The Nasa mission is unlikely to be short of volunteers: the calls come as a Dutch reality TV show revealed more than 75,000 people had signed up to join a colony on the Red Planet.
Aldrin, the American astronaut who was the second man to walk on the Moon, says the US must lead the way in building a permanent settlement on Mars.
“The US needs to begin homesteading and settlement of Mars,” Aldrin said at the Humans to Mars conference at George Washington University. “It is within reach.”
His call for US leadership in the space race to Mars largely lines up with plans set forth by Nasa and President Barack Obama’s administration to send the first people to Mars in the 2030s.
“There is really very little new research that is required,” Aldrin said, calling for cash investment and political will to sustain the vision of a permanent dual-planetary society.
“The US needs to continue to be the human space transportation leader and I think we can capitalise on the dynamism of the commercial market to develop a landing system that can truly become the basis for a US highway to space.
“We are talking about multiple missions to eventually settle and colonise Mars,” said Aldrin, who also plugged his plan to send spacecraft on cycling orbits that would engage in perpetual trajectories between Earth and Mars.
Aldrin described how there could be different modular habitats on Mars, perhaps built by space agencies from China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia, with the US in a leadership role.
He said a first step would be to send three people to the Martian moon Phobos “and use that year and a half to oversee the robotic deployment of the international Mars base.”
Regarding Mars One, the Dutch company that recently announced had recruited volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars in 2023, Aldrin said the plan appeared to have good fundraising and public relations appeal but “not much technical basis behind it.”
Aldrin was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, he and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to set foot on the surface of the moon.