Buzz Aldrin Hulks Out Over Mars at Stonehenge

The Apollo astronaut posts an impish photo with the message "Get your a** to Mars!"

Buzz Aldrin has a message for humanity: "Get your a** to Mars!" And he picked one of humanity's oldest astronomical monuments as the stage upon which to deliver it.

Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the Moon, posted a photo on his Facebook page this week showing himself standing in front of Stonehenge and pulling open his coat to reveal a T-shirt bearing his plea.

"While at Stonehenge yesterday I decided to send a message to the cosmos," he wote.

Aldrin has been a vocal proponent of launching a crewed mission to Mars. In 2013, he took to the radio airwaves to scold U.S. political leaders for dragging their feet on such an endeavor.

In one interview, Aldrin told 106.7 The Fan hosts Danny Rouhier and Holden Kushner that he'd taken it upon himself to try to convince NASA and the U.S. government to take the lead in settling Mars.

The Apollo 11 astronaut, who with Neil Armstrong spent nearly a day on the surface of the Moon in July 1969, cited the Netherlands-based non-profit Mars One foundation during that interview. In May 2013, Mars One kicked off its global search for prospective Mars colonists, recruiting adventurous souls to join a proposed four-person crew which would embark upon a one-way trip to Mars in about a decade to establish a base.

Mars One has since narrowed down its list of candidates to 100, but the non-profit has also taken some hits of late. One Mars One finalist, Dr. Joseph Roche of Ireland, this week alleged that the project is essentially a money-making scam with no hope of even mounting a voyage to Mars. Earlier this year, a group of MIT students published a paper expressing extreme skepticism about the project, opining that even if Mars One could send colonists to the Red Planet, they would likely perish in short order.

Of course, there are other, more practical Mars projects in the works. Dennis Tito has proposed a crewed flyby of the planet as early as 2018, while Space X boss Elon Musk has also expressed enthusiasm for a colonization effort.

Meanwhile, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has remained adamant about building towards a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030. The space agency has already begun flight testing the long-haul Orion spacecraft that would carry astronauts to the planet, as well as ramping up tests of the enormous Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will lift Orion into space.

Read the rest here:
Buzz Aldrin Hulks Out Over Mars at Stonehenge