To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing, National Space Society President and “Ad Astra” columnist, Geoffrey Notkin, sat down with his childhood hero, Apollo 11’s Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin, for an exclusive NSS interview about spaceflight past, present, and future.

Buzz Aldrin crew photo.

Credit: NASA

BUZZ

Geoffrey Notkin

Credit: Michael Kirk

I sat beside Colonel Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.–known to the entire world as “Buzz”–at a large, round, elegant banquet table in the grand ballroom of the downtown Hyatt. Just the two of us.

Our places were beautifully and meticulously set for the upcoming dinner. Aldrin would present the evening speech. I gave the address the previous evening and Aldrin had been seated right in front of me.No pressure there.Now, the tables surrounding us had no occupants; their perfectly-aligned geometry reminding me of launch pads along the seaward side of Cape Canaveral. All sites perfectly prepared and awaiting the upcoming launch. Or dinner.

The ballroom lights were low and the big room nearly silent. Just the occasional soft clink as a server fine-tuned the alignment of a wine glass or a dessert spoon. As a career performing artist, I have always been fascinated by the hush, the lull, the expectant silence that exists before the show. We, the performers, are like fairies, tiptoeing quietly and respectfully, lest some misstep should accidentally jinx the upcoming performance.

On our table lay pages of notes; my notes. I would introduce Buzz Aldrin before his much-anticipated conference keynote, and I would give it my all. I had worked on those notes for hours; it isn’t every day you get to honor a boyhood hero in a venue packed with astronauts, engineers, and spaceflight professionals. I wanted to make mission-critical certain that my presentation was the best it could be. That being said, it was, in a sense, a complete redundancy, because you could hardly be a guest at that dinner and not already know who Aldrin was.

“Is there anything in particular you’d like me to mention, or not mention?” I asked him. He handed me a “Let’s Get to Mars” t-shirt, which I now only wear on special occasions. “The main thing,” he instructed, “is don’t cut into my time. I have a lot to get through.”