Meeting Buzz Aldrin!
Posted by Jeff Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:51:00 GMT
For those of you who don’t know Buzz Aldrin - he’s the 2nd man on the moon!
I became a space fanatic when I was 12 years old - okay, I admit, the coolness wore off when I realized that my bad vision would prevent me from being an astronaut. (tear) But nevertheless, I pretended to be an astronaut by looking at a bunch of pictures and watching NASA WebCast (this was ‘98 mind you and webcasts were ‘rare’ and ‘difficult’ to get working).
Oh - and the most important part of the entire space excursion was playing Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. This was by far the most difficult game I have ever played. The goal is to do a moon landing and make it back alive while racing against the USSR. There were a great many quirks about the game - if your rocket blew up, you to start R&D on rockets from the beginning. You train your crew, and then have to keep them motivated by putting them on missions. I’m not a gamer at all, and this was one of the only games I really liked.
So - Saturday we went to Yuri’s night Celebration at Nasa where we actually got to meet Buzz Aldrin. That was awesome. I asked him what he thought of the space program - interestingly, he said “We should stop putting out the fires of today, and instead take a longer term look into the future” Wow - digging a little deeper, I found that from Buzz’s point of view, NASA can do a lot better than it has in the last 2 decades.
Delivering on visions such as going to Mars - I asked Buzz what he thought. His response was “We have to think about today - not how to get to Mars, but once we get there, what we are going to do and plan R&D accordingly” One example is rapid deployment of teams - it takes 6 months to get to Mars with a crew of 6. We are definitely going to need to think about how we can do ANYTHING with 6 people. That’s so little!
All the best to NASA - it was an awesome event!
