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• BUZZ ALDRIN RACE INTO SPACE VISOR BREAKS MOVIE

He's ridden the "vomit comet," the jet that uses parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness among passengers.

BUZZ ALDRIN RACE INTO SPACE VISOR BREAKS MOVIE

Standing next to Aldrin was movie director James Cameron. The moon man has a thing about moons, maybe. "I'm convinced that when we go to Mars, we should go to the moons of Mars first," Aldrin said. We were just brainstorming in the hallway. And now he had ideas about where we go next: "A logical step is to visit Earth-crossing asteroids." He's treated almost as a deity - for gosh sakes, he walked on the freakin' moon. The presence of someone like Aldrin gives any space event a touch of magic. You kept expecting them to say, like the Gene Kranz character in the movie "Apollo 13," "Failure is not an option." They were all exuding optimism, bouncing around as though gravity had weakened. The Disney crowd ranged from NASA bureaucrats to freelance rocketeers to hard-core space buffs. "Human beings are headed into the cosmos," the president of the United States declared last year. How good it is to have a vision! The space people had demanded a vision for years, something better than this round-and-round-and-round business with the space shuttle and the space station, both stuck in a major rut in LEO - low Earth orbit. It's called the Vision for Space Exploration. This is the president's directive, embraced by NASA. The context of the conference was a startling fact: The United States has vowed to send people back to the moon. He is astronaut-size, compact, perhaps even a bit elfin you half expect he'll pull moon dust from his pocket and cast a spell.Īldrin is a space entrepreneur, and he had come to Orlando for a portentous event, the first Space Exploration Conference, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Lockheed Martin and various other firms and organizations with a big stake in space. Aldrin is getting up in years, but he's handsome, tidy, with a shiny little crescent moon pinned to his lapel ("You get that one for coming back," he said).

He was in a ballroom at the Contemporary Resort, the A-frame hotel with the park's monorail running through its center. The images were flickering, fuzzy, dreamlike.īut it was all true, and now, decades later, here was the man himself: Buzz Aldrin had come to Disney World! The astronauts cut a ghostly outline, as though the camera had double vision. Some remained convinced years later that it was all a hoax. The future had arrived ballistically, so fast people weren't sure they could trust their senses. Night had fallen across much of the United States as people crowded around the television to watch Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

Nothing moved but his fellow astronaut, already bounding around.Īnd in that moment, ready to step on the moon, Buzz Aldrin described what he saw: "Magnificent desolation." His footsteps would remain in the packed powder virtually forever, for this was a place without erosion. The shadows seemed almost supernaturally black, bereft of the scattered light seen in Earth shadows. The horizon loomed just a mile or so away, and it curved. Through his visor he surveyed an alien world. He climbed from the lunar module and paused on the final step.