Buzz @ Space Camp

[WesL]

Compliments of The Huntsville Times / Alabama Live



Aldrin thrills Space Campers

Retired astronaut surprises kids, talks about teamwork

03/06/03

By JOHN ANDERSON
Times Staff Writer [email protected]


Retired NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin talked about teamwork, but his eager young audience at the Alabama [U.S.] Space & Rocket Center wanted to know about something more dramatic: flying to the moon.

"Anybody have any idea what you're learning here?" Aldrin asked the Space Campers, ages 9-12, as they kept strobe-like flashes bouncing off him with their disposable cameras during his 15-minute talk.


"How about teamwork? As was once pointed out to me, there's no 'I' in teamwork," said Aldrin, who flew with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins on Apollo 11. "How would you like to be on an island by yourself? It'd be kind of boring. You couldn't tell jokes.''

His chance talk to Space Campers occurred because he was speaking to executives attending a Space Camp corporate training program.

Aldrin, 73, used his two trips into space - he flew on Gemini 12 with Jim Lovell, the final Gemini mission that preceded the Apollo missions - as a metaphor for mankind's yearning "to go to places where nobody else has gone before."

"You're going on a journey right now on what somebody has called Spaceship Earth," said Aldrin. "You made a good step by coming here. It's a place to learn teamwork; to go back home and do it back there."

Aldrin ended his talk with a quip.

"You thought I was going to talk about walking on the moon, didn't you?" he said.

And the first question after he fin ished speaking? "How did you like walking on the moon?"

Aldrin said that isn't easy to answer.

"I've written a couple of books trying to explain that," he said.

He described the odd sensation of walking on a landscape that has one-sixth the gravity of Earth; of being able to see the horizon's curve because virtually no atmosphere obscures the view; of looking up and, instead of seeing a uniform yellow moon, the vividly colored Earth.

The moon is a place of "magnificent desolation," he said, "a very inhospitable place'' that alternatively cooks in 14 days of sunlight and freezes in a similar period of darkness.

One questioner asked him how it was decided that Armstrong would make the first step onto the moon's surface.

NASA brass didn't make a final decision on that "hot potato," which reportedly has been a sore point with Aldrin, until he pressed the issue about two months before Apollo 11's liftoff in July 1969.

The decision for Armstrong to claim the honor as the first man on the moon was the correct one, Aldrin said, because Armstrong was the mission's commander.

Aldrin alluded to sporadic progress in the nation's manned space program since the glory days of Apollo, repeating Armstrong's line when he stepped onto the moon: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

"We're still waiting for the 'giant step' part of it," said Aldrin, "but we're going to get there."

After his visit with the space campers, Aldrin went to a conference room at the Space & Rocket Center to speak to executives of a corporation attending an adult version of Space Camp designed to improve teamwork in the workplace. A center spokesman said the corporation requested its identity not be disclosed.

[sts205cdr]

WOW!!! I've always thought about recommending a corporate trip to Huntsville, I'll pass this along...

Thanks, Wes!!!

--John

[Boomerang]

Wow i wish i could have been there for that.

[Smiley]

He spoke for about 2 hours in the meeting. I was most interesting and a treat to be there.

[Boomerang]

Well i had a chance to meet him last yea unfortunately he came down with the flue and couldnt come. And they never managed to reschedule him.