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Buzz Aldrin, who pressed his boot into the soft, gray surface of the moon in 1969, is now staring at a red dot in our solar system. At the age of 88, Aldrin continues to press for a plan to send humans to Mars by 2040 and finally settle on the planet.
"I'm talking about Mars for permanence," he told Business Insider.
Aldrin thought of bringing humans to Mars for a while. In 2015, the former pilot of the Astronaut and Air Force published a book entitled "Welcome to Mars: Make a Home on the Red Planet". The same year, he testified before members of the US Senate to travel to Mars and created the Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology. The institute works with professors and graduate students to research new ways to help humans survive on Mars.
Aldrin's website even sells shirts, caps, wrappers and hoodies sporting the ruthless slogan "Get your a ** to Mars".
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But for this to happen, Aldrin believes that we will have to first land people on the moon and establish a base there. After that, Aldrin thinks that it should take about a decade to bring humans to the red planet.
Aldrin's taxi to Mars
On the website of Aldrin, he traced a kind of step-by-step system of jumps to bring space explorers closer to Mars. It goes like this:
First, humans would establish a sort of supply station on the moon to fuel future missions to Mars. As Aldrin wrote in 2005 in Popular Mechanics, "a permanent base on the moon would use lunar ice to produce liquid oxygen and hydrogen," which would help power the planet. 39, craft that transports people to Mars.
The Lunar Base would be more a temporary camp than a permanent home, however.
"There is no need to go to the moon and stay the rest of your life," Aldrin said.
Mars, however, is at over 33 million miles (that's more than 138 times the distance from Earth to the moon), so Aldrin says some explorers could very well stay there forever.
According to his plan for Mars, humans would send a crewed mission to an asteroid in 2026, then a first unmanned lander to Mars in 2034 to test the journey for humans. At the same time, six brave souls were going to land on the Phobos Martian moon, a tiny object less than 17 miles wide orbiting the Martian surface very closely.
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Aldrin said that a key part of the plan for Mars, once the moon will be open to business, would be to make ships travel continually to and from Mars – a sort of taxi system Martian to bring people back and forth, could even help pay for space tourism.
"This is not such a bold and expensive commitment as to land and stay, or to migrate. You can have a settlement, and after a while to come and go, you decide to stay, "said Aldrin. "Keeping [Mars] busy is a significant progress."
Unlike the missions of the moon in the 60s, however, Aldrin does not expect Americans to do all the work to make access to Mars a reality.
"Many other people can help us," he said. "We must be open, invite sharing, cooperation, invite other countries' help to do what they want to do."
Photo AP / Bebeto Matthews
A Mars Mission for Another Generation
This is a bold plan, and Aldrin knows it. He says it's an important part of how he has always solved the problems: "Do not be satisfied with just a little bit of improvement."
"Opportunities really start to appear with a flexible mind," he said.
Aldrin is already working to make sure his vision of a Mars mission survives his time on Earth. His son, Andrew Aldrin, who previously worked at Boeing and United Launch Alliance, is now director of the Aldrin Space Institute and president of Buzz Aldrin's non-profit ShareSpace Foundation.
Currently, however, Aldrin is locked in a bitter legal battle with his son over the control of his finances and homonymous organizations.
When Aldrin spoke with Business Insider, however, these legal concerns did not seem to affect his grand vision of future trips into space. He said the time had come to return to the moon – after all, almost 50 years ago, the Aldrin journey, which lasted nearly 240,000 miles, touched the dusty lunar surface.
"I can not think of a more appropriate moment than five decades from when the first eagle [lunar module] landed on the moon to argue that the United States could lead internationals … to put a another eagle on the moon "he said.
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