 2018:
a one-year flight culminating in
a 30,000 mph flyby of the comet
46P/Wirtanen. In 2019 and 2020,
the asteroid 2001 GP2 will come
within 10 million miles of
Earth, in position for a
month-long rendezvous with the
XM. In 2021, we could try a
manned approach to 99942
Apophis, the asteroid that will
just miss the Earth in 2029 and
has a tiny chance of hitting us
in 2036. If a 2036 impact looms,
we could use this mission to
divert the 820-foot-wide rock.
The last step toward Mars,
around 2025, would be a landing
on the planet’s 17-mile-wide
moon Phobos, which orbits less
than 4000 miles above Mars. A
Phobos base would be the perfect
perch from which to monitor and
control the robots that will
build the infrastructure on the
Martian surface, in preparation
for the first human visitors.
In recent years my philosophy on
colonizing Mars has evolved. I
now believe that human visitors
to the Red Planet should commit
to staying there permanently.
One-way tickets to Mars will
make the missions technically
easier and less expensive and
get us there sooner. More
importantly, they will ensure
that our Martian outpost
steadily grows as more
homesteaders arrive.
Instead of explorers, one-way
Mars travelers will be
21st-century pilgrims,
pioneering a new way of life. It
will take a special kind of
person. Instead of the
traditional pilot/
scientist/engineer, Martian
homesteaders will be selected
more for their
personalities—flexible,
inventive and determined in the
face of unpredictability. In
short, survivors.
But for this dream to happen,
NASA needs to dramatically
change its ways. Its myopic
Vision for Space Exploration
will never get us to Mars.
Progressive innovation and
enlightened international
cooperation will. President
Obama and Congress need to set
NASA right—and soon.
There, I’ve said it. No regrets
this time.
Buzz Aldrin
probes, Kaguya will end its voyage in a violent rendezvous with the moon's surface.
