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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Thirty years after he walked on the moon, Buzz Aldrin wants to send the rest of us.
Jul 20, 1999 | There are some questions you don't ask Buzz Aldrin - clichis he's heard so often that they set his teeth on edge. Chief among them: How did it feel to walk on the moon?
"I try to answer," he admits wearily. "I say, 'It felt terrific. Tremendously satisfying. The mission was going well, and our training had prepared us perfectly.'
"But then people say, 'No ... how did it feel? How did it really feel?'" He bristles. "For Christ's sake, I don't know. I just don't know. I have been frustrated since the day I left the moon by that question." He shakes his head. "Some things just can't be described. And stepping onto the moon was one of them."
Tuesday marks the 30th anniversary of the day that Aldrin and Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins became the most famous men on Earth. Six hundred million people watched their 35-
"Desolation" describes Aldrin's life in the years that followed Apollo. While many of his colleagues entered business, he returned to military service - but no one knew quite what to do with him. In 1971, Aldrin was made commander of the test-pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. "A highly prestigious position," he says dryly, "if you were a test pilot. But I wasn't."
Buzz had always enjoyed his Scotch, but now began drinking heavily. A series of accidents at the school were blamed on "supervisor error." Aldrin felt squeezed. He began to lose control. Depression and alcoholism beset him, and his license to fly was revoked: a staggering blow to the lunar module pilot of Apollo 11. After hitting rock bottom -- at one point putting a pistol to his head -- Aldrin pulled himself together and sought counseling.
People hearing this are rarely surprised. Life after a moon landing, they assume, must be anticlimactic (how else to explain the fact that a third of the moonwalkers have become artists, spiritualists and Christian evangelists?). Not so, says Aldrin. He's been sober now for 20 years and claims to be at his best: "I'm thrilled, I'm challenged, I'm with life more now." Much of his enthusiasm comes from a quasi-spiritual cause of his own: the development and commercialization of civilian space travel.
Aldrin now works out of a Beverly Hills, Calif., apartment he shares with his second wife, Lois. The telephone rings constantly.
"Buzz is an enormous business," Lois says, harried. She's an impish firebrand in a black sweatshirt and loud tights. "He works as if he were still on assignment for NASA: trying to develop better rockets, a better space station. He's been working 15 years on a way to get to Mars.
"He's found his niche," she concedes. "Which is space."
