Photo: Carrie Devorah
Neil Armstrong may be the first man to walk on the moon but second man Buzz Aldrin also placed first in a different category: first man to pee on the moon.
“It’s lonely as hell out there. I peed in my pants,” Aldrin told an audience at the Newseum Monday, the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.
Aldrin also joined other former astronauts from the Apollo missions at NASA’s Headquarters, where they came to a consensus that sending a crew to Mars should be the next big space adventure.
“America to Mars is what it ought to be, not America back to the moon,” Aldrin said.
Others at the event included Eugene Cernan of Apollo 10 and 17, Jim Lovell of Apollo 8 and 13, David Scott of Apollo 15, Charles Duke of Apollo 16 and Thomas Stafford of Apollo 10.
“We’re just like you. We just happen to be the luckiest group of people in the history of the modern world,” Cernan said.
Joking about their age, Lovell (who also traveled on the ill-fated Apollo 13, and was later portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie) said,“You’re looking at old people now, but our job is to inspire the young people.”
Later, Aldrin joined Armstrong and their pilot, Michael Collins, at the White House, where President Barack Obama promised to make math and science “cool again” for America’s youth.
The president then sounded a personal note, recalling “sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders when those capsules would land in the middle of the Pacific, and they’d get brought back, and we’d go out and we’d pretend like they could see us as we were waving at folks coming home.
“We expect that there’s, as we speak, another generation of kids out there who are looking up at the sky and are going to be the next Armstrong, Collins and Aldrins.” Obama said.
