Magnificent Desolation (37 page)

I knew I couldn’t help everybody, but felt compelled to do what I could. I decided to work exclusively with NBC, and within two hours I was on the air with various NBC commentators, discussing the catastrophe. I tried to remain stoic and scientific in most of my comments, but at one point during my appearance on NBC’s
Nightly News
, while discussing the disaster with Brian Williams, I could no longer hold back the tears welling in my eyes, as with trembling voice I recited a lyric from the song, “Fire in the Sky,” written by Dr. Jordan Kare that seemed so appropriate to me:

I knew the natural result of such a tragedy would be for NASA to pull back, to say, “We aren’t going to do anything until the investigators’ report is released and we find out why this horrible accident occurred.” That was understandable, but we dared not put life on hold as we waited.

Months later, when their report came out, the
Columbia
accident investigation board mandated that the remaining three shuttle orbiters in the fleet,
Discovery, Endeavor
, and
Atlantis
, be permanently
retired by the year 2010. NASA had been struggling with the issue of how long to fly the shuttles; some claimed they were never meant to have a thirty-year lifespan when they began flying in 1981. This mandate made it all the more urgent for America to put into effect a strong new vision and start building the next generation of spacecraft to replace the shuttle program. The report also recommended that the astronaut crew be separated from cargo in the launch vehicle in future space transportation systems. I saw this as a red flag that might prove a costly limitation as we moved forward.

With that premonition in mind, I initiated a conference call between two key admirals to raise the issue, Admiral Hal Gehman, who chaired the
Columbia
accident investigation board, and Admiral Craig E. Steidle, NASA’s associate administrator in charge of exploration systems. I told them that the separation of crew and cargo would restrict and limit the flexibility of configuring our future launch systems. We reviewed the issues, but in the end the accident board was not going to change its position due to underlying crew safety considerations. As it turns out, NASA implemented the board’s report by developing two completely different launch vehicles (the
Ares I
and the
Ares V)
to launch crew and cargo separately in its new Constellation program. Though it may take a rocket scientist to understand the ramifications, in my opinion—one shared by many others—NASA’s development of two completely different launch vehicles has strayed far from the shuttle-derived designs that make the most sense. This approach is what lies at the crux of our space program’s challenges today.

It saddens me to know that we have fallen short on our progress as a nation to lead the world in space. As I write these words, we do not have in place a new space transportation system to take over when the shuttle orbiters are retired. At NASA’s current pace with the Constellation program, America will experience a gap of at least five years in which we will have no capability of launching humans into space. We will have no direct ability to send our astronauts to the $100-billion investment in the International Space Station. We will be completely dependent on the Russians to fly to the ISS, or possibly the Chinese, once
they are invited to participate in the station. Moreover, we will have no capability to get back to the moon or on to Mars.

Although the space shuttle would fly again following the
Columbia
disaster, NASA’s position regarding the future use of the shuttles has not changed. I have suggested stretching the existing schedule to retire the shuttles by one-year intervals, and flying at least one of our shuttles back to the International Space Station and docking it there as a permanent part of the structure, but so far these ideas have not been well received.

We have experienced hiatuses in human space launch capability in the past, following Apollo and Skylab, before the new shuttle fleet was developed. It was a fallow period in which we could not venture into space. After the Mercury program, NASA might have faced a gap before fully developing Apollo, but instead, we filled it with the Gemini program. We have existing technology today to prevent another pause in exploration, but only if NASA partners with commercial aerospace companies currently developing such spacecraft. Furthermore, it would indicate true progress if after almost thirty years of landing the shuttle fleet on the runway, NASA were to adopt a gap-filling technology of a heavy-lifting spacecraft with wings that could land on the runway, rather than the simpler, nonprogressive way of landing space capsules in the ocean to be recovered as we did in the early days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Development of such a spacecraft is still barely possible to bridge the gap, but time is running out.

P
ARTIALLY TO TAKE
my mind off the
Columbia
disaster, and partly because it was something that I had never previously done, I accepted an invitation to be a celebrity participant in the Twenty-seventh Annual Toyota Grand Prix, held in Long Beach on the first weekend of April 2003. The event pits celebrities against professional drivers in a high-speed race for charity, with proceeds benefiting children’s hospitals in Long Beach and Orange County, California. I’ve always loved cars, and I love speed, and I love driving fast. But I had never really
raced cars, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, even though I was seventy-three years of age. I was assured of having at least one distinction: being the oldest driver on the course.

Lois didn’t really want me to drive in the race, because it was not a staged event; it was a real speed race and it was dangerous. The race circuit was nearly two miles long, winding through the streets surrounding the Long Beach Convention Center. On the straight stretches, a driver could reach speeds of close to 100 miles per hour. But the course is especially noted for its last section, in which it runs through a dangerous hairpin turn followed by a slightly curved section that follows the length of the Long Beach waterfront and is lined with palm trees, making for quite a challenging and scenic track. More than 200,000 race fans turn out annually for a weekend of racing, food, and music. Professional drivers who have won the Toyota Grand Prix include Mario Andretti and Al Unser Jr. Past celebrity participants have included Hollywood actors and actresses such as Cameron Diaz, Queen Latifah, Gene Hackman, William Shatner, Dennis Franz, Tony Danza, and Kim Alexis, and athletes such as Bruce Jenner, Lynn Swann, Walter Payton, Mary Lou Retton, Joe Montana, and rocker Ted Nugent.

For two weekends prior to the race, the celebrity drivers practiced on a makeshift track out in the Mojave Desert. The sponsors always invited both male and female celebrities to race, so it was quite a rowdy bunch. It was fun to hook up again with Olympic skiing gold medalist, Picabo Street, whom Lois and I had come to know in Sun Valley, Idaho, and whom I saw at a number of ski celebrity events. For the Toyota race, professional drivers Shawna Robinson and Jeremy McGrath, as well as actor Josh Brolin, were breathing down our necks. It was an exhilarating but humbling experience; it had been a long time since I’d driven a car with a manual transmission. My eye-hand coordination wasn’t quite as quick as when I was flying fighter jets in Korea, so almost every day during our test runs, I crashed a car into the wall. Comedian Adam Carolla loved making fun of me for my crashes. “Buzz’s best friend is the wall,” Adam joked.

During the actual race, I was doing great and holding my own until nearly the end, when swimsuit model and actress Angie Everhart crashed into me and knocked me into the wall and out of the race. Afterwards, Angie came over to me and got down on her knees, begging my forgiveness. “Oh, Buzz, I’m so sorry. Please, I’ll do anything to make it up to you!” I just smiled as the photographers flashed pictures of us. Peter Reckell, star of the daytime television series,
Days of Our Lives
, was the celebrity winner and Jeremy McGrath the pro winner.

O
N
D
ECEMBER
17, 2003, Lois and I traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the nation’s celebration of the “Centennial of Flight”— one hundred years to the day since Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully got their 1903 Wright
Flyer
off the ground and into the air. But unlike their “first in flight” day, this December 17 was pouring buckets. In spite of it, the crowds still gathered, huddled together under tarps for the beautifully staged ceremony in honor of the first powered flight. President Bush came from Washington, D.C., to speak to the crowd. Our friend John Travolta served as master of ceremonies for the morning events, and I delivered the formal prayer at the opening. The security guards held an umbrella over my head as I went up to the podium. I decided on this occasion to share the words that had helped me through so much of my life over the last twenty-five years:

“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

It was a sentiment I thought we would all do well to remember, having come so far from the first powered flight and in the context of looking to our future challenges in space.

As the rain abated, the celebration was honored by a 100-plane flyby spaced throughout the day. All sorts of dignitaries, celebrities, and aviation legends were on hand to commemorate this occasion, including Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, as well as Neil Armstrong and Apollo 10 astronaut Tom Stafford. One of the highlights for me was
being named as one of the top 100 aviators in history. Somewhere, I hoped my father was smiling.

The celebration culminated with a re-creation of the Wright brothers’ first heavier-than-air powered flight, which took off at precisely 10:35 a.m. and lasted twelve seconds, covering a mere 120 feet. Think about that—only twelve seconds in flight, but they were twelve seconds that changed the world. Naturally, I couldn’t help but think how far we had come—from Kitty Hawk to the moon in sixty-six years— and how far I dreamed of going.

To that end, the very next day after the Centennial of Flight, our ShareSpace Foundation held a one-day symposium to usher in the next century of flight. We called it “Next Century of Flight Space Imperatives,” held at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, D.C. Our goal was to inspire a new vision for America’s space exploration program. With a small, overworked staff, we secured sponsorships from Boeing, Lockheed, American Airlines, and others. We partnered with Aviation Week (publisher of the magazine of the same name) to host the conference, which also included an elegant gala affair the night of December 17 at the National Air and Space Museum. The conference took six months to put together, and was attended by numerous movers and shakers in the space and aviation world, including Senator E. J. “Jake” Garn, a former U.S. senator from Utah, who had been the first member of Congress to fly on the space shuttle; the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the world-famous Hayden Planetarium in New York; Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal, now turned aerospace entrepreneur with his space transportation startup, SpaceX; and no fewer than five of my fellow Apollo astronauts.

“To me, this is a culmination and a beginning,” I said in my opening remarks. “It’s the culmination of many years, months, weeks of efforts that I’ve attempted to put into building a coalition, to building a consensus. United we stand. Divided we kinda circle the wagons and shoot inward instead of accomplishing what we’re after.”

I was convinced that at this juncture in history, America was lost in space. I hoped that through the symposium we could stimulate some
ideas. “We have to push forward,” I told everyone I met. “We’ve got to set out a new vision for our country’s space program.” NASA didn’t seem to have a clear goal or vision. Moreover, the Chinese had just entered the space picture in October, becoming only the third nation in the world to launch humans into space—
taikonauts
, they dubbed them—as well as a satellite and probes to the moon, with plans for future probes to Mars. There was some concern that we might be on the verge of new space race in which we were handicapped by the upcoming retirement of the shuttle and the lack of a clear objective.