Buzz Aldrin

Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. was born on January 20, 1930, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in the neighboring town of Montclair. His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin Sr., was an Army aviator and aviation fuel executive who had studied under the rocket scientist Robert Goddard, and his mother carried the striking maiden name Marion Moon ^[1]. The nickname that would follow him to the lunar surface came from childhood: one of his sisters pronounced the word brother as "buzzer", which the family shortened to Buzz. He made the name legal in 1988 ^[2].

Aldrin was a strong student and athlete at Montclair High School, playing football and setting his sights early on a military career. Rather than accept an appointment to the Naval Academy that his father favored, he chose the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated third in his class in 1951 with a degree in mechanical engineering ^[1]. That combination of academic discipline and competitive drive shaped everything that followed.

Commissioned into the newly independent United States Air Force, he completed flight training and qualified as a fighter pilot just as the Korean War was reaching its final phase. The cockpit of a jet, not a spacecraft, was where his professional life began ^[3].

During the Korean War, Aldrin flew 66 combat missions in the F-86 Sabre and was credited with shooting down two MiG-15 aircraft. Gun camera film from one of his aerial victories was published in Life magazine in 1953, an early brush with the publicity that would later define much of his life ^[1]. For his combat service he received the Distinguished Flying Cross ^[3].

After Korea he served as a gunnery instructor, an aide at the Air Force Academy, and a fighter pilot with a squadron based in West Germany during some of the tensest years of the Cold War. He then made a decision that set him apart from most military aviators of his generation: he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue a doctorate in astronautics ^[2].

His 1963 MIT thesis, titled Line of Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, worked out how piloted spacecraft could find and join each other in orbit ^[4]. The subject was no academic abstraction. Orbital rendezvous was the unsolved problem at the heart of NASA's plan to reach the Moon, and Aldrin's expertise earned him the half admiring, half teasing nickname "Dr. Rendezvous" among his fellow astronauts ^[2].

NASA selected Aldrin in October 1963 as part of its third group of astronauts, the first selection to accept applicants who had not attended a military test pilot school. His doctoral work on rendezvous made him valuable to mission planners even before he flew, and he contributed to the orbital mechanics used throughout the Gemini program ^[1].

His first spaceflight came in November 1966 aboard Gemini 12, the final mission of the program, with command pilot James Lovell. Spacewalking had gone badly on earlier Gemini flights, with astronauts exhausting themselves as they struggled against weightlessness. Aldrin approached the problem methodically, training extensively underwater in a technique that later became standard, and he insisted on handholds, foot restraints, and deliberate rest pauses ^[3].

The preparation paid off. Over three excursions Aldrin logged roughly five and a half hours outside the spacecraft, at the time a record, and demonstrated that an astronaut could do useful work in open space without dangerous fatigue ^[1]. Gemini 12 also completed a rendezvous and docking with an Agena target vehicle, and when the onboard radar failed, Aldrin used charts and his own rendezvous calculations to help complete the maneuver ^[4]. The mission closed out Gemini and cleared the way for Apollo.

Aldrin served on the backup crew for Apollo 8 before being assigned, with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, to Apollo 11, the mission tasked with attempting the first crewed lunar landing. The Saturn V rocket carrying the three men lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969 ^[5].

On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin flew the lunar module Eagle down to the Sea of Tranquility while Collins remained in orbit aboard the command module Columbia. During the descent, Aldrin called out altitude and velocity readings as Armstrong steered past a boulder field to a safe touchdown with little fuel to spare ^[5]. Armstrong stepped onto the surface first, and Aldrin followed about nineteen minutes later, becoming the second human being to walk on the Moon. Looking across the airless plain, he described the scene with a phrase that became permanently attached to him: "magnificent desolation" ^[2].

The two astronauts spent about two hours and fifteen minutes outside, planting the American flag, deploying scientific instruments including a seismometer and a laser reflector, collecting rock and soil samples, and taking a call from President Richard Nixon ^[5]. Among the mission's most reproduced images is Armstrong's photograph of Aldrin standing on the surface, the photographer and the lunar module mirrored in his gold visor. Aldrin, a Presbyterian elder, also privately took communion inside the lunar module before the moonwalk, a detail he disclosed publicly years later ^[2]. After returning to Earth on July 24, the crew endured quarantine and then a global tour, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom and honors from dozens of countries ^[1].

Life after the Moon proved harder than the journey there. Aldrin left NASA in 1971 and briefly commanded the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, an assignment that fit poorly since he had never been a test pilot, and he retired from the Air Force in 1972 with the rank of colonel ^[1].

In the years that followed, Aldrin sank into clinical depression and alcoholism, conditions he described with unusual candor in his 1973 memoir Return to Earth. Speaking openly about mental illness was rare for a public figure of his standing at the time, and rarer still for a military officer and national hero, which gave the book a significance beyond his own story ^[6]. He later marked his sobriety from October 1978 and became an advocate for treatment and recovery.

His personal life was turbulent through this period. Two marriages ended in divorce before he married Lois Driggs Cannon in 1988; that marriage also ended in divorce in 2012. Aldrin has three children from his first marriage ^[2]. In January 2023, on his 93rd birthday, he announced that he had married Anca Faur ^[7].

From the 1980s onward, Aldrin reinvented himself as a persistent, sometimes impatient advocate for expanding human spaceflight. He developed and promoted the Aldrin cycler, a proposed spacecraft trajectory that would swing perpetually between Earth and Mars, allowing regular crew transfers with relatively little propellant ^[4]. He founded ventures and a nonprofit, the ShareSpace Foundation, to promote space education, and in 2015 he partnered with the Florida Institute of Technology to create the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute, focused on planning permanent settlement of Mars ^[4].

He also became a prolific author. Beyond Return to Earth, his books include the memoir Magnificent Desolation (2009), the Mars advocacy volume Mission to Mars (2013), children's books, and two science fiction novels written with John Barnes ^[6]. Few Apollo veterans matched his appetite for public argument about where the space program should go next, and his consistent answer, repeated before Congress and in print, was Mars rather than a return to the Moon as a final destination.

His appetite for adventure never faded. He traveled to the Titanic wreck site by submersible, visited the North Pole, and in 2016, at age 86, reached the South Pole, where he fell ill and had to be evacuated ^[7]. Along the way he became an unlikely pop culture fixture, voicing himself on The Simpsons, appearing on Dancing with the Stars in 2010, and lending his name to the Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear's cultural orbit.

Any honest Buzz Aldrin biography has to reckon with a double legacy: the engineer whose rendezvous mathematics and spacewalk methods helped make Apollo possible, and the second man on the Moon who spent decades wrestling publicly with what that ranking meant. Among Buzz Aldrin achievements, the science is easy to state. His MIT thesis shaped orbital rendezvous practice, his Gemini 12 techniques became the foundation of modern extravehicular activity, and his cycler concept still appears in serious Mars mission studies ^[4].

The honors are extensive. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, shared the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to the Apollo 11 crew in 2011, and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame ^[3]. A crater near the Apollo 11 landing site carries his name, as does the asteroid 6470 Aldrinia. In 2023 the Air Force honorarily promoted him to brigadier general ^[7].

For readers gathering Buzz Aldrin facts, perhaps the most durable one is this: of the twelve people who walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, Aldrin became the most visible living witness, using his fame less to relive July 1969 than to argue, decade after decade, that it should be a beginning rather than a peak ^[6].