Saint-Tropezian lands on the moon

Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, celebrated the anniversary of the moon landing in the Village

It was a great scoop for Mayor Jean-Pierre Tuveri when his friend Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, agreed to be this prestigious event’s guest of honour.

Saint-Tropez’s day-long celebration of the moon landing included the award of honorary citizenship and freedom of the town. The American astronaut was presented with an outsize ceremonial key to the gates of the city at a moving presentation at the Town Hall.

Visibly moved by the town’s warm hospitality, Mr Aldrin said that each five years that passes from the moon landing in 1969 is something special, but 40 years is a very special anniversary indeed. He was very happy to be celebrating such an important occasion in the wonderful town of Saint-Tropez.

The day’s main element was a spectacular evening presentation at the Citadelle, complete with Buzz Aldrin  and his wife, Mayor Tuveri, many other notables, four of France’s own astronauts, Claudie and Jean-Pierre Haigneré, Thomas Pesquet and Jean-Francois Clairvoix, and lunar expert Patrick Michel, a native of Saint-Tropez. The spectacle was watched by more than 1,000 local people and visitors, and more than 384,000 kilometres away, by the moon itself. A surprise addition to the programme was a live radio conversation with Frank de Winne, the European commander of the International Space Station, as he and six other astronauts circled the earth. The spectacle finished with a resounding laser show, contributing to a very happy and truly international marking of mankind’s first steps on the moon.

The accidental astronaut is how veteran Buzz Aldrin sees himself. Unlike other candidates for the US space programme in the 1960s, he had not served as a test pilot, a qualification that was then seen as a basic requirement for anyone wanting to become one of America’s first astronauts. It was his expertise on mission planning and ‘rendezvous’ that made Buzz Aldrin very valuable to the space programme, especially since the moonshot involved the use of a landing module and a mother ship. It was as the pilot of the lunar module that Buzz Aldin took his place in history, as the second man to set foot on the moon.

“This was a gentleman’s profession,” he says of the early training days. “I was surprised by two things. There were no exams and no way of telling whether an astronaut understood. It didn’t impress me. Same with physical fitness, and there wasn’t much in the way of team preparedness.”

Buzz Aldrin is a very modest man. It is competely self-evident. “We were not special people, we were just ordinary people doing something which when you put it all together was extraordinary.”

“We didn’t think there was anything miraculous about what we did. We were deliberately methodical. But sometimes there was too much engineering. Instead of a pencil we would have a fountain pen, for example.”
Asked by a French journalist if he had wanted to say goodbye to the moon, Buzz Aldrin replied: “We just wanted to do the job, because there was always something else to do.”

Now, that something else is to share his experiences of the Apollo missions with many appreciative audiences around the world, as an ambassador for space and also, very importantly, for international cooperation and all the benefits that brings.    Ian Brodie