Buzz Aldrin: Mission to Mars | Nat Geo Live

we want to build into a two-planet species to be able to go down in history with a tremendous heritage of charting a course for this great nation to be the one that leads humanity to the two planet system by permanence on Mars this is great I appreciate everybody coming tonight and they we worked pretty hard on this book and I had more hair and my beard was black when I started this but we worked it out and we had a great time putting this together it was a challenging timeline and you know when you do what the future it's pretty exciting so and this guy's full of full throttle vision about where we're going so it was a real treat to do this book but I think you know if you have to start anywhere it's obviously in emblazoned in people's mind and certainly mine is a young guy watching you and Neil come out of the Eagle the lunar module and and frankly I've always wondered why it took you so long to get out because I was wait I had the whole neighborhood was fixated on this I kept promising when they were gonna get out there pretty soon what what was that I was told not to open that hatch after Neil until 22 and a half minutes as that I had to wait inside and look out and watch him okay go down and so he went out there with a little shovel I don't know how he got the shovel I did send the camera down to him on a very sophisticated machine it had a little pulley here and a rope on it and there kind of wet the best Johnson Space Center oh yeah very advanced great way I saw him grumbling around picking up this sample and I figured this could be pretty easy look how easy it is for him to do that so you get down there so then 22 and a half minutes expired and now I back out of the hatch and then I remember the checklist very carefully it said partially close the hatch so I said you know I'm gonna partially close the hatch being careful not to lock it on my way out yeah not so funny they're hidden a handle on what was that like I mean when you think about it today you said magnificent desolation what do you remember about I I really couldn't describe it other than the word desolate it was the most lifeless thing I really ever seen you know I've been around the ocean and looked at a lot of sand but but this was all kind of one color and as shadows were black and the colors were different shades of gray little Rollie pollie indentations previous craters and absolutely no sign of life we knew there was no air but you look at this sky and with the sunlight it was sort of a velvet black he could look out and see the horizon curved away and if there was a boulder out there you could see it it was that clear but what I knew about it then and then what I saw not a good place to set up housekeeping okay we're gonna stay in this little machine and then we're gonna get the hell out of here and get back home do you feel the Space Station you know it's a hundred and seven billion dollar investment sixteen countries have worked hard to put that together we've got astronauts in there right now do you think it's been being used or underutilized now for that shuttle system it never quite made 40 flights a year or some people even promised 50 flights a year nine one year most of the time six flights not the safest thing the reason why the shuttle had to be designed that way is because the previous program that was going to follow Apollo that we really wanted was miss managed let me see and we had to cancel it and we had just scurry and put together a shuttle system you're a big proponent of space tourism space tourism with this particular vehicle just last recently had its first engine test yes well you know how a lot of this started after we got the shuttle about going I worked with some United Airlines pilots who wanted the airline to buy some shuttles so that they could fly shuttles instead of 727s we're getting kind of bored but of course the idea would be that they would put in the cargo bay our number of tourists but driven driven is but this particular vehicles this is Richard Branson you've met him and talked to him a lot this is a six passenger to pilot suborbital right vehicle how important is suborbital to get people acclimated to the true experience of orbital flight is it a well you not ask the master marketer Sir Richard yeah it'll tell you that you're going into space now not only that you're gonna be called and asked for not man that's pretty close yeah yeah now some people claim Richard of course thought that well we we can do this orbital now and people can look out these big windows and pretty soon we'll be able to go from one place to another I don't think Richard understood what ballistic missiles do but they they fire and they go and they cover a long distance yeah okay yeah but they also go pretty damn fast going up and man do they come pretty fast coming down it's not a good system for point-to-point transportation now there's another private sector activity that's interesting is Robert Bigelow is a hotel operator but has spent quite a few millions of dollars now investing in and double structures you visited and just got to long ago his wife is wondering where all the money's going but he's definitely he's already launched two small prototypes of this inflatable structure what's your view of habitation modules in this approach this is a private sector initiative he's spending his own money well my first impression was when you launch them everything is gathered around the central part and and when you want to use them like Skylab or something you expand it and of course Skylab was launched that way and it had a lot of things mounted on the inside some things on the outside you can't do that if the thing is going to be squished down and then go out like this so I was a little skeptical about the whole idea but then I saw the ambition that this guy has and how he has developed the central part of it after it expands and it appears that he can probably get a good bit done he's got a great ambition he wants he's put a couple of small ones up he's gonna build sort of a space station then he wants to put these inflatables on the moon I said to Bill Bob I said how are you gonna get the people there he said something like taken from a movie I think build it and they will come let's start I'm still wondering now they're gonna yeah let's talk about America's space policy you used to looted the flag on standing on the moon and here we are decades after that historic moment and are you again you're getting back to this unified space policy what has to happen in your mind to do the mission and missions to Mars that are needed to do what we write about in the book of long-term habitation of that Red Planet well President Bush somehow was talked into return to this time to stay well it didn't come together very well but that was because of the implementation and then the succeeding years I've been thinking about the capabilities of other nations to be able to do this and why would we want to get into a race with them when we already won the race now the alternative is forget to move I think about that for a while and that's not too good an idea we sure invested an awful lot and learning an awful lot about the moon maybe we can bring nations together instead of each one doing what they want to do bring them all together and we'll be the country that brings them together in an international lunar Development Authority and we need to test some of our interplanetary habitation modules why don't we test one on the moon the temperature goes very hot - very cold so we're testing this and we're also looking at how good it handles radiation and is it doing the job that it's supposed to do we sure hope that it is because now it's the hub and we got a safe Japanese to land it for us and then robotic ly we did the best we could because we're gonna do that same thing on the moon of Mars focus now but that's not just landing one thing we want to build a base on the moon so let's take some of Bigelow's inflatables and sprinkle them around for them around this thing it is giving us what we need to then do exactly the same thing from the moon to Mars on the surface of Mars I do know how to get to Mars and bring the spacecraft back empty so it can take other people sounds like one-way trip so that but it's not well it is but I call it permanence yeah and we have our minutes you have curiosity rover this thing's a ton took a ton of money to get it there but it's really doing some spectacular things and one of the things that we've written in the book how familiar it's making Mars to the public try to explain a little bit more about what you talk about in the book about long-term permanence on Mars what why would why would we want to do that as a country what is it that you feel is the sparkplug behind something like that and how the hard part is getting the American public to be interested in it these are all very complicated questions but it's definitely why go to the moon yeah it's there okay somebody's going to go there eventually let me talk a little bit about these Rovers that are there yes just for an example there were two Rovers before curiosity Spirit and Opportunity opposite sides of Mars put there about 10 years ago supposed to last 90 days they were a little better than that one of them kind of pooped out after five years and the other ones still go on now the program manager for this from Bernal works with JPL Steve Squyres said verbally but that put it in writing that there are two Rovers that were working for five years with one day's instructions and then they were trying to do what the one day's instructions were but they were very conservative because it didn't know whether it was going to tip over the hill or not when it began to get close the instructions had stopped don't do anything we'll figure it out well this is pretty slow activities so slow that he said what these two Rovers had done in five years could have been done in one week if we had human intelligence and orbit around Mars it's a picture by a friend of our standard I always look at this picture and I keep thinking okay what kind of advice would you give somebody that's like you did coming down a ladder and then putting a foot on the surface of Mars the for the first time is there any kind of advice I tried to get him to cough this up in the book we just never got there but don't trip on the rocks it might tear the spacesuit well it's gonna bring any seamstress yeah a long with us but I mean it's the distance the the idea of communication they're pretty much on their own this is not a Mission Control in your ear do this Buzz pick this up do that they're going to be pretty much isolated on their own for the first time right we got a lot of learning to do now whether this makes sense or not I thought it did let's send three people to focus year and a half okay before we send them they've got a return capability of another interplanetary spacecraft so they stay there for for a year and a half while things are placed down there and they assemble and so I'm going to be generous I'll bring them back and send another three for a year and a half I'm going to be so generous that I'll bring them back and send another three the third group now but this time the third group has a lander with them and ranae get through putting this base together on Mars the International Mars base they know more about what that thing is and anybody here on earth permanence is what we really want anyway we want to build into a two-planet species and just think of the history of humans on earth being written hundred thousands of years and the let's do let's do some questions and the answers here I'm sure we've got a scat of things and I actually I want and II wanted to voice your opinion okay so so dad you we you know you have over 250 pages a great idea that in the book there's lots of really cool stuff and I think you're going to be there in 2016 yeah and you're gonna be on Air Force One again let's just have you got your vision in 15 seconds though what are you gonna tell them is the reason he should commit to going to Mars I hope you tell your successor that you have done all you could during your administration to help your successor of the same party to be able to go down in history with a tremendous heritage of charting a course for this great nation to be the one that leads humanity to a two planet system by permanence on Mars and if you haven't be where things are gonna happen that you didn't expect gentlemen oh yeah the last row here Yeah right there if you offered to go to Mars and stay permanently would you no way can't you see how much more valuable I am right here you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 137,526

Rating: 4.6669235 out of 5

Keywords: spacelist, journalist, writer, NG Live, curiosity rover, cooperation, NASA, Richard Branson, NGLive, Andy Aldrin, Skylab, lecture, moon, Endeavour, Nat Geo Live, space, Leonard David, tourism, National Geographic Live, mars, Apollo, book, Nat Geo Events, National Geographic Live!, policy, permanence, international space station, future, Robert Bigelow, astronaut, politics, Nat Geo Live!, Opportunity, unity, Neil Armstrong, Spirit, desolate, Buzz Aldrin, space shuttle, author

Id: fsQvqmN0PYU

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2013