Buzz Aldrin: The Dark Side of the Moon | Hacker News Reader

Buzz Aldrin: The Dark Side of the Moon

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96 pointsThevet24 comments

    Buzz is tired. Buzz is so tired of these moon-wisdom questions, 
    nearly a half century of the same questions about feelings that 
    leave him feeling inadequate. He is a man of science. Next time 
    NASA should send up a poet, he wrote in one of his books, a 
    philosopher, an artist, a journalist. He wasn't being flip. He 
    thought mankind clearly needed to send up people who know how to 
    translate feelings.

A lesson most of us in "tech" could use to learn.

The same thing happened to Lindbergh - he wanted to move on, but the public was relentless in never allowing it.

Neil and Buzz spent 2.5 hours walking around on the moon, in a very small region. In comparison, Apollo 17's surface EVA time was 22 hours - driving a lunar rover many miles. Seems like we should be talking to the astronauts in the later missions if we want to hear about what it's like to be on the moon.

I was actually shocked when I learned that other people went to the moon as well. For a long I used to believe that Neil and Buzz were the only 2 people who walked on the moon.

> His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong

> "First Man on the Moon" commemorative stamp to one that said

> "First Men on the Moon" so it could include Buzz.

Wow. I always wondered what it was like, to be the "2nd Man on the Moon.".

In Sports, Athletic Competitions and many other situations in life, it's only the 1st place winner that people remember.

As far as I'm concerned, Buzz and Neil landed on the moon at the same time, so they are both first.

As far as an ant is concerned, neither of them landed on the moon, and the moon doesn't exist.

Absolutely. Honestly, the part about people forgetting the names of 2nd and 3rd ones on the moon makes no sense now in this age of internet and Wikipedia.

In a worse situation is Michael Collins who flew in Apollo 11 but only remained in orbit around the moon, never landed and whose name is not known nearly as well as Neil and Buzz.

As one comedian said, the three probably put it to a vote as to which two would get to walk on the moon, and Armstrong and Aldrin said "Let's do it alphabetically!"...

One of my favorite books is Michael Collins's "Carrying the Fire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_the_Fire:_An_Astronau...

Good article, and it was nice to see the journalist take the high road by not fixating on (or even mentioning) Buzz's altercation with the conspiracy nutcase outside his hotel. It's also a pretty depressing read. As the article suggests, it seems likely that NASA made the right call by putting Armstrong in the #1 position, because being #1 would likely have destroyed Buzz.

All I'd have to say to Buzz Aldrin or anyone else from the Apollo program is, "Sorry we dropped the ball you handed us."

If you want to know more read Aldrin's book "Magnificent Desolation". Pretty dark story at times.

His sci-fi book "Encounter with Tiber" was pretty neat. Loved it, and it had me hooked the whole time.

Michael Collins "Carrying the fire" was also a very good book. Collins is a great writer with a great subject.

I got to see the Saturn V rocket at the Johnson Space Center on Saturday. It is the most incredible piece technology i have ever seen. Luckily I was standing next to a guy whose father worked on the apollo space program; while the astronauts got all the glory. The pride of everyone involved is immense and should be celebrated.

Look up the documentary series "Moon Machines" - it does an amazing job of telling numerous stories of the engineering feats behind the Appllo project, with first-hand accounts and some pretty awesome B-roll from the archives

I can't imagine how painful it has to be to be known for an achievement the rest of the country has effectively abandoned for decades. Every single time someone runs up to ask him "what was it like on the moon?" must be like a knife to the gut, a painful reminder of what we've willingly given up.

"Recently Buzz had a hard time getting anyone at the White House to answer his calls about maybe doing a ceremony or something to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his moon walk. (Eventually they pulled a little something together.) "

This, if true, is disgusting, a disgrace, nationally and globally.

Pretty sad that the media chews up and spits out guys like Buzz.

This was published in January, and look at all the Mars mission stuff that has popped up since. I wonder what a follow up would read like? I'm guessing they're using his Mars algorithm?

Those Aldrin Cyclers are kind of a strange beast -- possibly useful in a speculative-fiction kind of way, but take more delta-v than a Hohmann transfer orbit and have a very high relative velocity as they pass Earth and Mars, which makes getting cargo to them tricky (the "taxis" have to make a hyperbolic rendezvous with the cycler, and a missed encounter would likely result in a very long tour of the solar system). Instead, NASA envisions using near-Hohmann orbits for getting advanced cargo to Mars; human travel would use the usual hyperbolic transfer orbit.

Most people outside of NASA still consider a standard Hohmann-like orbit for getting people to Mars too.

It's dated January 2015, not 2014.

How could it possibly be dated January 2015??

EDIT: I mean, indeed it is, but we're like, you know, still in 2014

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