At a press conference ahead of his lecture at the Technion this week, Aldrin said: "I wouldn't be where I am today without the education I was able to squeeze from the education system." "Humanity does not need to visit Mars and not conquer it, but establish a permanent settlement on it"
Buzz Aldrin has long adopted Arnold Schwarzenegger's words from the movie "Fateful Memory" - "Move your butt and fly to Mars" (in English ASS and MARS rhyme). But he doesn't just talk, it turns out he does. About a year ago, he founded the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology, in which he heads the team developing a practical method for flying to Mars that will allow astronauts to fly back and forth to Mars on a regular basis, whenever the planets approach each other, once every 26 months.
Aldrin calls the plan "circular orbit to Mars". And it includes a gas station at one of the Lagrange points, the meeting points between the gravitational forces of the moon. He currently serves as the governor of the Space University, the third governor in total since the university was founded in the summer semester held in 1998 at MIT.
"I wouldn't be where I am today without the education I was able to squeeze from the education system." Aldrin said at a press conference that preceded the lecture in memory of Gerald Soffen, held as part of the International Space University, which travels every year between technological universities around the world and this summer is held at the Technion.
My two older sisters only studied until the XNUMXth grade. I suddenly became wise and gave up a scholarship to MIT because I wanted to serve in the army as a fighter pilot - I was advised to enlist in the navy, but I decided that I should not land on aircraft carriers in the middle of the sea. I preferred the army and when I finished my third year at West Point we had to move to the air force base in the Philippines to control Japan from there, but then the Korean War broke out and changed my career.
Later I served on a military base in Germany and then I met Ed White, one of the first astronauts who perished in the fire of the Apollo 1 spacecraft. He was a test pilot and then they announced that NASA was looking for astronauts after Operation Gemini. We both approached. He was accepted and I was not. I had to wait another year to be accepted.
By the way, Aldrin eventually completed a doctorate at MIT, with the subject of his work being the planning of rendezvous of spacecraft in space, based on the movements of reaching the target to be bombarded, which sometimes requires reaching angles of 270 degrees. This is how we learned about relative motion, for example if we missed the moon we would return to orbit around the earth and again go towards the moon but the moon would not be there.
The Mars mission
Dr. Aldrin has never rested on his laurels, and for the past three decades he has been devoting most of his time to the next mission: manning Mars. "I'm not talking about a visit, not about an occupation and not even about a changing presence of people on Mars, but about a permanent settlement. My plan presents a definite path to humanity's next abode.”
For this purpose, he founded the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute in Florida, which works to promote colonization on Mars, with the target year for the beginning of colonization being 2040. "Mars is the island waiting for us in the darkness of space, so get your ass to Mars." Because there, as President Kennedy said about the mission to land on the moon, a meeting with destiny awaits us."
One of the components of the "circular orbit to Mars" is the establishment of a gas station at one of the Lagrange points, the points where the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Moon balance. The source of fuel is the ice deposits in shaded craters up to the south pole area of the moon, however there is not much point in landing on the moon on the way to Mars because it also requires a lot of fuel. The idea is to mine the ice in an unmanned way, and launch them to a point in orbit, where a process of separating the water into hydrogen and oxygen, the components of the fuel that will bring manned spacecraft to Phobos and then to Mars, will take place.
"Even in orbit around Mars there is an advantage, because if you closely control an all-terrain vehicle, the entire distance that Spirit covered in five years and Opportunity in 11 years can be done in one week, without delay in the radio broadcasts.
In response to the science site's question, Aldrin said that he regrets the decision to cancel NASA's plan for a manned landing on an asteroid in 2025, and replace it with a robotic program that will bring a space rock into Earth orbit where only the astronauts will meet it.
In the lecture itself, Aldrin said: "I have no doubt that I am lucky. My mother was born at the time when the Wright brothers made the first flights in history, and my father was one of the pioneers of the world of aviation. I just flew jet planes in the Korean War and did spacewalks, and yet - I got to walk on the moon."
Born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. in January 1930 in New Jersey, Aldrin is best known for being one of the first two astronauts to walk on the moon. He is also known to the younger generation thanks to Buzz Lightyear - the hero of the movie "Toy Story" - who got his name from Aldrin.
The first landing on the moon, starring Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, took place 47 years ago this month - on July 20, 1969. Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the moon, followed by Aldrin, who described the sight as a "spectacular wilderness" - as his autobiographical book was later called. They placed the US flag and a commemorative plaque on the lunar surface, performed some predetermined scientific missions and spoke with then US President Richard Nixon. After that, they got on the lander and returned to "Columbia" - the command cabin - where Michael Collins, their colleague on the mission, who was circling the moon in orbit, was waiting for them.
Dr. Aldrin, a graduate of West Point Military Academy and a former fighter pilot, received his doctorate from MIT. His doctoral thesis dealt with a manned rendezvous in space. The compounding methods he developed in his thesis are still in use today and are what earned him the nickname Dr. Rendezvous. In 1963, he was accepted as an astronaut into the ranks of NASA and is best known for breaking the spacewalk record as part of the Gemini 12 mission (1966) and for landing on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission (1969).
Apollo 11 was the culmination of the Apollo program, which US President John Kennedy (JFK) announced in his famous speech in which he set the goal: landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, did not get to see his dream come true.
The main mission of the Apollo team was a manned landing on the moon, and more than half a billion viewers watched on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the landing ladder and said: "That's one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind." Buzz Aldrin came down about twenty minutes later and together the two carried out the predetermined tasks, including walking on the moon, collecting soil samples, installing a television camera that would transmit images from the moon to the earth and placing a board on which was written a message of peace to any living thing that found it. Four days later, on July 24, 1969, Apollo 11 landed in the Pacific Ocean.
"We got an opportunity to land on the moon, and the opportunity became a landmark, an event that changed the history of mankind," said Dr. Aldrin in his lecture at the Technion. "Humanity managed to set foot in a completely new and different place. 400 thousand people were involved in the success of this mission and half a billion watched us in that historic event. When we returned from there we were received as heroes, but the world cheered not for us but for what we represented: conquering the impossible."
More on the subject on the science website
- "The next president or female president of the USA will have to make a fateful decision regarding the space program"
- 47 years since the moon landing: the technologies that were there and contributed to today's technology era
- A man on the moon - the story of the Apollo 11 mission
- A big step towards the moon - SPACEIL signed an agreement with SpaceX to launch the Israeli spacecraft to the moon
- Neil Armstrong for children at the Science Museum in Haifa: Invest in science and technology studies
- The first steps on the moon
