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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon back in 1969 and even lived on the moon for a day. Humans can't live on the moon or any other planet really besides Earth and maybe eventually, Mars. Here with me now to make the case for a realistic exploration of Mars is the astronaut and rocket scientist himself, Buzz Aldrin, along with Marianne Dyson, a physicist and NASA flight engineer. He's written a book for kids on this topic called Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet. Hi Buzz Aldrin. Welcome back to WNYC.

Buzz Aldrin: Hi. Good morning to you and all those listening in. Yes, people will make a home on the moon just like the space station, but they'll-

Brian: On the moon?

Buzz: -stay there, on the moon, for maybe six months. Not yet. We went there six out of seven times successfully. What do we have to show for it? 4% of our discretionary funds it's dropped down despite the shuttle and the space station to less than 0.5%. For more than the last 10 years, we can't do hardly anything much less regain leadership in space and go to places like Mars. We know how to do that. We know when we can do it, by 2040. We have a plan. We just need the public to not be so apathetic about things and generate up enthusiasm.

Brian: Give it a shot. You don't want to explore Mars merely but to colonize it for permanent settlements?

Buzz: I think most people when they look into the future, Stephen Hawking, me, Buzz Aldrin, and others, many, it just is that we haven't convinced the members of Congress who say, "The US government would never send people in a one-way trip to die on the planet." Come on now. How in the world would you build up a settlement? a colony? The pilgrims on the Mayflower did not wait around Plymouth Rock for the return trip. Come on. They came here to settle.

Brian: Is your motivation that we're on the way to destroying the Earth, so we need a backup planet?

Buzz: Oh, come on. Now, Stephen Hawking observed, and he's a pretty smart guy, that we had maybe 200 years where he felt we should establish a growing habitation other than the Earth.

Brian: Why?

Buzz: I talked to him and I said, "Gee, I think we can do that in 20, 30 years."

Brian: Out of curiosity?

Buzz: Of course, I would say pestilence, Ebola, nuclear conflagration, nuclear winter by Carl Sagan's terminology, impact.

Brian: Global warming.

Buzz: I don't want to get into that.

Brian: Okay.

Buzz: Right now, we need solar system warming. We need Mars warming. If we can take all the things that some people think we're doing wrong here and do them at Mars and change the climate to warm it up, I'd love that.

Brian: Listeners, anything you always wanted to ask Buzz Aldrin about Mars or anything else, but you didn't have him over to dinner and you weren't on the moon with him, 212433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. You wanted to finish your thought?

Buzz: Yes. Where was I?

Brian: About pestilence and nuclear winter.

Buzz: Now listen, the dinosaurs did not have a space program. When there was a big impact on the Yucatan 60 million years ago, whenever it was, killed off the dinosaurs and made room here for humans to begin to evolve.

Brian: What would it cost to go to Mars and the way you want to go to Mars?

Buzz: It is unaffordable. It is doable. It is not trillions of dollars or anything like that. It is progressively internationally cooperatively, we don't want to compete with China at the moon or anywhere else. We want to cooperate and even more than that, we want to assist all the nations in several bases. I have a design that not only is good for one nation, America, to use, it's good for four, five, six nations. No one else-

Brian: Your vision is no space race like we had versus the Soviets in the 1960s?

Buzz: I hope so or I hope not. It's not productive to do that, unless we open the door a little bit to cooperation. During the Cold War, we rewarded because of Dayton and the ABM treaty the Soviet Union, by offering to do Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, the Cold War. Look at the legacy that that has resulted in. Nations and the international nations, unfortunately, a Congressman vetoed the idea of inviting a Chinese [unintelligible 00:06:22] to come to the International Space Station. You know how absurd it is, NASA, by law, cannot even talk to the Chinese space people? That's absurd.

A nation in history has never been able to succeed in, "Oh, naughty, naughty. You dictatorship. You shouldn't be doing those things." That's not going to work. We're cutting off our own nose to spite ourselves. We need to open the door, reward the Chinese for opening up the sea lanes and the air routes in the South China Sea-

Brian: Go to Mars together.

Buzz: - let's go to the moon. First help them go to the moon and let's help our budget to not spend too much anymore than we need to at the moon, to get that cooperation and to learn the things that are essential, to be able to talk to occupy Mars.

Brian: Vincent in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Hello?

Vincent: Sir. Aldrin, although you're only a few years older than me, you have been one of my heroes for life. Thank you for everything. Thank you for your service.

Buzz: I got a few more years left. I hope you do.

Vincent: [chuckles] My question relates to the voyage itself. How large a spacecraft, how many people would be onboard you anticipate. I know it's a long trip. we would be able to move around. Growing up in the '50s, of course, we had all of the Disney stuff which talks about the settlements but very little on getting from here to there.

Buzz: Well, we know how to get from here to there. We've been sending robots, spacecraft. We have sent many more spacecraft to the Red Planet, Mars, than any other nation.

I hope others like India will have success. The UAE, I hope they have success for their 50th anniversary of formation. We need to help those people do that and expand our opportunities. What two rovers have done in five years could be done in one week if we had human intelligence in orbit around Mars.

The first thing we do is to get or to plan on getting people to the moon of Mars. Now, about five or six years before we start sending habitation modules from the Earth, it is painstakingly slow to communicate back and forth to that robot that's going to move these modules. If we didn't do it from Earth, then the people at Mars would have to spend their time, but we want them to just do the final connections. If they're successful in the electrical power, the water supply, the gardens, robotically and join together.

You asked maybe because this cycler which consists of three habitats that are on the surface, hooked together to make the cycler and its power and its propulsion and other accommodations for the crew because we can resupply the cycler as it swings by the Earth. The only thing we have to intercept it with is a lander, two landers, three landers, for redundancy.

We get the landers and their propulsion system together. We refuel them from that fuel depot close to the moon from the water ice in very cold craters. We're now refueled and they're tied together but we can have explosive bulbs, so the one propulsion fails, we'll still get to Mars. Another one could fail.

NASA, the big companies do not have redundancy for that very important departure velocity change. If you don't get 100%, you're not going to get to Mars. 95%, 80%, we went to the moon on a free-return trajectory. If propulsion or other problems, we were not in more than a 10-day orbit, but if you don't get 85% of what you're looking for, you're not coming back to Earth, you're in a sun or-

Brian: I get it. You have to have a very reliable landing mechanism. John-

Buzz: For redundancy.

Brian: Yes, which helps build the reliability. John in Manhattan you're on WNYC with Buzz Aldrin. Hi.

John: Hi, Buzz. Big fan of yours. I just want to ask you what you thought about maybe Tesla's work with free energy and even maybe Wilhelm Reich's work with Orgone energy, and if that might ever come into play with trying to get into other places like anti-gravity or things like that.

Buzz: Yes, I'm familiar with anti-gravity nuclear propulsion, none of those will get us to the stars, gravity waves may. I have a good friend who is maybe leading the US research into gravity waves and he says the Chinese are significantly ahead of us. He's cooperating with them. Gravity waves may get us to Alpha Centauri and beyond. That's my science fiction story except they came here first.

Brian: One little inconvenience, I did read in your book that humans can't breathe the air on Mars. What's the work around?

Buzz: There's no air. The pressure is 100,000 feet here and it's carbon dioxide. There has to be global warming but we grow plants. What do they eat beside dirt? Carbon dioxide. What do they produce? Oxygen.

Brian: You would start planting on Mars but that would take, of course, a very long time. In the meantime, live in oxygen chambers?

Buzz: Pressurized habitats, yes with certainly more than enough breathable oxygen. The water, the ice that is there through electricity power from the sun nuclear reactor, we can separate the hydrogen and the oxygen and that's good rocket fuel but it's also nice breathable oxygen and it's water. We need to drink that stuff.

Brian: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin with us. His new book along with Marianne Dyson, a physicist and NASA flight engineer is a kids' book called Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet. He's giving us the adult version on the radio right now and here's a skeptic. Benjamin in Morristown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Benjamin.

Benjamin: I am certainly a skeptic regarding cost. I think we need some priorities. I don't think we have thought that through in a lot of things that we've done in space. There are too far too many things on Earth that we need to address first and they will probably never be addressed entirely successfully.

Buzz: How much percentage of discretionary funds would you like to solve all the problems here on Earth? 100%? We want to sit back and watch the Chinese populate Mars? We want to sit back and watch the Russians populate Mars? That's not exciting or inspiring for-

Benjamin: If we're doing it because it's romantic and sexy, which is certainly true, or only because it's competitive with Russia or China which might be true, I'm not sure that that competition is going to continue forever. This kind of [crosstalk] it's going to take probably many, many decades.

Buzz: We compete at the design level and we cooperate and execute together. That's a principle. We went to the moon all by ourselves mostly because we advanced our technology. To put together the capabilities of all nations to be able to populate Mars, we'll require all nations to advance their technology. Not one nation can do it all by themselves.

Brian: Let me get one more question in here from a listener. This one I think is going to be about the past rather than the future. Michael in the East Village, you're on WNYC with Buzz Aldrin. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Yes, how are you?

Brian: Okay.

Michael: Hi, Buzz.

Buzz: Hi, Michael.

Michael: I've always been inspired by the story Tom Wolfe wrote about you singlehandedly inventing the process of working in space before there was an unknown how you would even turn a wrench. I've wondered if you could comment on his description or just that period where it was really unknown how you would actually accomplish anything in space.

Buzz: Well, he's very generous. My very good friend, Ed White from West Point here behind me, did the first American space walk and we had to coax him back in. Alexei Leonov was the first human being to exit the spacecraft and he had a very difficult time getting back in again, so did Ed. We fixed the hatch so it was easier to close because Ed was a pretty tall guy.

It was Ed, a fighter squadron mate in Germany who coaxed me into applying for the astronaut program. He'd gone through test pilot training and I hadn't. He got picked, but I had to convince NASA that my rendezvous work at MIT and my fighter pilot experience qualified me to become an astronaut. I wasn't going to fly in the Gemini program with rendezvous but it took a tragedy. My back door neighbor, Charlie Bassett was killed in an airplane accident, and shuffling the crews allowed Jim Lovell and I to back up that mission 9 and then fly on Gemini 12. My scuba diving experience caused me to welcome eagerly the suggestion that we train in neutral buoyancy in a swimming pool to simulate the floating in space of zero gravity. That worked wonderfully.

Brian: Is it feasible for commercial enterprises to lead the way to Mars? Is there enough private sector incentive like for Elon Musk maybe and his company SpaceX? Musk was on Stephen Colbert's New Late Night Show last night.

Buzz: I missed him because I was watching myself.

Brian: On?

Buzz: On comedy special with Larry Wilmore. That was funny.

Brian: Oh, you were the competition?

Buzz: That was very comic.

Brian: Let me play you 30 seconds of what you missed. Elon Musk with Stephen Colbert talking about how he thinks we can make Mars inhabitable.

Elon Musk: Eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet.

Stephen Colbert: How would you do that?

Elon: You'd warm it up. Just warm it up. If you want to-

Stephen: With a blanket? Or with what? How would you warm Mars up? It's a long way away from the sun.

Elon: There's a fast way and a slow way.

Stephen: Okay. Give me the fast way.

Elon: The fast way is drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.

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Stephen: You're a supervillain. That's what a supervillain does.

Brian: I wish you all could have seen the look on Buzz Aldrin's face when Elon Musk just said, "Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles."

Buzz: Oh well, in my science fiction story, that's what they did to darken the surface so that the surface of Mars would receive more solar energy, but I have a much better idea than that. We will ask Al Gore to tell us how to warm up Mars because he seems to be an expert in that.

Brian: On planetary warming?

Buzz: Global warming because it's climate change. Climate change has been taking place for millions of years.

Brian: What's the slow way? Do you know? That's the slow way? Just a lot of carbon emissions?

Buzz: Humans seem to warm up things with their friendship with each other and the need to keep warm in the wintertime. Now, the moon gets very cold at night, 14 days of night. Not Mars. Their day is 24 hours and 39 minutes, just a little longer than ours.

Brian: Last question, can you clear up once and for all, did Neil Armstrong say, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."? Or did he say, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," and the "a" got lost in transmission?

Buzz: What he said is so great and somebody asked me what I thought about this guy that jumped out of a balloon, opened a parachute. I said, "That's a giant leap for Red Bull." Now, Neil said, "Small step for man, giant leap for the rest of us."

Brian: "Man" not himself?

Buzz: Mankind. Yes, he was referring to a human being there.

Brian: A man? Did he say the word "a"?

Buzz: I don't know. I was pretty close. I didn't hear it, but my hearing is getting worse. I have hearing aids, so maybe I couldn't hear him say that, but I usually agree with whatever my commander says.

Brian: Whatever it was it was right. It's been a real honor. Buzz Aldrin, who along with Marianne Dyson a physicist and NASA flight engineer, has written a children's book now called Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet.

Buzz: Yes, and I did a book before that called Mission to Mars which was for adults and it is background information for my new plan, Cycling Pathways to Occupy Mars in my Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at Florida Tech in Melbourne, Florida, laborly assisted by Purdue University.

Brian: Thank you so much. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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