RocketSTEM Issue #8 - July 2014 | Page 77

crew of Gemini X and the crews were already assigned and in training for XI and XII. The backup crew on X would be the prime crew on XIII, but there wasn’t a XIII. But things happened, and obviously continued to happen, from the time I crawled out of my crib and got in trouble for getting into the refrigerator.” pilot alongside Commnand Pilot Jim Lovell who was on his second demonstrate that an astronaut could successfully conduct a spacewalk. A task which had proven to be problematic to both the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts in prior missions. Aldrin had trained for the mission using what was then a novel technique of practicing his Earth. The training proved to be so successful that it has been a staple of astronaut training ever since. During the mission itself, Aldrin performed a two-hour 20-minute spacewalk while tethered and was able to perform a number of extravehicular activities. “My education plus my Air Force directly to my MIT thesis on manned orbital rendezvous. Now what’s a Well, it’s actually quite similar when space rendezvous that has been set up by selected maneuvers to reach the correct point, at the correct time, with the correct velocity. So an intercept can then be made that is quite standard and familiar and useful in an optimum backup fashion. “Following the Moon landing, I eventually applied that orbital and the backside of the Moon. Since NASA did not have a full appreciation of that then, I switched to Mars. It’s kind of hard to discover something that’s there, you just haven’t found it yet, but in a pioneering discovery I found that there is a cycling orbit between Earth and Mars that continually rotates back and forth with the only interval of Mars access, or departing Mars, which is every www.RocketSTEM .org Buzz Aldrin holds up a model of the lunar lander during a press conference to announce the crew members for improved by my inspiration and work with Purdue University to a dual synodic period cycling spacecraft, which for simplicity is every other two of these cycling spacecraft to transport humans from the vicinity of the Earth to a Mars landing in about the standard international way of transporting crews from the Earth to Mars. “It makes possible the dream of a permanent human presence there. “I’m keeping very current on all the changes that might have an affect on phasing this system in so that potentially the next president in July of 2019 -– on the 50th anniversary – could make some statement that I believe that within two decades the United States can lead an international human permanence on the planet Mars. Which the more i think about it will be a giant leap of mankind to be remembered for hundreds and thousands of years.” Aldrin admires the work toward launching humans to Mars being done by Elon Musk and SpaceX, as well as the recent successful test of NASA’s Low Density Supersonic Decelerator technology in this skies above Hawaii. “Not only his organization, but I could say Elon himself, has been designer of excellence and as a rocket developer with spacecraft follow-ons that appear to be potentially very pioneering at this time. But after Curiosity from JPL endured seven minutes of terror – or suspense or whatever you might call it – it dawned on people that to land on Mars in a way similar to how we land on Earth from space would require considerable attention be paid to the thinner atmosphere at Mars. To land like on Earth would require a much larger heat shield called an adjustable or an expandable ablator, descent rocket to land. “If the entry for landing at Mars can be perhaps a bit more like our descent to land on the Moon, rather than an entry into the thick atmosphere of Earth, if that proves to be true, then it will result in what some might call a game changer. We may 75 75