Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrinis an American engineer and former astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, he was one of the first two humans to land on the Moon, and the second person to walk on it. He set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on July 21, 1969, following mission commander Neil Armstrong. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer with the Command Pilot rating...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth20 January 1930
CityGlen Ridge, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I think you have to talk to your congressman to try to get the government to want to work with the private sector.
Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.
Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.
I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring.
It's not easy to get human beings into orbit. So far only three nations have been able to do that, with all the resources that they put together. And I'm just a little skeptical that that's going to be done by the private sector without making use of what has been done by the government.
When the time comes to start building deep space transports and refueling rocket tankers, it will be the commercial industry that steps up, not another government-owned, government-managed enterprise.
The government needs a role in carrying out exploration. They will be leading the development of the engines that are needed, and the private sector will take advantage of those.
Fear, to people who have been in aviation and combat (such as) fighter pilots ... is something you learn how to deal with and set aside, ... It's a very disabling emotion. You want to be alert as you possibly can.
I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights.
The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream,
why can't the average citizen? That's what I've been promoting in the last several years.
We should've asked China to be a portion of the space station. We should've worked out ways that we can... just give away the technology that we have that puts things up into space, with cooperation up above the atmosphere that's needed to help each other.
People come up to me and say, 'It's too bad the space program got canceled.' This is not the case, and yet that is what most of the public thinks has happened.
Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter.