Buzz Aldrin

• 1. Introduction

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  Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface. His first words, spoken into the silence of the lunar landscape, were simply: "Beautiful view." Armstrong asked if it was something. Aldrin answered: "Magnificent desolation."

  The man who spoke those words was born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. on the 20th of January 1930, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He would go on to fly 66 combat missions in Korea, earn a doctorate from MIT, and become the second human being to walk on another world. But the story of what came after the Moon is as remarkable as the journey to get there. How does a person live after the greatest adventure in human history? What happens to a man who has seen the Earth from 240,000 miles away, and then comes home to sell used cars?

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Edwin Eugene Aldrin Sr. cast a long shadow. He had been an Army aviator during World War I and later served as assistant commandant of the Army's test pilot school at McCook Field, Ohio, from 1919 to 1922. He left the Army in 1928 and became an executive at Standard Oil, but his military bearing never left him.

  When it came time for his son to think about college, the senior Aldrin wanted the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He enrolled his son at Severn School, a preparatory school for Annapolis, and even secured an appointment from Albert W. Hawkes, one of New Jersey's United States senators. But the younger Aldrin suffered from seasickness and considered ships a distraction from flying. He faced down his father directly, telling him to ask Hawkes to change the nomination to West Point.

  At West Point, the son outperformed his father's ambitions. He finished first in his class in his plebe year, competed in pole vault for the track and field team, and graduated third in the class of 1951 with a degree in mechanical engineering. His father had advised him to fly bombers, arguing that command of a bomber crew built leadership skills. Aldrin chose fighters instead. That pattern of quietly defying authority while achieving more than expected would define his career.

  The nickname Buzz had no heroic origin. His younger sister Fay Ann, a year and a half older than him, mispronounced "brother" as "buzzer," which was shortened to Buzz. The name stuck so thoroughly that Aldrin made it his legal first name in 1988.

• 3. Combat Over Korea

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  In December 1952, Aldrin was assigned to the 16th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, part of the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing, based at Suwon Air Base about 20 miles south of Seoul. He flew F-86 Sabres in the skies over Korea, and what happened on the 14th of May 1953, gives a picture of how he operated under pressure.

  Flying about 5 miles south of the Yalu River, Aldrin spotted two MiG-15 fighters below him. He opened fire on one. The pilot may never have seen him coming. The 8th of June 1953, issue of Life magazine featured gun camera footage Aldrin took of the pilot ejecting from his damaged aircraft.

  His second aerial victory, on the 4th of June 1953, was a different kind of fight. He was accompanying aircraft from the 39th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron in an attack on an airbase in North Korea. Their newer planes were faster than his, and he had trouble keeping pace. He then spotted a MiG approaching from above. This time both pilots saw each other at roughly the same moment. They went through a series of scissor maneuvers, each trying to get behind the other. Aldrin got there first, but his gun sight jammed. He manually sighted his gun and fired. He then saw the canopy open and the pilot eject, though he was uncertain whether there was enough altitude for a parachute to open.

  By the time his year-long tour ended in December 1953, Aldrin had flown 66 combat missions, shot down two MiG-15 aircraft, and earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Air Medals.

• 4. Dr. Rendezvous

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  At MIT, Aldrin encountered Richard Battin in an astrodynamics class. Two other Air Force officers who would later become astronauts, David Scott and Edgar Mitchell, took the same course around that time. Aldrin enjoyed the classwork so much he abandoned his plan for a master's degree and pursued a doctorate instead.

  In January 1963, he earned a Doctor of Science degree in astronautics. His thesis was titled Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous. The dedication read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!"

  Aldrin had chosen the thesis topic deliberately, hoping it would help him be selected as an astronaut even though writing a dissertation meant forgoing test pilot training, which was then a prerequisite for the astronaut corps. When he first applied to NASA's Astronaut Group 2 in 1962, his application was rejected on exactly those grounds. He asked for a waiver and was turned down.

  NASA then changed the rules. The next round of selections required either test pilot experience or 1,000 hours of flying time in jet aircraft. Aldrin had over 2,500 hours total, with 2,200 in jets. He was selected as one of fourteen members of NASA's Astronaut Group 3, announced on the 18th of October 1963. His fellow astronauts gave him the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous." Aldrin noted that the nickname was not always intended as a compliment.

• 5. Gemini 12 and the EVA Problem

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  By the time Gemini 12 was being planned, NASA had a problem it could not ignore. Astronaut Gene Cernan on Gemini 9 and Richard Gordon on Gemini 11 had both suffered from dangerous fatigue while performing extravehicular activity. The physical demands of working in a spacesuit were severely underestimated. It fell to Aldrin to solve this.

  NASA formed a committee specifically to give him a better chance of success. They dropped a piece of equipment that had given Gordon trouble so Aldrin could focus. They revamped the training program, replacing parabolic flight with underwater training in a buoyant fluid that better simulated weightlessness. They added handholds on the capsule, increasing them from nine on Gemini 9 to 44 on Gemini 12. They built workstations where Aldrin could anchor his feet.

  Gemini 12 launched from Launch Complex 19 at Cape Canaveral at 20:46 UTC on the 11th of November 1966. Early in the mission, the radar connecting the spacecraft to its target vehicle deteriorated until it became unusable. Aldrin used a sextant and rendezvous charts he had helped create to give mission commander Jim Lovell the information needed to dock manually.

  Aldrin performed three EVAs. His free-flight EVA, completed after two hours and six minutes, involved installing electrical connectors and testing tools that would be needed for Apollo. A dozen two-minute rest periods, built into the plan, kept him from becoming fatigued. The approach worked. After Gemini 12, NASA had its EVA problem solved.

  After the mission, Aldrin's wife noticed he had fallen into a depression she had not seen before.

• 6. Apollo 11 and the Moon

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  On the morning of the 16th of July 1969, an estimated one million spectators watched the launch of Apollo 11 from the highways and beaches near Cape Canaveral. The launch was televised live in 33 countries, with an estimated 25 million viewers in the United States alone. Apollo 11 lifted off at 13:32:00 UTC and entered Earth orbit twelve minutes later.

  During the descent to the surface, five minutes in and 6,000 feet above the Moon, the lunar module's guidance computer issued the first of several unexpected 1202 and 1201 program alarms. The computer could not complete all its tasks in real time. Armstrong landed the Eagle manually. The spacecraft touched down at 20:17:40 UTC on July 20, with about 25 seconds of fuel remaining.

  As a Presbyterian elder, Aldrin took communion on the surface of the Moon, making him the first person to hold a religious ceremony there. He radioed Earth and asked every person listening to pause and contemplate the events of the past few hours. He kept the ceremony private, however, because of a lawsuit that had followed the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8. In 1970 he reflected: "It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements."

  Most of the iconic photographs of an astronaut on the Moon from the Apollo 11 mission show Aldrin rather than Armstrong. Armstrong had the camera most of the time. Aldrin explained: "It wasn't until we were back on Earth and in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory looking over the pictures that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault perhaps, but we had never simulated this during our training."

  Before leaving the surface, Aldrin tossed out a bag of memorial items that Armstrong reminded him was in his sleeve pocket. It contained a mission patch for the Apollo 1 flight that Ed White never flew due to his death in a cabin fire, medallions commemorating Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, and a silicon disk carrying goodwill messages from 73 nations. Columbia splashed down in the Pacific 2,660 kilometers east of Wake Island at 16:50 UTC on July 24. The total mission duration was 195 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds.

• 7. After the Moon

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  Aldrin returned to the Air Force in July 1971 as Commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. He had neither managerial nor test pilot experience, but a third of the training curriculum was devoted to astronaut training. Fellow moonwalker Alan Bean considered him well qualified.

  The job became something else entirely. Aldrin did not get along with his superior, Brigadier General Robert M. White, who had earned his astronaut wings flying the X-15. Two aircraft crashed at Edwards, an A-7 Corsair II and a T-33. No one died, but the accidents were attributed to insufficient supervision, which meant the blame fell on Aldrin. He went to see the base surgeon. He was hospitalized for depression at Wilford Hall Medical Center for four weeks. His mother had died by suicide in May 1968, and he was plagued by guilt that his post-Gemini 12 fame had contributed to her distress. Her father had also died by suicide, and Aldrin believed he had inherited a susceptibility to depression.

  In February 1972, General George S. Brown informed Aldrin that the school was being renamed and the astronaut training curriculum was being dropped. Aldrin retired as a colonel on the 1st of March 1972, after 21 years of service. His father and General Jimmy Doolittle, a close friend of his father's, attended the formal retirement ceremony.

  What followed was years of alcoholism and depression that he recounted in his autobiographies Return to Earth (1973) and Magnificent Desolation (2009). Encouraged by a therapist to take a regular job, he worked selling used cars, a job he described as one he had no talent for. Eventually he was arrested for disorderly conduct. In October 1978, he quit drinking for good.

  On the 9th of September 2002, Aldrin was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel on the pretext of being interviewed for a Japanese children's television show. Moon landing conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted him with a film crew and demanded he swear on a Bible that the Moon landings were not faked. After Sibrel called the 72-year-old Aldrin "a coward, a liar, and a thief" and witnesses said Sibrel had aggressively poked him with a Bible, Aldrin punched Sibrel in the jaw. The police declined to press charges, and the deputy district attorney of the Beverly Hills office declared that Sibrel had provoked him.

• 8. Mars and What Comes Next

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  In 1985, Aldrin proposed a spacecraft trajectory now known as the Aldrin cycler, a path between Earth and Mars that reduces travel cost by using less propellant. The cycler would provide a five-and-a-half month journey from Earth to Mars, with the return trip of the same duration on a twin cycler orbit. He continues to develop this concept with engineers from Purdue University.

  In a June 2013 opinion piece in The New York Times, Aldrin argued for treating the Moon not as a destination but as "a point of departure, one that places humankind on a trajectory to homestead Mars and become a two-planet species." In August 2015, in association with the Florida Institute of Technology, he presented a master plan to NASA calling for astronauts with ten-year tours of duty to establish a colony on Mars before the year 2040.

  The Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear was named in honor of Buzz Aldrin. The Aldrin crater on the Moon near the Apollo 11 landing site and Asteroid 6470 Aldrin are named in his honor. His hometown middle school in Montclair, New Jersey, was renamed Buzz Aldrin Middle School in 2016. On the 5th of May 2023, he received an honorary promotion to the rank of brigadier general in the United States Air Force.

  In December 2016, at 86 years old, Aldrin traveled to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica as part of a tourist group, making him the oldest person to reach the South Pole. He had first traveled to the North Pole in 1998. The Masonic flag he carried to the Moon, embroidered with the words "Supreme Council, 33 degrees, Southern Jurisdiction, USA," now resides in the archives of the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C.