Buzz Aldrin Smells Like Teen Spirit

The funniest thing about the AXE Apollo Space Academy campaign isn’t that a deodorant company was offering actual suborbital spaceflight as a prize. It’s that they got Buzz Aldrin—a man who walked on the moon, who has seen Earth from a distance that renders all human vanity microscopic—to front it. There he stood, the second human being to set foot on another world, lending his face and his legend to a brand whose entire mythology rests on the idea that the right body spray will make women lose their minds around you. The jump from "spray this and she’ll want you" to "spray this and you’ll go to space" is, in a way, completely logical. Both are selling the same thing: transformation. The promise that who you are right now is fixable.

The mechanics were real enough—XCOR Aerospace was involved, Space Camp training was on the table, twenty-two winners from around the world were supposed to get a ticket past the Kármán line. Whether it ever actually happened is a different question. But the image of it is somehow perfect: Buzz Aldrin, eighty-three years old, arm around someone who won their slot by getting friends to click a button on a website, heading toward the edge of the atmosphere. Capitalism’s highest achievement and its most absurd one, occupying the same moment.