itself was very comfortable, with huge seats, as well as desks and chairs for working. The conference room aboard the aircraft is replete with video screens and teleconferencing capabilities. And, of course, there is free Wi-Fi aboard Air Force One!
The aircraft was impressive, but I was most taken with the gracious staff, all of whom had favorite Air Force One stories and were more than willing to share them if Peter and I would listen. We listened to a few, but I was too busy making phone calls to all my friends to focus on the attendants’ stories, especially since the flight from Andrews to the Kennedy Space Center was relatively short.
After a while, I said to Peter, “Do you want to go look around?”
“Sure thing,” Peter replied.
We started roaming around the president’s plane and made it all the way to the stairs that led to the upper section of the Boeing 747 when an attendant spotted us. At first I thought he was going to reprimand us for exploring or send us back to our seats, but instead, he asked, “Would you like to see the cockpit?”
I smiled like I’d just won the lottery. “Of course,” I replied. There were no security worries aboard Air Force One, so the attendant took us to the cockpit and I stuck my head inside the doorway. Not only had we made it onto Air Force One when all the naysayers said it was impossible, but I was now looking over the shoulders of the guys who were flying it.
Unlike flying commercially, it was not necessary to turn off my phone before landing. In fact, nobody even came on the intercom instructing us to sit down and buckle up. The pilots of the huge plane brought it down smooth as a feather right on the space shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space Center and then eased to a stop.
When we arrived, President Obama and I walked out to greet the crowd to whom he was going to speak. Even though we had very limited time together, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to tell the president about my research and the Aldrin Mars Cycler, the method I had developed for going to Mars. As we were walking, I quickly explained my plans for the Cycler concept. I told the president that we needed to use Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, as our staging point before we actually landed on Mars. He was planning to promise an increase in NASA’s funding by six billion dollars, and to orbit Mars within the next two decades. I was talking about landing on Mars.
The daughter of a friend of mine had made a papier-mâché model of Phobos that was so good I carried it with me wherever I traveled, so I could illustrate how the Mars Cycler works. As I was talking with President Obama, I remembered that I had the model in my briefcase. I pulled out the papier-mâché model, which looked similar to a large baked potato, and was using it to explain my concepts to the president.
The president took the model from my hands and began to walk away with it. “Well, thank you, Buzz,” he said, waving.
“No, no, no! That’s my Phobos!” I said. The president must have thought I intended him to have the model. I didn’t.
I had taken that model on so many trips and had shown it to so many people, my papier-mâché Phobos was beginning to fray and show cracks, so much so that the aluminum foil beneath the papier-mâché had begun to show. A few weeks later, we were having a “full moon” party at my home. As a joke, Christina placed the Phobos model in the middle of a table in my office and wrote out a warning: “Moon rock. Please don’t touch!”
Throughout the party, guests slipped into my office to view my many mementos, and there was the Phobos model. “Ohh, look, it’s a Moon rock!” a number of people gushed.
Really? I actually do have some Moon rocks but none of them are made from papier-mâché! And I don’t leave them sitting on my desk.
I had made a presentation in 2009 for the Augustine Commission, a committee of experts assigned with the task of reviewing the U.S. human spaceflight plans regarding recommendations for the future of the space program. In an effort to encourage further exploration and to avoid duplication of our efforts, I made the comment, “Why go back to the