Buzz Aldrin: The next giant leap for space exploration

Buzz Aldrin, an Apollo 11 moonwalker, holds a doctoral degree in astronautics and continues to wield influence as an international advocate of space science and planetary exploration.

For many years, the United States has been spending billions of dollars on human spaceflight exploration. However, we have lacked a clear commitment to a program to break the pattern of humans simply circling Earth. It’s time to sojourn outward and have America soar beyond low Earth orbit.

When I peer into the future, I see Cycling Pathways to Occupy Mars — a comprehensive and immediate plan for human spaceflight. The overall objectives of this plan are to sequentially evolve international contributions of shared exploration beyond low Earth orbit and toward international crew landings on Mars by 2040. This plan can grow to enable a permanent settlement on the Red Planet to be up and operating in the following years and decades.