Aldrin Says U.S. Space Policy Adrift : ’69 Moon-Walker Wants to See a Few More Giant Leaps

Twenty years. A blink of time in the universe but a fourth of a lifetime for most mortals.

Buzz Aldrin, 59, sits at a desk in his Laguna Beach home, windows opening on a stunning view of the Emerald Bay coast of the Pacific Ocean. To his right, a wall of pictures and artwork document his career as an Air Force officer and astronaut.

“July 16 will be the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch,” Aldrin said. “I’ll be there, at the Cape, at the exact time of liftoff, to mark that anniversary.”

Four days later, Aldrin will be in Washington. In the company of Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, Aldrin will stand with President Bush at the Smithsonian Institution. Along with the rest of the world, they will recall the great adventure: the day Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon, and Aldrin, 18 minutes later, the second, while Collins soared in lunar orbit above them.

Twenty years after the moonwalk, Aldrin is clear-eyed, robust, physically fit. But he is clearly an angry man--an explorer who is enraged at his country for failing to advance beyond the moon. Indeed, he is angry that the United States seems to have abandoned the moon itself.

“America won the first moon race,” Aldrin wrote in his new book, “Men from Earth.” “But it is possible we will become a second-rate space power in the next century.”

In an interview, Aldrin repeatedly hit on the theme of America’s squandering of the potential of the moon. It can serve as the U.S. launching pad to Mars, he said. The moon can provide “an ample supply of the isotope helium-3” to fuel nuclear fusion reactors that “would be almost completely devoid of radioactivity,” he said.

The moon, Aldrin said, could also be used to collect solar energy and beam it earthward--a cheap, renewable source of power.

Aldrin’s blue eyes flash. He jabs a finger at the interviewer.

“We went six years without even flying one American into orbit, while the Soviets continued to perfect Soyuz I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and then (the space station) Mir,” Aldrin said. “And we still haven’t put an operating location in space.”

There is already a great, logical place for the United States to build a permanent, human-staffed space station, he said. “It’s called the moon.”

America needs a thriving, active base on the moon, he said. “Initially, we need to build up, to set out, the facilities that then can serve man (on Earth) with lunar resources,” Aldrin said. “We need information from telescopes to be placed on the far side of the moon. We need transmission bases and manned scientific investigations just like when they put people in Antarctica. We don’t just put machines in Antarctica to send back lots of information. We put people down there.”

When Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin blasted off from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida, Aldrin was generally described as the threesome’s most accomplished scientist. An intense, driven man, he speaks tersely, using few adjectives. When he stepped onto the moon’s surface 20 years ago, however, he was moved to say: “Beautiful! beautiful! Magnificent desolation.” Later, Aldrin unfurled an American flag, planted the staff into the tough lunar surface and then gave the Stars and Stripes a snappy West Point salute. An estimated 500 million people around the world watched television coverage of the historic moment.

In his book, Aldrin said his most nervous moments came during the flag ceremony. “I suddenly felt stage fright,” he wrote. “Since childhood, I’d been fascinated by explorers planting flags on strange shores. Now I was about to do the same thing, but on the most exotic shore mankind had ever reached.”

Before stepping onto the lunar surface, Aldrin performed a private religious ceremony inside the module. Using a small Communion kit given him by his Presbyterian pastor, Aldrin conducted a remembrance of Christ’s Last Supper. “I gave thanks,” Aldrin wrote in his book.

Life has brought hard landings for the former astronaut since his historic moonwalk. Aldrin, who bought a condominium and moved to Orange County about 5 1/2 years ago, had divorced twice before he met and married Lois Driggs Aldrin and moved to her Emerald Bay home. He has battled depression and overcome an addiction to alcohol. Aldrin has also encountered career frustration. Instead of another space job after Apollo 11, Aldrin was assigned to command the test flight school at Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles.

“I went back to the Air Force and tried to find a home there,” Aldrin said. “It was a challenging assignment, but inappropriate really for me to command a test pilot school. I’d never had any formal training in test piloting. Also, I’d been away from the military 11 years--3 1/2 years while getting my doctor’s degree at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and 7 1/2 years at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). A much better assignment would have been at the Air Force Academy, as commandant of cadets. But they (in the Air Force) had other ideas in mind.”

Aldrin was born in Montclair, N.J., and christened Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. He legally changed his name to Buzz, his lifelong nickname, about 10 years ago. The nickname was his older sister’s fuzzy way of calling him “baby brother.”

He graduated in 1951 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, third in his class. Aldrin was a fighter pilot during the Korean War and credited with shooting down two MIG-15 jets. After earning his doctorate from MIT, for which he wrote on orbital rendezvous techniques in space, he was tapped for the astronaut program in 1963.

Despite his long years in the military, Aldrin now speaks acidly of the Air Force. “I’ve seen that the Air Force really doesn’t know how to treat space people,” he said. “They don’t look after their promotions, their livelihood, anywhere near the way the Navy does.”

He retired with the rank of colonel in March, 1972. By then, Aldrin was experiencing periods of depression, which he candidly discussed in his first book, “Return to Earth.”

Now, years later, as he sits at his home in Laguna Beach, Aldrin says alcoholism was at the root of the depression.

“The last person to be aware of the seriousness and progression of the disease of alcoholism is the person who’s got it,” Aldrin said. “So I was unable to really come to grips (with) what was troubling me at the time. And it was not depression or anxiety or nervousness. It was inherited, genetic traits (toward alcoholism) that I just fostered and encouraged, and thank God, the trauma of being put on a pedestal, and trying to live up to that, accelerated the progression (of the disease) so that I had a chance, before I was too old, to go through a recovery process. So all of that brought about this kind of turnaround and forced me to make that kind of recovery in ’75 and ’76. I had three years of stumbling around, but now it’s 10 1/2 years” of continuous sobriety.

“Let me tell it more simply,” his wife, Lois, said. “What would you do at the age of 40, if you’d worked for this fantastic career where you reached the top? You’d want to go on! But what if you found suddenly that you couldn’t go on in that career--that your progress and your ideas in life were stopped? So who wouldn’t get depressed?”

America has made poor use of its former astronauts, Aldrin said. “I don’t think we’ve done very well as far as establishing a rapport between all former astronauts on an annual basis,” he said. “We haven’t got a unity. We’re taken advantage of because of that. We’ve played one against the other. We don’t get the privileges that I think our status deserves, and it’s because we’re not unified.

“You know, I really know an awful lot about what we ought to do in the future in space,” he said. “But I’m not consulted when decisions are made. I think I should be.”

Aldrin’s permanent status as the second man to walk on the moon has led to endless interview questions and a suggestion in his book that he was dissatisfied with the decision. But Aldrin pointed out in the interview that Armstrong was both commander of the lunar expedition and had seniority because he was picked earlier for training as an astronaut.

“I’d have a hard time explaining why the junior member of the third group (of astronauts), the co-pilot, was given the privilege of saying the historic words of first putting his foot on the moon and then looking back and seeing my commander in the lunar module waiting his turn to come down to the surface,” Aldrin said.

He said he is not bitter. “Why should I be? But how do I deny being bitter about it? How the hell can you answer that one except by saying, ‘Listen, honestly, I’m a military man, I understand seniority.’ ”

Aldrin, an international space consultant and lecturer since his military retirement, is now finding life good. He likes living in Orange County because “it’s got growth and tremendous opportunity.” He also enjoys being near the tranquility of the ocean.

His three grown children--a daughter and two sons--visit frequently. ‘EXCITING TIME’

Orange County people tell of working for moon trip. Page 3