Recently, Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, opened a virtual discussion on Reddit. He raised the issue that some people consider the video of him walking on the Moon to be a fake and explained why he is against commercial flights to Mars.
What was it like being on the moon? “Delightful loneliness,” says Aldrin. There are no such secluded places on Earth, he added. - I realized that the things I look at in any direction have not changed for hundreds, thousands of years. All I saw was the winding surface of the moon - no atmosphere, black sky. Cold.
One of the users touched on the next big stage in space exploration. He wrote: “I hope that Elon Musk will be able to send a man to Mars. What advice would you give Elon to achieve this goal?"
It turned out Aldrin opposed flights to Mars organized by a private company. He believes that the establishment of a colony is necessary from the very beginning, and commercial flights there and back are not only expensive, but will also slow down the establishment of the settlement. SpaceX, the Maska company, may be able to fly to Mars, but "they go against my idea that the first person to land on Mars should not return to Earth."
“I know many people think that this should not be done. Some even believe that this is a suicide mission. But not me! This is not true. Everything will be planned, preliminary construction work will be carried out from the Mars satellite within 6-7 years. Various objects will be sent to the planet for the construction of housing and laboratories on Mars in a similar way as it was done on the Moon.
The greatest achievement of humanity should not be carried out by a private company, he believes, but by a team of the best specialists on Earth. He speaks of a leader who could go down in history for the beginning of the "occupation of the solar system by humans."
In response to one of the user's questions, Aldrin shared his impression of the scientist Carl Sagan.
"He did a much better moonwalk than I did in Dancing with the Stars," says Aldrin. He praised Sagan for popularizing space among young people and lecturing to the general public about the history of the universe and the technological development of mankind. Aldrin is friends with Neil de Grasse Tison, who this year revived Sagan's television show Cosmos.
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The controversy was not without someone bringing up the claim that Apollo11 did not actually complete the mission and Aldrin never walked on the moon. Aldrin replied, "I personally don't waste my time discussing such things." He quoted Sagan as saying: "Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to be believed." Currently, there is no credible evidence that refutes the official version and confirms that the mission was falsified, Aldrin said.
Photo: NASA
In turn, there is credible evidence that he was on the moon. “There are photographs from orbiting satellites for studying the lunar surface, which clearly show all the experiments we have described. This is evidence that we were there and are telling the truth, you can even see Neil Armstrong's trail (not a footprint, but the dust behind it, raised while walking) on the way to the western crater. We flew over him, Neil wanted to land next to him, he took a photo, and then returned to the spacecraft."
Speaking of other skeptical remarks, he said that the flag they left on the moon fell when they flew away, and during this time it was probably already destroyed under the influence of cosmic radiation.
Some users have asked questions about aliens. Aldrin did not answer them, but, describing the moon, said: "No sign of life."
In a 2005 Science Channel interview, Aldrin mentioned that he saw an unidentified flying object that followed Apollo11 during a mission to the moon and could be controlled by aliens.
In a video uploaded to YouTube, Aldrin recalls this experience and his conversation with the flight control center: “There is something at a relatively close distance, it could be observed. What could it be?"
“Mike [Collins] decided he could try looking through a telescope, and he did it. When it was in one position, it looked like a group of ellipses. But with increasing definition, it had an L-shape. It didn't tell us anything."
Photo: NASA
“Naturally, the three of us tried not to talk too much. Imagine if we said, 'Hey Houston, there is something flying next to us, and we don't know what it is; Can't you explain? "We didn't act like that because a lot of people could hear this radio broadcast. Who knows what order they would give us then? And then we would have to come back because of the aliens or whatever."
He said that the team decided not to touch on this topic until the debriefing.
The astronauts thought the object might be an S-IVB rocket stage. They asked Houston how far away she was. S-IVB was 6,000 nautical miles away. “I don’t think we were watching an object this far,” Aldrin told Science Channel.
Astrophysicist David Morrison wrote on the NASA website that after this interview he spoke with Aldrin.
Then Aldrin said that Morrison's quotes were taken out of context. On the 2007 Larry King TV show, Aldrin said that what they saw was most likely a panel detached from the spacecraft, and this is common.