Magnificent Desolation (36 page)

I
N
2002, I was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry, where I emphasized the importance of NASA partnering with privatized efforts to develop alternative spacecrafts and rockets. Our final commission report strongly urged the creation of a new space imperative for America, and that NASA look to private industry to accelerate commercial space endeavors in the twenty-first century.

But once again NASA put off any action that might open the doors to a paradigm shift regarding access to space. I had been trying for years to transform the U.S. government’s approach to the space program, trying to get members of Congress to replace short-term thinking with a long-term, forward-looking perspective, planning for where we want to be thirty to fifty years from now, instead of getting back on the budget treadmill every year, perpetually debating the same issues regarding the space program year after year. Inevitably those issues revolved around the perennial question, “How much is all this going to cost?”

That’s why ShareSpace was (and remains) such an exciting concept for me and for others who are able to share the vision of what we could do. One of those people was Les Moonves, president and CEO of CBS television. Les and I engaged in serious conversations regarding
the possibility of a
Survivor-type
television program in which contestants could compete in various astronaut-training ordeals over the course of the season, with the winner receiving the grand prize of a trip to the International Space Station on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, since commercial suborbital flights were not yet feasible in the United States. Our only stumbling block was the price tag.

In recent years I’ve been approached by as many as ten separate television production companies and high-profile television producers who want to develop a space “reality” show or a competitive game show similar to
American Idol
, along the lines of
Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?
If we can put the right ingredients together, who knows? I might get back into space yet! But, even better, I’m working to find a way to
give you
a chance to travel in space!

   20

L
IKE MOST
A
MERICANS
, I’
M QUITE SKEPTICAL ABOUT CON
spiracy theories. I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon—that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace—has to rank among the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet somehow the media has given credence to some of the kooky people espousing such theories, and my fellow astronauts and I have had to put up with the consequences.

This is almost a no-win situation. If you ignore the panderers of nonsense, they say, “See! Buzz is afraid of the truth.” If you attempt to correct their error, you automatically lend undeserved credibility to their ridiculous suppositions. I am passionate about passing down accurate history to the next generation, so I must confess that I’ve had little patience with the conspiracy nuts. To me, they waste everybody’s time and energy.

Nevertheless, since I’m probably the most publicly visible of all the astronauts who walked on the moon, I get more of the close encounters of a kooky kind than my colleagues, although any one of them has a collection of stories they could share as well.

Because of the publicity the hoax theorists have garnered, occasionally even in a serious interview a reporter will broach the subject. One September morning in 2002, I was in Beverly Hills at the Luxe Hotel, filming a television interview for a Far Eastern TV network, when the interview began going in a direction that I knew was out of bounds. At first I tried to be cordial, adroitly answering the question, assuming that the interviewer would recognize my reluctance to talk about inanity, and bring the focus back to a bona fide space subject. Instead the interviewer began playing a television segment that had aired in the United States on the subject of hoaxes, including a section suggesting that the Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. I was aware of the piece and had been livid when it originally aired. I did not appreciate the interviewer’s attempts to lure me into commenting on it. Lisa had accompanied me to the interview following her early morning triathlon training in the Santa Monica Bay, and she immediately recognized that this was a flagrant violation of our willingness to conduct the interview in good faith, so she called a halt to the production. We weren’t belligerent, but we did not linger long over our good-byes, either.

We left the hotel room and walked down the hall to catch the elevator, only a matter of seconds away. I pressed the button for the ground level, and Lisa and I looked at each other and smiled. It had been a strange morning already. When the elevator doors opened on the ground level, it got worse.

As we stepped out into the hotel foyer, a large man who looked to be in his mid-thirties approached me, attempting to engage me in conversation. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” He had his own film crew along, with the camera already rolling to document the encounter.

I greeted him briefly, acknowledging his presence, and kept moving— standard procedure for life in Hollywood. As Lisa and I walked through the foyer toward the front door of the hotel, however, the man kept getting in my way, peppering me with questions, none of which I answered. Lisa took my arm and glared at the man. “That’s enough,” she said, as I could feel her pressure on my arm guiding me toward the door. “Please let us alone; we’re leaving now.”

We stepped outside under the hotel awning, and the film crew continued right along with us. Lisa’s car was parked across the street on Rodeo Drive, but there was no crosswalk nearby, and the traffic was brisk.

Meanwhile, the “interviewer” had taken out a very large Bible and was shaking it in my face, his voice becoming more animated. “Will you swear on this Bible that you really walked on the moon?”

I looked back at the man and gave him a look as if to say,
Will you swear on that Bible that you are an idiot? The
man was becoming more virulent, inflammatory, and personally accusatory in his outbursts. I tried not to pay any attention, but he was saying things like, “Your life is a complete lie! And here you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!”

Lisa approached the cameraman and insisted, “Please turn off that camera! We’re just trying to get across the street to our car.”

I’m a patient man, but this situation was silly. “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Lisa spied a break in the traffic, so she grabbed me by the arm again, and said, “Buzz, let’s go.” We started walking across the street, but the large man kept getting right in front of us, standing in the middle of Rodeo Drive, blocking our path as his cameraman kept rolling film. Lisa seemed nervous about trying to go around him, while searching for her keys to unlock the car with the man in such close proximity, so we turned around and walked back to the bellman’s station outside the hotel.

“Okay, this is ridiculous,” I said to Lisa and to the bellman. “Call the police. This guy is not letting us get to our car.”

I was under the awning, and Lisa turned away from me to approach the cameraman again. “Please turn that camera off,” she said. Meanwhile the large man was nearly screaming at me, “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin! You’re a liar; you’re a thief!”

Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force fighter pilot, or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character assassination, but whatever it was, as the man continued to
excoriate me, I suddenly let loose with a right hook that would have made George Foreman proud.
WHAAP!
I belted the guy squarely in the jaw.

While I prided myself on staying in relatively good shape, it was doubtful that my septuagenarian punch did much damage to the fellow, except perhaps to his ego. But he was not at all concerned about the punch, anyhow. It was obvious that he had been goading me in that direction, and he seemed ecstatically happy that I had finally grown exasperated and hit him.

“Hey, did you catch that on tape?” he called out to his cameraman. That was all he cared about.

Lisa turned around and walked back to me. She cocked her head slightly, looked up at me, and asked quietly, “Buzz, what happened?”

I looked back at my stepdaughter rather sheepishly, and said, “I punched the guy.”

“You what?” Lisa’s hand instinctively flew to her mouth in disbelief, as though already postulating in her mind any potential legal ramifications.

The film crew and “interviewer” hastily packed up and headed for their vehicle. They had gotten what they were hoping for—and more. Before the night was over, the film of me punching the guy was on the news and all over the Internet. The interviewer went to the police, threatening to file assault charges against me.

In the meantime, Lisa contacted our legal representative, Robert O’Brien, and told him everything that had happened. Robert suggested that we hire a criminal lawyer, just in case the encounter actually led to charges.

On the following
Tonight Show
, Jay Leno included the incident in his standup routine, cheering, “Way to go, Buzz!” They doctored up the video of my punch, and edited it to make it appear as though I had given the guy about twenty rapid-fire punches instead of the one.

David Letterman also came to my defense in his opening remarks for
The Late Show
, and threw in a double feature on the story the next
night, since they had “dug up” some old archival footage of a reporter accosting Christopher Columbus, accusing him, “You didn’t really cross the ocean and land in the New World. You’re a liar!” And of course, Columbus decked the guy.

By then, television networks and evening entertainment news programs were calling, suddenly wanting me to appear on their shows. Ordinarily I would have been delighted, but our legal advisers said, “No interviews.” Eventually the matter died down. The city of Beverly Hills did not bring charges against me, and there were witnesses to the harassing behavior that provoked my response. It still cost me money to hire a lawyer to defend myself, and the hoax advocate received the publicity he sought, so I suppose, in the end, he won. But the punch provided me with some satisfaction, at least, and I was gratified by the calls and notes of support. CNN
Crossfire
commentator Paul Begala gave me a thumbs-up, and many others sent encouraging messages. Ironically, some of the most supportive words came from my fellow astronauts, to the effect of, “Hey, Buzz, I wish I’d punched the guy! Finally, somebody has responded to these hoax theory perpetrators.” More than my knowledge of rendezvous techniques, more than my actions under pressure during the initial lunar landing, more than anything in my career as an astronaut—it seemed as if nothing elevated me more in their estimation than “the punch.” From that day on, I was a hero to them.

O
N
J
ANUARY
29, 2003, I was in New York to celebrate General Electric Plastics’ fiftieth anniversary of the invention of
Lexan
at its “Innovation Day,” held at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Lexan is the highly durable polycarbonate material used in everything from plastic water bottles to space helmets. I donned a replica
of my Apollo 11
space helmet with a visor made of the Lexan resin, and shared my space stories with more than 500 sixth graders. As part of the anniversary celebration, I made a spotlight appearance on NBC’s
Today
show, and
talked about the space shuttle
Columbia
, which was due to land in a few days, and of course how excited I was about the progress we were making toward getting ordinary citizens into space.

Back home, I arose early on the morning of February 1, 2003, and turned on the television. I had penciled into my handwritten calendar the time that the
Columbia
shuttle was expected to return from its mission to the ISS for its runway landing at the Kennedy Space Center at around 9:00 a.m. (EST), 6:00 a.m. (PST). I brewed some coffee, poured myself a cup, and sat down to watch the reentry. But I could tell that something wasn’t right; it was suddenly too quiet, and at this point in the landing, such a silence was highly unusual. Normally the radio transmissions between ground control and the shuttle would be constant back-and-forth confirming critical data and readings. I turned the television’s volume higher, thinking it might be something malfunctioning on our set, but the interruption of communication from the
Columbia
was real—and alarming. Unknown to me or to most of the world at that moment, the space shuttle
Columbia
had already begun to disintegrate as it streaked high above Texas during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. All seven crew members died in the catastrophe.

Apparently the shuttle had been damaged either during or shortly after launch when a piece of foam insulation, no bigger than a small briefcase and weighing slightly more than a pound, broke off from the main propellant tank. The debris struck the edge of the left wing, damaging
Columbia
’s thermal protection system, which guards it from the intense 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures generated during reentry. Making matters worse, it was later discovered that NASA engineers suspected the damage the entire time the shuttle was in flight, but it was determined that there was little that could be done to repair the problem. Nobody bothered to tell the
Columbia
’s crew of the danger they were in as Commander Rick Husband, an experienced shuttle pilot who had flown one of the first missions to the International Space Station (ISS), ran the spacecraft through its final burns.

The
Columbia
spread bits of debris across parts of Texas and as far
away as Arkansas and Louisiana. My heart sank as I watched the television coverage of the tragedy.

I had little time to grieve, however. Within minutes, all six telephone lines in our home and office were lighting up, with what seemed like every television network and news agency in America wanting to ask me about the chain of events. Several television networks wanted me to sign on as their exclusive news commentator to help viewers understand more about this horrific incident.