Buzz Aldrin ieri ha risposto alle domande di tutti su Reddit

di Paolo Attivissimo



Ieri Buzz Aldrin, pilota del modulo lunare di Apollo 11 e uno dei primi due esseri umani a camminare su un altro corpo celeste insieme a Neil Armstrong, ha risposto in diretta alle domande degli internauti su Reddit. Questa è una sintesi della discussione, che trovate in forma integrale qui.



Is there any experience on Earth that even compares slightly to having been on the Moon?

My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was "Magnificent desolation." The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream - achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate - there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.

Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away - no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up- but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever. That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth.



Mr. Aldrin, do you watch movies about people going to space, if so, which one is your favourite?

I have watched many movies from martians coming to Earth in New Jersey in the form of giant snakes - this was a radio program created by Orson Welles, War of the Worlds - and I've read many science fiction stories, descriptions, by Isaac Asimov, but my favorite of course is Arthur C. Clarke. So 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then later on, I managed to arrange a cruise ship departing from Sri Lanka where Clarke lived, and I was able to stay with him, talking about many, many things in the past. I wrote a book along with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, called First on the Moon, and the epilogue was written by Arthur C. Clarke. When I wrote my book of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a one page forward that was OUTSTANDING, absolutely, as he praised our ingenuity and imagination. And when we visited, we talked about a treasure he had discovered in the ocean, and we both hoped in the future that he and I could scuba dive and perhaps retrieve some of that treasure. That never happened, unfortunately.

I thought that the movie Gravity, the depiction of people moving around in zero gravity, was really the best I have seen. The free-falling, the actions that took place between two people, were very, I think, exaggerated, but probably bent the laws of physics. But to a person who's been in space, we would cringe looking at something that we hoped would NEVER, EVER happen. It's very thrilling for the person who's never been there, because it portrays the hazards, the dangers that could come about if things begin to go wrong, and I think that as I came out of that movie, I said to myself and others, "Sandra Bullock deserves an Oscar."



Do the pictures of space do any justice to the real thing?

Yes, they do. They recall (for me) the actual experience of myself in space - not by words, not by print, but visual reminders, it brings back a very in-depth appreciation. They can be used very well for communicating in speeches, talks, and more to other people who can actually see what i saw and what the camera saw.



Hi Mr. Aldrin!
What advice would you like to give to a lab full of aspiring engineers and astrophysicists?
And...
What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

COCONUT ICE CREAM.
Don't waste your time on beaming people up or down. Instead, consider gravity waves as advanced physics of the universe that could be used to travel interstellar distances. And ENJOY floating in space, rather than being decomposed or recomposed in another location.



What advice can you give to current undergrad aerospace engineering students?

Drive over to the nearest airport, and enroll in flight classes. You will experience the joy of freedom in the air above, as you study the mechanics of how this is made possible by understanding the construction, the laws of motion, the air that can provide lift when it is moved by propulsion through the air, and stay above the gravity pulling the airplane back down to earth.



Hello Mr. Aldrin! Is there anything you regret not getting to do while in space?

On the Gemini mission in space, on my doctoral thesis at MIT, those techniques were used by Gemini, Apollo and even the space shuttle. But I was very disappointed when it looked like I wouldn't even have a chance to fly in the two-man Gemini program! I was not scheduled to be anything other than the back up crew. A tragedy changed that, and I was a backup pilot on Gemini 9, and then I would be on the primary crew for Gemini 12, the final mission. The #1 air force experiment was on Gemini 9 and 12, but its use was unsuccessful on Gemini 9, and so I became the first astronaut to train underwater in neutral buoyancy. I had been a scuba diver 10 years earlier, and knew that training underwater would be very very effective, and I felt very confident of carrying out the difficult procedures to be able to free-maneuver outside the spacecraft with the equipment (this is what George Clooney's character was doing with the jetpack in Gravity) - unfortunately NASA cancelled that experiment.



Col Aldrin, what went through your head when you first looked back and saw the Earth from space?

"Where are the billions and billions and billions of people, on what I'm looking at? We're the only 3 that are not back there."
And we didn't get to celebrate. Because we were out of town.



How did you guys decide who would walk on the moon first. Was it always going to be Neil from the beginning or was there some Rock Paper Scissors matches to decide?

I felt that there was an obligation on my part to put forth the reasons why a commander who had been burdened down with an enormous amount of responsibility and training for activities (and because of that, in all previous missions, if someone, a crew member, was to spacewalk, it was always the junior person, not the space commander who would stay inside). We knew this would be different because 2 people would be going out. There was a group at NASA who felt the junior person (me) should go out first, but many people felt the great symbology of the commander from past expeditions or arrivals at a destination. The decision that was made was absolutely correct as far as who went out first, symbolically. However who was in charge of the what happened after both people are outside, I believe, could have been done differently. I was not the commander, I was a junior person, so once both were outside, I followed my leader, because we (NASA) had not put together detailed jobs of people outside. I believe it could have been improved. But it was very successful for what it was. And the decision wasn't up to me, or Neil, it was up to people much higher up in NASA.



Mr Aldrin, what do you consider your biggest accomplishment that's totally unrelated to space?

I was very close to the top of my class at West Point. And I continued to expand my understanding of the world around me, and the human evolutions here on earth, the achievements perhaps to other people are impressive when I tell them that not only have I been to the North Pole, I haven't been to the South Pole yet, but I have been to the Titanic in a little yellow french submarine. It took an hour and a half just to sink down in the ocean about 2 miles deep to look out the thick glass window and see the Titanic. The visibility was such that we could see the bow, it became very famous in the movie thanks to James Cameron, but the visibility was not so good that you could actually see the bottom of the ocean that the Titanic was resting on. So it was an eerie site, of a ship festooned with rusting metal, like gingerbread. Floating, floating out the window in the Ocean.



How does it feel to be THE REAL buzz lightyear? Also how can I be an astronaut and go to the moon?

I am @theRealBuzz on Twitter!
They wanted a name that is better than Lunar Larry - and it became Buzz Lightyear because they wanted it to be more genuine. So now that I have changed my name from Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr. to Buzz Aldrin, I'm seriously thinking of adding a middle name - so it would become Buzz "Lightyear" Aldrin.

My sister called me "Buzzard" when I was a baby - she couldn't say "Brother" so I've been Buzz my whole life.



Hello Mr. Aldrin!
Our nation and our world have been waiting for another monumental achievement by humanity ever since you were a pioneer in the space race and set foot on the Moon. For lack of any serious government effort, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to accomplish this by sending man to Mars. What advice would you give Elon to achieve the ultimate objective of permanence on Mars?

There is very little doubt, in my mind, that what the next monumental achievement of humanity will be the first landing by an Earthling, a human being, on the planet Mars. And I expect that within 2 decades of the 5th anniversary of the first landing on the moon, that within 2 decades America will lead an international presence on Planet Mars. Some people may be rooting for Elon - I think he could, with his SpaceX, contribute considerably, enormously, to an international activity not only at the moon but also on Mars. I have considered whether a landing on Mars could be done by the private sector. It conflicts with my very strong idea, concept, conviction, that the first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony / settlement, I call it a "permanence." A settlement you can visit once or twice, come back, and then decide you want to settle. Same with a colony. But you want it to be permanent from the get-go, from the very first. I know that many people don't feel that that should be done. Some people even consider it distinctly a suicide mission. Not me! Not at all. Because we will plan, we will construct from the moon of Mars, over a period of 6-7 years, the landing of different objects at the landing site that will be brought together to form a complete Mars habitat and laboratory, similar to what has been done at the Moon. Tourism trips to Mars and back are just not the appropriate way for human beings from Earth - to have an individual company, no matter how smart, send people to mars and bring them back, it is VERY very expensive. It delays the obtaining of permanence, internationally. Your question referred to a monumental achievement by humanity - that should not be one private company at all, it should be a collection of the best from all the countries on Earth, and the leader of the nation or the groups who makes a commitment to do that in 2 decades will be remembered throughout history, hundreds and thousands of years in the future of the history of humanity, beginning, commencing, a human occupation of the solar system.



What's the most frightening moment that you have ever experienced in space?

I believe it was after leaving the surface of the moon and completing a successful rendezvous with Mike Collins in the command module, as we approached connecting / docking, the procedures in the checklist said one thing, and I thought maybe doing it a slightly different way, rolling and pitching instead of something else, and I thought that was better on the spur of the moment! It turns out that it was not a good thing to do, because it caused the platform to become locked, and we were not able to use the primary thrusters, the primary guidance, to control the spacecraft, to its final few feet to dock and join the other spacecraft. That was my mistake. I suggested to my commander that we do it differently, and it was his mistake to assume that i knew what I was talking about. So we both made mistakes - brought about by me! We recovered successfully on the "abort guidance" system.
(I don't admit that to many people)
(but I'm sure the mission controllers in Houston, while it was happening or certainly afterwards, they certainly knew what had happened, but fortunately they didn't squeal on us)



Sir, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for your push for Mars. You and the crew of 11 have, and continue to be an inspiration for all of us. As for a question: what can we, the American public, do to help push the powers that be into legitimate funding for new manned missions to back to the moon or to Mars? Thank you again!

We in the United States cannot come close to the return to leadership that the United States had 45 years ago, and shortly thereafter. The lack of funding that supported missions to the Moon and return, a pioneering effort for humanity, required 4% of the national budget of the United States. Now we are at 1/2 of 1% and have been that way for quite some while. To those of us that feel that America is a leader, it was, we helped win WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and we can lead the other nations in peace, just the way that the plaque on the moon that Neil and I left, "We came in peace for all Mankind" - I believe that that is so American, to do things, and share with other nations of the world. That's how we should go back to the Moon, not by competing with other nations, like China, to land our people - we've done that. The robotics, the operation of rovers and such at a great distance, has improved tremendously in the last 45 years. I don't believe the human mind has increased that much at all. So let the other nations of the world put their citizens on the surface of the moon for prestige - that is a major reason why nations put their people on the Moon. But we've done that, we can help the other nations, and we can help other nations use our facilities, and then we can deploy a radio telescope on Mars via balloon and design a strong suggestion for what the lunar base should be, on the near side & the far side, we can help in the construction of those elements, and we can bring those elements that are landed by other countries (because they are heavy, expensive) - we can bring them together and then the interface between elements that will come together in a complicated way because this is in a gravity field with uneven terrain, it's not as simple as the space shuttle docking with the space station, or any spacecraft, and zero gravity, it's much much more difficult, it requires (from a distance) bringing them sufficiently close and aligning them so that the two interfaces from adjacent cylinders (that may be 20 feet in diameter, 30 feet long, vertically part of the the shared space onboard the base) and from each one of these 3 can emanate 2 different nations for a total of 6 different individual nations growing outward for their habitation and laboratories and to control robots on the surface, to establish a distinct presence and yet sharing with the other people who have their personnel and their astronauts or the front or back side. But that is the great contribution of the United States, technically, but it's not a contribution that requires great investment of money for big rockets, and sustaining people on the surface.
Returning to the Moon with NASA astronauts is not the best usage of our resources. Because OUR resources should be directed to outward, beyond-the-moon, to establishing habitation and laboratories on the surface of Mars that can be built, assembled, from the close-by moons of Mars. With very little time delay - a second or less. Much better than controlling things on the Moon from the Earth. So when NASA funding comes up for review, please call your lawmakers to support it.

Back in the 60's and 70's when we were achieving in competition with the Soviet Union, but also to stimulate the United States to improve its technologies and science, we (the United States) won clearly the race (if you want to call it that) to the Moon. And I believe that that demonstration of the perseverance, the dedication, the depth of the industrial capacity of the United States went a long ways to convince Premier Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could not match - the announcement by President Reagan that we would develop a strategic defense initiative, branded by the media in a detrimental way, as "Star Wars" - it, I believe, was a major factor in the ending of the Cold War and the separation of the Satellite Nations around the U.S.S.R. It gave us peace. It reduced the Nuclear Weapon threat worldwide.
So we are now very interested in science, technology, engineering and math. When we went to the moon and thereafter shortly, we were number one, and I think that there are many children's books - I have written 2 so far, and I have another one that is well underway on National Geographic that follows my adult book, Mission to Mars and my vision for space exploration. I think that reading to children will help inspire that interest in aerospace, and many other supporting career fields. Not everyone can be an astronaut and go into space, some people with sufficient resources can purchase and fly sub-orbitally thanks to various companies and for more money (considerably) fly into orbit. For a million dollars, the Russians would take two people, a million apiece, around the moon and back. However, stories, videos that come from the space station, and other people, are a great inspiration to young people for an exciting career field.



Hello Mr. Aldrin,
If you were given the opportunity to go to the Moon again, would you?

My intellect now, having been there, and developed, and thought about humans going to Mars, has been so intense and so very useful to the future, I think I need to continue to think and plan and marry all of the different things that we could do that make transportation in space from the earth to the space station, from the earth to the moon to space stations around the moon to visiting an asteroid, which the President said we should do - when he observed in 2010 in his first term that humans should visit an asteroid by 2025. And I believe we should do that again, but we should have a robot slowly conserving fuel, so that in 1, or 2 years, get there just after a crew has arrived on the same asteroids. Combining those 2 without a human being, and with a human being, each has significant limitations but when those are put together, on the same asteroid, you are able to do much, much more for that mission in 2025, or 2026, or 2027, than the present mission that NASA and some of Congress and some of the President's office feel. So no - because I am needed here on earth to focus on opening up these opportunities, and also because the budget would not be there.



If you had the opportunity to speak to the crew of the first manned mission to Mars prior to launch, what would you say to them?

Realize that you are perhaps the most ambitious, the most historical pioneers that the earth has produced since its beginning.
And you are given a great honor in spending the rest of your lives pioneering for mankind.
AND HAVE FUN!



How were the cast and crew of 30 Rock? Anything memorable you can share?

Well, 30 Rock means 30 Rockefeller Plaza. My father, in 1925, 1926, in the Reserve of the Air Corps, worked as Aviation Fuel Manager for Standard Oil of New Jersey, that's where I lived at that time, and he would go into NYC and work at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. So when I was asked to consider participating, I jumped for joy, and I can't remember a more pleasant episode of discussions with Tina Fey as we talked about her fictitious mother's (I think it was) love affair that she had with me, Buzz Aldrin. And then we looked at the Moon, and we both sort of cursed at it for various reasons and said - I'll never forget the line - "I walked on your FACE!"


Mr Aldrin, I am interested in what kind of music a highly distinguished astronaut such are yourself would find yourself listening to. Could you enlighten me?

Well, I prefer the soft singing voice of Karen Carpenter. I have heard Frank Sinatra sing "Fly me to the Moon" almost too many times. So I'm interested in composing a new song, entitled "Get your ass to Mars!"



Does actual astronaut food taste as bad as the novelty stuff we can randomly buy in stores?

I think it has been very selected and prepared for long duration trips in a partial atmosphere and in zero gravity, where a can of peas or rice or whatever would pretty soon be all over the cabin! In the Simpsons I played a role where I opened a bag of popcorn and it was all over the place. Bart Simpson said "no no no! don't open that!" The taste was generally pleasant. But it was mostly freeze-dried so we had to add water to the container and let it set - and around the instrument panel and other parts of the spacecraft, we had certain places we had velcro so we could attach things so we wouldn't have to hold onto each one or have it float around the cabin. We had to use a water gun to send water into the plastic bag with the freeze-dried food. Now later on, things got much better and they were more like TV dinners that I remember - I don't see too many these days - as long as the food has some stickiness to it, it won't float around, but if it is like M&Ms, that are used in training with zero gravity, they're all over the place, and so would water form into spheres and float around in the cabin! So the crewman has to be very careful about adjusting to a lack of gravity sensation. We had very small shrimp that had a little bit of cocktail sauce, and when exposed to water, were very very tasty. But you wouldn't want a shrimp an inch long floating around the cabin!



Thank you for doing the AMA!
Ever find time for computer games like Kerbal Space Program? I've gotten 3 kids more interested in math and science after showing it to them.
Have a fantastic day!

I have inspired my own video games, 10, 20, 30 years ago, and now there is in Europe a video challenge, a video activity, entitled "Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager." And there game players can build their own space program from the beginning, and from where we are now on into the future, with some of the components that I believe will make great progress in our transportation systems between the Earth and the Moon and Mars in a long-standing reusable way into the future. I'll have to check out Kerbal Space Program.



Mr. Aldrin,
I've always been curious what it would be like to experience reentry. What kind of emotions and thoughts did you experience when falling back to the earth?

I had 2 re-entries: one in 1966 and one in 1969. In 1966, it was the last reentry in the 2-person Kennedy program. So I held a camera up against the window to film the flames from the heat shield that was behind us, but foremost in the spacecraft, and the flames were going backwards, away from us, in the front, and I was holding the camera and taking photographs. The g-forces increased and I wasn't able to continue to hold the camera against the window, so I had to lay it back against my chest, but still continued to photograph the re-entry until there was no more unusual visual effects of the energy in the atmosphere. And it was very comforting to understand that the people in Houston, the controllers, had very high confidence that we were on the right path. And the right path means that as you enter the atmosphere, the lift of the spacecraft is down to be able to capture the trajectory from the moon, and once that is assured, that the spacecraft won't skip out, we now roll the spacecraft so the lift vector is up, it's predicted by the computer, as basically a target, moving it up to where it now was exactly where we wanted it to be, and then we could roll the spacecraft so that it no longer had increasing lift in any direction but had zero lift, effectively, and we would guide it down to a point where we could then deploy automatically a device that would slow us down enough that then at 10,000 feet, the 3 parachutes would come out, a little lower the pressure of the atmosphere outside was greater than inside, and we could smell the salt air and it was very encouraging to return to earth.

We didn't jettison the parachutes soon enough, so the impact on the water moved my fingers away from the circuit breakers, which had to be pushed in before Mike Collins, throwing the switch to jettison the parachutes, could take place! So the parachutes pulled us over, and allowed the spacecraft to float upside-down rather than right side up. Now the engineers were very surprised in the early testing of the spacecraft in water to discover that it would float upside-down as well as right-side up. So they devised a system of inflating big balloons that would then turn the spacecraft right-side up. We had to do that.



Do you believe in aliens and what are the sightings you saw aboard Apollo 11?

On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be "unidentified."
We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information. It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That's what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today.
But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away.



Was it more challenging to go through the training to become an astronaut, or to actually go to space?

Yes, it was challenging to understand what was necessary to successfully carry out all the training simulations that we, as crewmen, would experience, and make a very successful use of that training and education. Training was much more extensive, and we dealt with many recoveries from emergencies, and fortunately, participating and observing and existing through the reality of space was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and it was not marred by unexpected hazards or catastrophes.



How do you feel about people who claim you faked the moon landing?
Can you describe how the moon felt to you? (Was it an adrenaline rush when your feet hit the surface? Was it soft or hard? Could you feel temperature through the suit at all?)
Funniest moment during the mission to the moon and back?

I personally don't waste very much of my time on what is so obvious to a really thinking person, of all the evidence - we talked about Carl Sagan recently, who made a very prophetic observation. He said that "extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable." There is not extraordinary evidence of (as far as I know) all the claims that have been made that we did NOT go to the Moon. There are photographs from lunar reconnaissance orbiter satellites, going around the moon, that clearly show all of the experiments that we described when we came back from the moon, and they are evidence that we were there, telling the truth, you can even see a trail of Neil Armstrong's trek (not footprints really but the stirred up dust in walking or jogging behind him) to see the west Crater that we had flown over, that Neil was concerned about landing close to that - and he took photos of that and then he went back to the spacecraft. I was back inside the spacecraft at this time, but looking at the photos of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiters, you can clearly see the evidence of Neil's trek. And he took photographs, and all the signs are still there. Our flag in Apollo 11 was, without the doubt, the best looking flag that was stuck on the moon. But it was close to the spacecraft, so when we lifted off, Neil observed that the rocket exhaust caused the flag to strike the ground, to fall over. And by this time, I'm sure the radiation in space has deteriorated every piece of cloth on the flags, whether they are flying on the surface or standing up. We perhaps in the future will have very accurate rovers that can approach the different landing sites, and perhaps make available to people back on earth the ability to control a video scan, get out elevations, with floodlights to illuminate during the 14 days of darkness - I believe this will be very inspiring to people back here on earth, if we have the funds to do that, it would be great to do that.
The space suit had a soft interior to the shoes, and when the boots got put over the shoes, there is much cushioning effect, and the light weight due to the reduced gravity and the thickness of the dust, made it difficult to sense the feel of the surface. it was so remarkable, the way the bootprints were left, with such strong definition of the soil underneath, like moist talcum powder I guess, it keeps its shape, so I photographed before and after, pictures of the surface, and then I thought that looked a little lonely, so I put another bootprint down, and moved my foot a little bit so you could see my foot and the bootprint.
I have since been told by a comic, by a humorist, what humor really is - but just as we were leaving the moon, I had given some thought to this, and I was able to create two achievements of humor in one sentence.
When Mission Control said, to us, as we were about to leave "Tranquility bass, you are cleared for liftoff," I responded by saying to them "Roger, Houston, we are number one on the runway."
There wasn't anybody else for us to be 2, 3, 4 to! But there wasn't any runway up there either!
It's a phrase most pilots hear many times - "Roger Tower, acknowledge we are number 3 for takeoff on the runway" Because there are people waiting before us in an airplane to start take off. Pilots always get it. We are not going to roll ahead with increasing speed, we were going to lift off straight UP the way we left the earth!.



How often do you use "Yeah well I walked on the moon" as a trump card for arguments?

I don't thinK I've ever really used that. I don't want to be shockingly bragging. I would rather people understand that there is a very, very fortunate American who was given the opportunity, and was in the right place at the right time to have the moment of a lifetime. My mother was born - her name was Marianne Moon. And she was born in 1903, the year that the Wright Brothers first flew. I participated with great honor in becoming one of the first to land on the moon, and now I am devoting and have devoted many years of my life to enabling Americans to lead international nations to permanence on the planet Mars. I was lucky enough to have been born on this planet earth, in this admirable country of the United States of America.



Hello Col. Aldrin. Thanks for doing this AMA on my birthday :)
Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield has said that being an astronaut and a test/fighter pilot requires you to constantly train in every worst case scenario so that you are prepared for everything. He eloquently said "as a pilot you are always thinking 'What's the next thing that's going to kill me?'". This has influenced his life and his mindset in very small things on his every-day life, like traffic, preparing what to say to famous people, thinking what to do if there's a fire in the building, etc.
Have you had this experience? Is there anything you learned from being an astronaut, 8 hours of EVA and a fighter pilot that you applied to your every day routine or maybe changed your perspective or attitude towards life?

Yes.
I realized that unfortunate things may occur, anytime, to anyone, just as disastrous events may occur - to pilots, to combat pilots, or to those in space. To appropriately respond to an emergency requires a very clear mind, to cooly analyze what the observations are and how to fix it. Fear and worry are emotions that cloud the mind from being able to think clearly, to remember what the procedures are to deal with that emergency. Dwelling on an engine failure for a pilot as he rolls down the runway is NOT what he should be thinking about - it's obtaining a smooth liftoff! But in the back of his mind, he knows exactly what to do (or pretty much) and in many cases, if he's alone in the fighter aircraft, he has to leave that aircraft in an ejection seat in a big hurry!
When I am getting ready to cross a street, I look both ways before crossing. My bones, my muscles, are not what they used to be, so I am careful when I go up and down stairs, because I've heard stories of older people falling and having very disabling injuries. I have enough things that begin to go a little bit wrong as I get a little bit older. I'd just as soon not have major catastrophes to have to deal with. So I very carefully move around, avoiding dangerous situations.



Hi Mr. Aldrin - Thank you for joining us!
One of my heroes is Carl Sagan, and, as far as i have read, he worked with NASA during the Apollo missions - so did you ever get to meet him, and if so; what were your impression of Carl Sagan?

Yes, I did. I met Carl Sagan and his wife. Both were very dedicated people to explaining to young people and to all people the benefits to be derived from space, the history of how our universe was formed, and the history of the advancement of the technologies that hundreds of years ago, enabled present day nations to use them to begin to add more science discoveries in space. And to write stories and television series that reach many people and after his passing away, you have a rejuvenation of the series COSMOS, featuring a very good friend of mine, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We were on a commission together to look at the future of space activities for the United States, that was about 12 years ago, and we've been good friends ever since. I was on his TV show. He did Michael Jackson's moonwalk far better than I did on Dancing With the Stars.



How tempting was it to lay in the moondust and make moon angels?

That was not at all tempting. I wanted my white spacesuit to remain as clean as possible!



Hello Mr. Aldrin! I just wanted to ask you how was your day? And say that you are one of my heroes. Thank You!

Well, I woke up before the alarm went off so I could re-arrange all of the pills and vitamins that I have to take with me on my next trip. Then I enjoyed reading the newspaper, having a cup of coffee, and beginning to eat my breakfast. I haven't finished it yet, and my watch says "10 minutes to 1" in the afternoon.




my first time getting to any AMA that is not days old and i have no idea what to ask so i'll just ask. Have you ever eaten a burrito? Also thank you.

Absolutely yes!



What is your absolute favorite aircraft to fly today?

Well, I'm sure it would still be the most favorite airplane in my career of flying - the Sabre F86 cleft wing , which allowed me to be credited with 2 Russian-built Mig-15 destroyed during the Korean War. Where I was in 1953.



What is your favorite type of cheese?

Since we're talking about the Moon, it'd have to be American Cheese.



Hello Mr. Aldrin! If it was you, not Neil, who took the first steps on the moon, what would you have said?

I think the words that he used, about the actions of the moment, and what they meant, in the future or for the greater understanding of mankind, were somewhat similar to my words that were spur of the moment. His 'giant leap for mankind' and my observation of the desolation and magnificence that was on the moon, viewed by any individual who would look out and observe with their eyes, the actual visual confirmation of what we intellectually understood we were looking at - but to actually see - something so unlike anything that could be observed on earth. It was "what can one person do" and "what do we know about earth."

Bisbigliare nell'orecchio della Storia: incontro con Buzz Aldrin, astronauta lunare

di Paolo Attivissimo. Questo articolo vi arriva grazie alla donazione per il libro “Luna? Sì, ci siamo andati!" di giuseppe.ac* e c.agost* ed è stato scritto a gennaio 2012 per la rivista Alpha Quadrant dell'associazione culturale Deep Space One. Compare qui con il permesso dell'associazione e in forma aggiornata.

Photo credit: Andrea Tedeschi

Luglio 2010. L'uomo accanto a me, sul palco della multisala di Avezzano allestito per la manifestazione Il Cielo di Argoli, ha un luccichio birichino negli occhi nonostante gli ottant'anni compiuti da poco. Gli stanno mostrando una foto di un caccia russo d'epoca, un MiG-15 biposto, e gli stanno offrendo di provarlo. In volo. Il luccichio è ben motivato, tanto quanto l'offerta: lui, quei MiG-15, li abbatteva durante la Guerra di Corea, nei primi anni Cinquanta del secolo scorso, quando era pilota militare dell'aviazione statunitense. Trovarsi nei panni dell'ex nemico, indossare le sue ali d'argento, sarebbe un'esperienza straordinaria.

Ma il bagliore dell'entusiasmo dura un istante, perché si rende conto che quel caccia ha sulle spalle cinquant'anni di manutenzione improvvisata e rischia di essere un trabiccolo letale. L'espressione successiva che gli compare fugace sul volto è la consapevolezza agrodolce che quand'anche l'aereo russo lo riportasse a terra intero, sua moglie Lois non gli perdonerebbe una pazzia del genere. Oltretutto lui, di trabiccoli letali, se ne intende. È Buzz Aldrin: l'uomo che insieme a Neil Armstrong toccò per primo il suolo lunare in una notte indimenticabile del luglio del 1969, sbarcando con un veicolo così fragile che le pareti della cabina si potevano bucare con una matita e così risicato nelle prestazioni da dover rinunciare persino ai sedili. È uno dei dodici uomini che hanno camminato sulla Luna.

Aldrin se ne intende anche, purtroppo, di manutenzione improvvisata: sopravvissuto all'impresa lunare, è stato perseguitato dai demoni gemelli della depressione e dell'alcolismo, dai quali si è liberato con fatica e al prezzo della carriera militare e di due matrimoni e dopo aver sfasciato, ubriaco, le auto che si era ridotto a vendere per campare perché non aveva più un soldo. Solo la volontà di ferro della moglie Lois, sposata nel 1988 e sempre accanto a lui (anche qui ad Avezzano), lo ha rimesso in sesto. 

Se Armstrong è passato alla storia per il suo sangue freddo e la sua serenità olimpica, Aldrin è la sua controparte sanguigna ed emotiva. Provocato da un complottista che lo accusava di aver simulato lo sbarco sulla Luna, Neil Armstrong chiamò la polizia. Aldrin, invece, rispose con un memorabile cazzotto. E fu Aldrin a descrivere la Luna, mentre camminava nel suo Mare della Tranquillità, come una “desolazione magnifica”: uno dei rari slanci poetici di un gruppo di uomini scelti per la loro disciplina mentale più che per il loro afflato romantico e troppo presi dalle complessità tecniche delle missioni per potersi soffermare a contemplarne le implicazioni filosofiche.

Riconosco quel fugace luccichio negli occhi di Aldrin: è quello tipico del geek, che va in salivazione pavloviana quando contempla un gadget o un'idea tecnologica accattivante e innovativa. E Aldrin è un übergeek: i suoi colleghi lo avevano soprannominato Dottor Rendez-vous, perché non faceva che parlare di rendez-vous orbitali. Ogni volta che gli organizzavano un incontro con una ragazza, lui portava immancabilmente la conversazione sulle tecniche di attracco spaziale fra due veicoli. Non era una tecnica d'abbordaggio tramite metafora freudiana: la sua tesi di laurea in astronautica al Massachusetts Institute of Technology era infatti intitolata Tecniche di guida a vista per il rendez-vous orbitale umano. Roba tosta, per il 1963, visto che l'era spaziale era iniziata solo sei anni prima. Ironicamente, la dedica della tesi era rivolta “agli equipaggi dei programmi spaziali attuali e futuri di questo paese. Se solo potessi unirmi a loro nelle loro imprese emozionanti!” Non era preveggenza: Aldrin aveva scelto appositamente quest'argomento di tesi e aveva già fatto richiesta di diventare astronauta, ma era stato respinto perché non era pilota collaudatore. La NASA eliminò questo requisito e lo selezionò come astronauta a ottobre dello stesso anno.

L'ossessione di Aldrin per i rendez-vous gli fu assai preziosa nel suo primo volo spaziale, assai meno celebre di quello lunare dell'Apollo 11: quello a bordo della Gemini XII, nel 1966, insieme a Jim Lovell (futuro protagonista della sfortunata missione Apollo 13). Un guasto al radar di guida del veicolo automatico Agena al quale dovevano attraccare mentre orbitavano intorno alla Terra rischiava di compromettere la missione, che aveva fra i propri obiettivi primari quello dimostrare la capacità di rendez-vous, indispensabile per le future missioni verso la Luna. Aldrin risolse il problema calcolando a mente le coordinate, con l'aiuto del suo fido regolo calcolatore, salvando la missione. Questo talento contribuì non poco alla sua selezione per le missioni lunari, nelle quali un mancato attracco poteva significare il fallimento del volo o la morte dell'equipaggio. Meglio avere a bordo un Dottor Rendez-vous.

La missione Gemini XII lo vide anche compiere tre passeggiate spaziali, dimostrando che era davvero possibile lavorare nel vuoto e in assenza di peso: le escursioni precedenti dei colleghi non avevano avuto altrettanto successo a causa di guasti tecnici, surriscaldamenti e appannamenti delle visiere. Parte del merito di questo risultato di Buzz (questo è il suo nome legale dal 1988; prima era Edwin Eugene) fu dovuto all'addestramento in una speciale piscina, nella quale gli astronauti s'immergevano indossando una tuta spaziale modificata, ottenendo una simulazione delle condizioni di assenza di peso che avrebbero incontrato nello spazio: un'idea introdotta da Aldrin stesso, che è tuttora un sub.

Photo credit: Andrea Tedeschi.

Il suo geek interiore emerge anche nelle risposte alle domande del pubblico in sala, che gli traduco bisbigliandogliele in un orecchio, cercando disperatamente di non farmi distrarre dal fatto che sto parlando a chi ha fatto la Storia con la S maiuscola e a un mito assoluto della mia infanzia. Aldrin è conciso, quasi laconico, nelle domande sulle sue emozioni, su cosa ha provato durante la sua missione sulla Luna, ma è un fiume in piena nelle risposte ai quesiti tecnici. Prende in mano il mio modellino del Modulo Lunare e se lo fa “allunare” traballante sul ginocchio. Mima con le mani il rientro della sua capsula Apollo 11 nell'atmosfera terrestre, a circa quarantamila chilometri l'ora, e fa quasi una conferenza a parte, senza mai fermarsi, per spiegare al pubblico come la forma bombata del fondo della capsula conica fungesse da superficie aerodinamica, consentendo a Michael Collins, terzo membro dell'equipaggio, di planare e manovrarla con precisione. Non invidio il mio collega che deve memorizzare, riassumere e tradurre questo chilometrico monologo irto di tecnicismi, ma noto l'estasi degli appassionati d'astronautica in sala per questi dettagli poco noti dell'impresa, raccontati direttamente da chi li ha vissuti.

E di dettagli poco conosciuti, in quello storico primo sbarco seguito in diretta TV da seicento milioni di telespettatori, ce ne sono tanti. Le medaglie sovietiche lasciate in gran segreto sulla Luna per commemorare Vladimir Komarov, morto durante il rientro della sua capsula Soyuz 1 per la mancata apertura del paracadute, e Yuri Gagarin, primo uomo a orbitare intorno alla Terra, perito in un incidente aereo nel 1968. Nemici e rivali nella Guerra Fredda, ma colleghi d'aviazione e compagni d'avventura nello spazio, dove le frontiere nazionali perdono ogni senso. La comunione fatta da Aldrin sulla Luna, senza poterne parlare pubblicamente per mantenere la neutralità religiosa della NASA, scottata da una causa legale scaturita dalla mirabile lettura di alcuni passi della Genesi da parte degli astronauti durante la missione Apollo 8 (Aldrin divenne così il primo uomo a bere alcolici su un altro corpo celeste). L'interruttore d'innesco dell'unico motore di risalita, trovato rotto al rientro nel modulo lunare dopo la storica passeggiata e riparato grazie a un pennarello usato per chiudere il contatto.

Si mormora di pillole al cianuro per suicidarsi se quell'interruttore rabberciato, o qualunque altro componente vitale, non avesse funzionato, lasciando Armstrong e Aldrin intrappolati sulla Luna, senza alcuna possibilità di soccorso, e obbligando il loro compagno Collins, rimasto in orbita lunare, a tornare a Terra da solo. Ma Aldrin liquida l'idea con indifferenza: in un ambiente ostile come quello lunare non occorrono pillole per morire. Prima o poi l'ossigeno finisce e ci si addormenta per sempre. Tutto qui.

Sono invece molto più di un mormorio le rivalità fra i due protagonisti del primo sbarco sulla Luna. Collins, nella sua magnifica autobiografia Carrying the Fire, descrive Aldrin e Armstrong come due “amiable strangers”: estranei cordiali. Dopo il ritorno sulla Terra, ciascuno dei tre astronauti è andato per la propria strada, incontrando gli altri solo in rare occasioni ufficiali. Dopo tutti questi anni, Aldrin non sembra ancora aver preso bene la decisione della NASA di far scendere per primo Armstrong, consegnando il suo nome ai libri di storia e relegando invece Aldrin al ruolo di eterno secondo anche se raggiunse Armstrong sulla superficie lunare meno di venti minuti dopo. La giustificazione ufficiale è che il portello del modulo lunare si apriva verso Aldrin nello strettissimo spazio della cabina, rendendo quasi impossibile farlo scendere per primo nonostante fosse il più qualificato in fatto di escursioni extraveicolari. Quella meno ufficiale è che Armstrong era un civile e quindi politicamente più presentabile all'opinione pubblica mondiale: la NASA temeva che far scendere per primo un militare dell'aviazione USA, quale era Aldrin, avrebbe dato l'impressione sbagliata di una presa di possesso della Luna. Quella ancora meno ufficiale è che si temeva che Aldrin non avrebbe retto allo stress della popolarità immensa che sarebbe ricaduta per sempre sul primo uomo a mettere piede sulla Luna.

Fonte: Big Bang Theory.

È vero che gli anni di alcol e depressione che fecero seguito alla missione lunare, raccontati da Aldrin senza pudori nelle sue due autobiografie (Return to Earth, 1973, e Magnificent Desolation, 2009), confermarono questa intuizione degli psicologi della NASA. Ma è anche vero che oggi Buzz ha superato questi problemi ed è fra i più attivi promotori dell'esplorazione spaziale: tiene frequenti conferenze sul futuro dell'esplorazione spaziale in giro per il mondo, è prolifico su Twitter (@TheRealBuzz), ha girato dei video comici per il sito Funny or Die con Lorenzo Lamas, ha inciso una canzone con Snoop Dogg (Rocket Experience) e ha partecipato a Futurama e Transformers 3 (interpretando se stesso) oltre che a 30 Rock, a Big Bang Theory e all'edizione americana di Ballando con le stelle. Scelte non convenzionali per un ex astronauta, ma efficaci nel riportarlo all'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica e nel raggiungere una generazione che non sapeva quasi nulla dell'epopea spaziale degli anni Sessanta.

Fonte: profilo Facebook di Christina Rasch-Korp.

Alla fine del 2012 Aldrin è tornato alla ribalta anche per motivi meno entusiasmanti: ha divorziato dalla terza moglie, Lois, citando “differenze inconciliabili” dopo ventitré anni di matrimonio (e al termine di una procedura di divorzio iniziata nel giugno del 2011), e ha avviato una causa contro Lisa Cannon, figlia dell'ex moglie, che li aiutava nella gestione delle attività promozionali dell'astronauta lunare. Ora (2013) è con Christina Rasch-Korp (foto qui accanto).

Buzz ha padroneggiato le complessità dei rendez-vous orbitali e le tecnologie del volo spaziale, ma non quelle della vita sulla Terra: una caratteristica che lo accomuna a molti altri astronauti, la cui dedizione totale alla missione ha sfasciato matrimoni e carriere post-volo spaziale. Chissà se ora farà quel volo proibito sul quel MiG-15.

Douglas Trumbull, maestro degli effetti speciali: impossibile falsificare le riprese degli sbarchi sulla Luna

di Paolo Attivissimo. Questo articolo vi arriva grazie alla donazione per il libro “Luna? Sì, ci siamo andati!" di Antonio Poppi (citato con il suo permesso).

Photo credit: Paolo Attivissimo

Il 14 agosto 2013 ho incontrato a Locarno Douglas Trumbull, creatore o co-creatore degli effetti visivi di 2001: Odissea nello Spazio, Incontri Ravvicinati del Terzo Tipo, Star Trek: il Film, Silent Running (2002: la seconda odissea), Blade Runner e molti altri film, per i quali ha ricevuto tre nomination agli Oscar. 2001 vinse l'Oscar per gli effetti visivi nel 1969, ma il premio fu assegnato a Stanley Kubrick, regista del film e supervisore dei suoi effetti; Trumbull era uno dei membri della squadra di tecnici e fu responsabile della memorabile sequenza dello Star Gate (il viaggio interstellare del protagonista.

Da 2001: Odissea nello Spazio.

Si tratta, insomma, di un esperto assoluto nel settore degli effetti speciali e in particolare di un esperto che conosce bene le capacità e le limitazioni delle tecnologie degli effetti cinematografici disponibili all'epoca delle missioni Apollo (2001 fu girato fra il 1964 e il 1968, appena prima del primo allunaggio). Se c'è qualcuno che può dire, con competenza indiscussa, se era possibile falsificare le immagini delle missioni umane sulla Luna, è Douglas Trumbull. Così gliel'ho chiesto.

Photo credit: Elena Albertini

Dopo la sua masterclass al Festival, Trumbull si è intrattenuto a chiacchierare a ruota libera, dimostrando una disponibilità rara nel mondo nel cinema. Io e un altro partecipante a questa chiacchierata post-conferenza abbiamo colto l'occasione per chiedergli un parere sull'accusa, fatta spesso dai complottisti lunari, che Stanley Kubrick le riprese dell'allunaggio. Questa è stata la sua risposta: “Io so che [le immagini degli sbarchi lunari] sono reali. Non che io fossi lì, ma nella mia mente non c'è alcun dubbio che siano vere” (“Well, I know they're real, but, you know... Not that I was there, but there's no question in my mind they're real”).

Photo credit: Elena Albertini

Gli ho chiesto quale sarebbe stata la sequenza dello sbarco sulla Luna più difficile da falsificare, avendo a disposizione gli effetti speciali degli anni Sessanta: “Avevano cineprese 16mm sul modulo lunare e in altri punti del razzo Saturn, e vedi una ripresa molto complicata, con emissioni gassose che si muovono e la superficie che si avvicina e allontana, e tutte queste cose si spostano l'una rispetto all'altra. A quell'epoca non avevamo alcun modo per realizzare un motion control che sovrapponesse elementi multipli. Credo che sarebbe stato impossibile farlo sembrare veramente reale” (risposta integrale: “I don't know the answer to that. I really don't know. I mean, there's something about photography at that... Part of the answer would be this: they had 16-mm cameras on the lunar lander and on other parts of the Saturn rocket and everything, and you're seeing a very complicated shot of vapors going and the surface coming or going, and... and all these things are moving relative to each other. At that time we had no way of doing motion control that would superimpose multiple elements. I think it would have been impossible to make it look really real”).

Gli suggerisco come ripresa particolarmente difficile il moto parabolico della polvere lunare sollevata dall'auto elettrica usata dagli astronauti (nel vuoto la polvere non forma volute ma ricade di colpo): “Sarebbe stato necessario farlo con qualche sistema di simulazione di particelle in grafica computerizzata. Potresti farlo oggi, ma non potevi farlo all'epoca” (“It wouldn't be impossible to do, you would do that with some computer graphics particle system. You could do that today. But you couldn't do it then”).

Buzz Aldrin intervistato da David Frost

di Paolo Attivissimo

Pochi giorni fa è andata in onda un'ampia intervista di David Frost, storico giornalista britannico che ora lavora presso Al Jazeera, con Buzz Aldrin. L'intervista è ricca di chicche e dettagli della storia personale di Aldrin.

Si parla dell'origine del nomignolo Buzz (poi diventato suo nome legale), della sua esperienza di pilota nella guerra di Corea e della missione Gemini XII. Naturalmente Frost chiede ad Aldrin della sua memorabile avventura sulla Luna: Buzz racconta che il Saturn V al decollo faceva sette pollici per gallone (a 15:00) e che oggi non rifarebbe la comunione che fece allora in segreto sulla Luna.

C'è spazio anche per parlare della sua personale desolazione dopo la missione che lo aveva fatto diventare una celebrità planetaria ma gli aveva fruttato soltanto 33 dollari: a tanto ammontava il rimborso governativo per il viaggio sulla Luna. Attanagliato dalla depressione e dall'alcolismo, ha finito per fare il venditore di auto a Beverly Hills.

Ma Aldrin ha anche una visione per il futuro: inutile tornare sulla Luna, almeno per l'America, anche perché, dice, basta che i cinesi riescano a mettere una sola persona sulla Luna e avranno eguagliato il successo statunitense che domina tuttora l'esplorazione spaziale; anzi, dato che l'America non è più capace di andare sulla Luna, la Cina l'avrà superata. L'esplorazione spaziale deve prefiggersi invece nuove mete: Marte, in particolare, con l'imperativo di crearvi una colonia permanente come garanzia di sopravvivenza della specie umana in caso di cataclisma cosmico (impatto di grandi asteroidi sulla Terra).

I momenti interessanti sono moltissimi, ed è un raro piacere vedere un'intervista nella quale l'intervistatore non fa protagonismi e non interrompe, ma lascia parlare il proprio ospite. Segnalo soltanto ancora una chicca: il racconto, intorno a 22 minuti, della genesi della celeberrima frase di Neil Armstrong “Un piccolo passo per un uomo, un grande passo per l'umanità”: non fu preparata a tavolino, ma fu una scelta che Armstrong fece soltanto dopo l'allunaggio, durante le ore di preparazione per l'uscita sulla superficie.

“We, we didn’t know whether he’d prepared that ahead of time.    As a matter of fact, Mike said, ‘What are you gonna say when you get down… when we get down to the surface?’  He [Armstrong] said, “Well, let’s get there first, and I, and I’ll think of…”  Of course, we had a good bit o’ time getting ready. Several hours.”

Ulteriori dettagli sono in questo articolo di Aljazeera.

Lo chiamavano “Buzzer” (3:30)

Il giovane pilota Aldrin intervistato per un cinegiornale (1953, 6:10)

Diretta planetaria per Neil e Buzz (24:00).

Intervista sui complotti lunari per Class TV MSNBC

di Paolo Attivissimo

Il 27 marzo scorso sono stato intervistato via Skype dal programma Prometeo di Class TV MSNBC. L'emittente ha pubblicato su Youtube l'intervista, che vi ripropongo qui sotto. Io inizio, dopo il brano dell'intervista d'epoca a Neil Armstrong e le opinioni delle persone per strada, a 5:00.

Neil Armstrong intervistato da Patrick Moore nel 1970

di Paolo Attivissimo. Questo articolo vi arriva grazie alla donazione per il libro “Luna? Sì, ci siamo andati!" di giustur* ed è stato aggiornato dopo la pubblicazione iniziale.

In questo video, Patrick Moore, storico conduttore della BBC in campo astronautico e astronomico scomparso di recente, intervista Neil Armstrong. L'intervista fu trasmessa per la prima volta il 19 novembre 1970 nell'ambito della trasmissione The Sky At Night.

Oltre a essere interessante come testimonianza di prima mano di chi ha camminato sulla Luna, è un'altra dimostrazione della falsità del mito lunacomplottista secondo il quale Armstrong si vergognava e rifiutava di parlare alla stampa della propria missione: semplicemente sceglieva con cura le trasmissioni e gli eventi pubblici ai quali partecipava.

Ecco una trascrizione veloce della conversazione.

MOORE: Mr. Armstrong, I do realize that when you were on the Moon you had very different time for gazing upwards, but could you tell us something about what the sky actually looks like from the Moon? The Sun, the Earth, the stars, if any, and so on?

ARMSTRONG: The sky is a deep black when viewed from the Moon, as it is when viewed from cislunar space – the space between the Earth and the Moon. The Earth is the only visible object other than the Sun that can be seen. Although there have been some reports of seeing planets, I myself did not see planets from the surface, but I suspect they might be visible. The Earth is quite beautiful from space and from the Moon it looks quite small and quite remote but... It's very blue and covered with white lace of the clouds and the continents are clearly seen, although they have very little color from that distance.

MOORE: What about the Sun? Did you see any trace of the corona?

ARMSTRONG: No, the glare from the Sun on the helmet visor was too difficult to pick out the corona. The only time we could see the corona was during an eclipse of the Sun from the Moon – that is, when we were flying through the Moon's shadow and could observe the solar corona peeking out from behind the Moon.

MOORE: Looking at the photographs that you brought back, the colored photographs of the Moon's surface, it seems that the colour of the surface actually varies according to the angle from which you see it. Is this so? Does it do this?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, it certainly does. It's a characteristic that we observed first while traveling around the Moon in orbit. We could see that at the terminator – at the boundary between the black part of the Moon and the lighted part of the Moon – it was as if you were looking at a television set with the contrast turned to full contrast: very black and very white. As you moved further into the light there were more and more shades of gray. But as you moved further, such that the Sun was higher above the horizon, you actually start to see the tans and browns appear, although at a very low level. Similarly, on the surface of the Moon the same characteristic is evident. You can see browns if the Sun is high enough. Apollo 12, for example, landed while the Sun was only 5° above the horizon, so when they arrived they saw no browns or tans anywhere – only fairly high-contrast grays.

MOORE: But you did.

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I did. The Sun was at 11°, and Apollo 12 did also the next day, when they arose from their sleeping period and the sun was higher. Of course then the browns were observable to them.

MOORE: When you were actually walking about on the Moon's surface and kicking about a certain amount of dust, did you notice any local colour? And also, were you at all subconsciously worried about the possibility of unsafe areas?

ARMSTRONG: Well, the color is a puzzling phenomenon on the Moon. Aside from the characteristics that I've already mentioned, you generally have the impression of being on a desert-like surface, with rather light-colored hues. Yet when you look at the material at close range, as if in your hand, you find it's a charcoal gray in fact, and we were never able to find any things that were very different from that color. I suspect that as we get more and more samples with future flights we will see that there is in fact some color but the optical properties on the Moon are most peculiar.

MOORE: When you were actually walking about, did you have the have any difficulty in distance judging? Because I think I heard you say once that near... far things looked quite near.

ARMSTRONG: Yes, we had some difficulties in perception of distance. For example, our television camera we judged to be, from the cockpit of the lunar module, only about 50 to 60 feet away, yet we knew that we had pulled it out to the full extension of a 100-foot cable. Similarly, we had difficulty guessing how far the hills out on the horizon might be. A peculiar phenomenon is the closeness of the horizon, due to the greater curvature of the Moon than we have here on Earth – of course four times greater, and the fact that it is an irregular surface, with crater rims overlying other crater rims. You can't see the real horizon, you're seeing hills that are somewhat closer to you. There was a large crater which we overflew during our final approach which was... had hills of the order of 100 feet in height, and we were only 11-1200 feet west of that hill and we couldn't see it. A 100-foot-high hill from from 1100-1200 feet away, so...

MOORE: Did you notice any obvious differences between the far side and the near side, as you went around it? I mean, apart from the obvious differences in topography?

ARMSTRONG: No observable differences in color, but then the Sun's angle was always somewhat different over there, so it would be difficult to make a general correlation. I would say that topography is a striking change – of course, as all your viewers know, there are no seas on the far side of the Moon, it's all highlands and high mountains, big craters, so it's strikingly different from the side...

MOORE: There's one more thing I'd like to ask you. You are one of the very, very few people I think whose opinion on this is really worth having – in fact there are only four of you. Do you think, from your knowledge of the Moon, having been there, that it is going to be possible, in the foreseeable future, to set up scientific bases there on anything like a large scale?

ARMSTRONG: Oh, I'm quite certain that we'll have such bases in our lifetime, somewhat like the Antarctic stations and similar scientific outposts, continually manned. Although certainly there's the problem of the environment, the vacuum and the high and low temperatures of day and night, still in all, in many ways it's more hospitable than Antarctica might be. There are no storms, no snow, no high winds, no unpredictable weather phenomena that we're yet aware of, and the gravity is a very pleasant kind of place to work in, better than here on Earth, and I think it would be quite a pleasant place to do scientific work, and quite practical.

MOORE: Mr. Armstrong, thank you very much, and again let me say what a tremendous honour and privilege it has been to have you here with us.

ARMSTRONG: Thank you.

Negli USA a incontrare gli astronauti

Sono negli Stati Uniti, a Cape Canaveral, per il raduno degli astronauti e dei tecnici delle missioni Mercury, Gemini, Apollo e Shuttle organizzato dalla Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. Sono in compagnia di mia moglie Elena, di Andrea Tedeschi, Rodri van Click e dell'organizzatore del viaggio/pellegrinaggio Luigi Pizzimenti (FOAM13 e Collectionspace.it).

L'evento vero e proprio inizia domani. Spero di poter pubblicare qui degli aggiornanenti in tempo reale; seguiranno sicuramente foto e dettagli.

L'ultima intervista di Neil Armstrong?

di Paolo Attivissimo

Alla fine di aprile 2012 Neil Armstrong ha rilasciato una lunga intervista ad Alex Malley di CPA Australia, un sito dedicato ai revisori di conti, in cui ha raccontato numerosi dettagli della propria carriera e del proprio modo di vedere il mondo, con buona pace di chi insinua che Armstrong non concedeva interviste perché si vergognava di aver partecipato alla messinscena lunare.

A quanto mi risulta, si tratta dell'ultima intervista pubblicata prima della morte di Armstrong il 25 agosto scorso. Qui sotto ne trovate la trascrizione, realizzata con la collaborazione di Elena Albertini. Se vi interessa sponsorizzarne una traduzione italiana, fatemelo sapere nei commenti.

Prima parte, da 1:45 a 14:25

Link al video.

Malley: Neil Armstrong, a very warm welcome to Australia.

Armstrong: Thank you so much.

Malley: The words determination and destiny keep coming to me and the way in which your life's unfolded I'm not quite sure of the order of those at times, but certainly your first air show at two years old your dad took you to, your first airplane flight with your dad at seven, and your pilot's license at 15 tells me a lot about determination.

Armstrong: Yeah, I had become fascinated with the world of flight as an elementary school student and determined that somehow I wanted to be involved in that and as I learned more about aviation I thought: “Design – that would be the epitome of an aeronautical career, to be a designer”. And so that's what I strove for.

Malley: And in terms of your mom and dad, Stephen and Viola, your dad was a public servant in Ohio and traveled a lot in his role. What did your parents collectively teach you and give you as a foundation?

Armstrong: Well, they – my father was an auditor and he audited the books of county governments across the state where we lived, the state of Ohio, and so we were transient, my father moved the family along with him as he moved around the state while we were young. And I think they were very accommodating. They allowed me to do... pursue my own interests, and I'm forever grateful that they gave me that freedom. They didn't try to dictate to me what I should do or where I should go.

Malley: And your childhood, what fascinates me about it is, and we've had these conversations before about your rather heightened fear of death as a child and concern that if a pet died you didn't really want to confront it, is not necessarily what would appear to be the man who would take all the risks he took in adult life. I mean that's quite a fascinating...

Armstrong: Well, I think many younger people are uncomfortable with the thought of death, whether it be themselves, their relatives or their pets, and I've shared that uneasiness about facing the reality of death and it took me some years to sort of circumvent that concern.

Malley: So then of course, Neil, you flew 78 missions in the Korean War and again took some chances. What are your reflections on the risks you had to bear, you and your colleagues?

Armstrong: The risks in combat are substantial, and I think in general they are higher risks than I faced in my test pilot work or in my astronaut work. And the consequences are severe. And there is a good side and a bad side. The bad side is that you lose colleagues, and that's painful. The good side is you have – you create very strong bonds with your colleagues that survive, and those bonds exist throughout your lifetime. And I value those experiences very highly because they built a lot of character, they built a lot of backbone and you were a better person for having learned to endure those – that environment, that situation, and those risks.

Malley: So, Neil, your test pilot career was, you know, as everything else in your career a distinguished one. But tell me what a test pilot feels and what it does feel like to get in those jets as you did so often: the exhilaration, the moment, the responsibility?

Armstrong: The test pilot is solving problems. He is looking for inadequacies or shortcomings or barriers to substantial safety and increasing performance in flight, and his job is to identify those problems and assist in finding a solution. So it's a problem-solving job, and you're always working with the unknowns. And I found that a fascinating part of my career path. I really enjoyed the opportunity to contribute in some way to the solution of problems. The history of humanity has been, you know, slowly increasing the boundaries of knowledge and knowing more and more and more and feel comfortable inside there, but at the edges it's always going to be a challenge.

Malley: Yeah, absolutely. And to those edges, your first flight, one of your first flights in the B-29... Now being an accountant, I can do the numbers, and if one engine out of four is working I'd be worried – and that's without any pilot experience. What happened that day, and how did you work through the problems?

Armstrong: I was a pilot, one of the two pilots of the B-29 carrying a rocket aircraft to altitude where we would release the airplane and it would go doing the testing and we were just providing the service – get the rocket airplane up to a starting point. And we were somewhere up above 30,000 feet when the governor on one of the propellers failed and the propeller started running away – that is, going faster and faster and faster. And of course at some point in time it's going to explode. And so we had the choice of either slowing down to try to slow down the propeller or speeding up so that we could drop the rocket. We chose the latter, dropped the rocket and almost instantaneously thereafter the propeller exploded and blades cut through the – it was the right... far right engine – cut through the number three engine, cut through the fuselage and the number two engine, and left only the number one engine running. That's an uncomfortable position, one out of four. But fortunately we had a lot of altitude and we had a big dry lake bed not too far away where we could land so we could make a very gentle – very gentle turns and keep the power back and sort of make a gliding approach into the landing area. The second pilot, his control cables had been cut by the propeller, so his controls were of no use whatever. I still had control. so I was flying the airplane and he was doing the thinking (laughs). And when we got to the ground and looked at the airplane afterwards, we found my cables had been cut too, but there were still a few strands of the cable left. So we were very fortunate to have survived that situation.

Malley: Extraordinary. And look, another example, I guess, was in the lunar training, when you had to eject from the rocket within seconds of your life, as I understand it. Take us through that.

Armstrong: Well, we needed something to simulate landing on the moon. The moon has no atmosphere, so you're flying in a vacuum, and the gravity is much lower, so the characteristics of the flying machine in that environment are very different than they are here on Earth. And we felt we had to understand those variations and be able to feel comfortable in flying the lunar module to the surface of the moon in the actual conditions. So this device did provide very good training and experience in that mode. Unfortunately it was a complicated machine with a lot of different rockets and wires and claptrap of all this – and consequently it was subject to malfunction. And one of these malfunctions snapped on me one day and I lost my control system, and you know pretty quickly that's it's time to go and part company with your friend. And I did that and the ejection seat worked very well, fortunately, and I bit my tongue and that was the only real damage.

Malley: And as I understand it, as the legend goes, you know – that's a term I like using when I speak with you – you basically just went back to work.

Armstrong: Well, yeah, there was work to be done back at the office and so I thought I'd better go get on with it.

Malley: I'm trying to line that up with the modern era of occupational health and safety, and it's just not working for me at the moment, Neil, that's extraordinary. We've got some footage that I want to play to you: John F. Kennedy was speaking about the mission and about the vision. This was early in the sixties.

Kennedy: ...but why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others too.

Malley: The extraordinary time in the US at that time, you had the president of that ilk, you had politics, the administration, science, the community all on song for this vision, all on song for that plan. What was that like?

Armstrong: Well, you have to appreciate the context. The Soviet Union had successfully put firstly an artificial satellite into space and secondly put a man into orbit around the Earth. We were trailing. We had put only one flight, Alan Shepard, on a short 20-minute suborbital flight of about a hundred miles altitude and back down into the ocean. Never had a person in orbit and now the president was challenging us to go to the moon. The gap between 20 minutes, a 20 minutes up and down a flight and going to the moon, was something that was almost beyond belief, technically. But NASA was a new organization only about four years old at that point. It had done a lot of thinking about this, and they identified the lunar landing as perhaps the only way we could catch up with the Soviet Union. And as the President said, we were going to get in this game. He was saying, “This is a new ocean around us. This is the new ocean and we must sail upon it and we must be a leader on it”. And that caught people's imagination, because at that time we had the ideological competition between East and West and concerns about the future of all humanity on Earth, so it was a very big thing, not just technically, it was sociologically a very big thing and the challenge was enormous. So to be able to get the agreement of not only the government but the will of the people to go along with that idea was quite striking.

Le altre parti seguiranno quando possibile.

Neil Armstrong rilascia un'intervista (prima parte)

di Paolo Attivissimo

CPA Australia (un sito dedicati ai revisori dei conti) ha pubblicato una lunga intervista a Neil Armstrong, prodotta da EVO TV, che ripercorre la carriera non solo astronautica del primo uomo sulla Luna. La prima parte, della durata di circa 15 minuti, è già disponibile; le altre seguiranno l'8, il 15 e il 22 maggio.

Charlie Duke (Apollo 16) sarà a Varese il 31 marzo

Il 31 marzo prossimo sarà a Varese, a Villa Recalcati, l'astronauta Charlie Duke, che camminò sulla Luna nel corso della missione Apollo 16.

Verrà inaugurata una mostra di oggetti originali delle missioni spaziali che includerà, per la prima volta in Italia, una replica in scala 1:1 di un modulo di comando Apollo (la capsula nella quale viaggiavano i tre astronauti di ogni missione), completo di tutti i dettagli e con elettronica funzionante.

Ci sarà anche un campione di roccia lunare, recuperato dalla missione Apollo 15, che ha un'età stimata di circa quattro miliardi di anni.

Io sarò lì come fan e come traduttore per l'ospite. Tutti i dettagli dell'evento, con foto degli oggetti che saranno in esposizione, sono qui su Collectionspace.it.

Neil Armstrong intervistato dalla CBS

di Paolo Attivissimo

Neil Armstrong, comandante della missione Apollo 11 e primo uomo a mettere piede sulla Luna, è notoriamente una persona molto riservata e modesta. Alcuni lunacomplottisti hanno attribuito la sua riluttanza ad apparire nei media a un presunto senso di colpa per aver mentito al mondo durante l'altrettanto presunta messinscena lunare e per tutti gli anni successivi.

Circola anche la credenza diffusa che Armstrong non rilasci interviste e non sia mai più apparso in televisione dopo le celebrazioni immediatamente successive all'impresa lunare del 1969.

Non è così: semplicemente, le sue apparizioni sono state selezionate con molta cura. Quest'intervista, rilasciata a Ed Bradley per il popolarissimo programma 60 Minutes della rete televisiva statunitense CBS e trasmessa a novembre del 2005, ne è un ottimo esempio.

Maggiori dettagli, insieme a del materiale aggiuntivo, sono sul sito della trasmissione. Qui sotto riporto la trascrizione delle parole di Armstrong nell'intervista.

Bradley gli chiede cosa si prova a decollare con un Saturn V: “It felt like a train on a bad railroad track, shaking in every direction. And it was loud, really loud.”

A proposito del suo gesto di alzare il pollice verso le telecamere mentre saliva sul vettore lunare in segno di fiducia: "Yeah, but a little bit of a sham, I admit. You know, the reality is, a lot of times you get up and get in the cockpit, and something goes wrong somewhere and you go back down. So, actually, when you actually lift off, it's really a big surprise."

Su quanto ci fosse in gioco in quella missione, in termini di speranze del paese: “We wanted to do well. And, even more than that, you hope that you don't, you as a person, don't make any mistakes.”

La sua reazione alla morte della figlia di due anni, Karen, in seguito a un tumore al cervello, nel 1962, l'anno in cui fu scelto come astronauta: “I thought the best thing for me to do in that situation was to continue with my work, keep things as normal as I could. And try as hard as I could not to have it affect my ability to do useful things... At the time I thought the family was handling it well. And I was doing the best I could.”

Nel 1968 sfiorò la morte durante un volo con il veicolo addestratore lunare, eiettandosi a poco più di 30 metri da terra; davvero tornò in ufficio a sbrigare delle carte, come se niente fosse? “I did. There was work to be done.” L'intervistatore obietta che era quasi morto nell'incidente. Armstrong risponde: “Well, but I wasn't.”

A proposito dei problemi con il pilota automatico del modulo lunare durante l'allunaggio: “Our autopilot was taking us into a very large crater, about the size of a big football stadium with steep slopes on the crater, covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles. That was not the kind of place I wanted to try to make the first landing.”

Dopo alcune domande al giornalista Walter Cronkite, che condusse la diretta dello sbarco per la CBS, Bradley chiede ad Armstrong come gli sia venuta l'idea della celebre frase "Un piccolo passo per un uomo, un grande balzo per l'umanità": “I thought, ‘Well, when I step off, it's just gonna be a little step, from there down to there.’ But then I thought about all those 400,000 people that had given me the opportunity to make that step and thought ‘It's going to be a big something for all those folks and, indeed, a lot of others that even weren't even involved in the project.’ So it was a kind of a simple correlation of thoughts.”

Sull'aspetto reale della superficie lunare, vista con i propri occhi: “It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it.”

L'intervista affronta la celebrità planetaria che accolse Armstrong e i colleghi Aldrin e Collins al loro ritorno: “Friends and colleagues all of a sudden looked at us, treated us slightly differently than they had months or years before when we were working together. I never quite understood that.”

Bradley gli chiede come mai una volta rispose a un giornalista dicendo "Quanto tempo deve passare prima che io smetta di essere noto come un uomo dello spazio?", e Armstrong gli risponde così: “I guess we all like to be recognized not for one... piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work.”

Sul suo disagio per la celebrità: preferirebbe non avere tutte queste attenzioni? “No, I just don't deserve it” dice Armstrong ridendo. L'intervistatore gli obietta che fu scelto, quindi ci dev'essere un merito: “Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone.”

A proposito della difficoltà di mantenere una vita di famiglia in un contesto del genere: “The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel. And I didn't... get to spend the time I would have liked with my family as they were growing up.”

Si aspettava che il programma di missioni lunari sarebbe finito così presto? “I knew it would have a limited life, but I must say it was a bit shorter than my expectation. I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.”

Come mai non ci furono altri voli verso la Luna? “When we lost the competition, we lost the public will to continue.”

L'intervista mostra Armstrong che pilota un aliante, una delle sue passioni: “Gliders, sail planes, they're wonderful flying machines. It's the closest you can come to being a bird...Oh, it is self satisfaction. A sense of accomplishment. At trying to do a little better than you think you possibly can.”

Bradley gli chiede se è interessato a partecipare a una possibile missione lunare o su Marte: “I don't think I'm going to get the chance. But I don't want to say I'm not available!” risponde Armstrong ridendo.