🇺🇸Buzz
Aldrin

Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. was born on January 20, 1930, in Montclair, New Jersey, the son of a military aviation pioneer and the grandson of a Methodist minister — a lineage that seems, in retrospect, precisely calibrated to produce someone who would one day stand on the Moon and take communion. His mother's maiden name was Moon. His sister could not say "brother" as a child and called him "Buzzer," which became Buzz, the name that stuck for the rest of his life and that will be on his headstone. He grew up in a household saturated with aviation: his father Edwin Sr. had studied under Orville Wright, organized some of the first commercial airline routes in America, and brought home a succession of military aircraft that made the Aldrin backyard the most exciting in New Jersey. By the time Buzz was old enough to understand what his father did for a living, he had already decided to do the same thing.

Aldrin graduated third in his class from West Point in 1951, a commission that sent him directly to Korea, where he flew 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres and shot down two MiG-15s. He was not a cautious pilot. He was precise, aggressive, and technically exceptional — a pilot who understood what his aircraft could do and pushed it to those limits methodically rather than impulsively. After Korea he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed his doctorate in astronautics in 1963, writing his thesis on the mathematics of orbital rendezvous — the problem of how two spacecraft in orbit might find each other and dock. It was a subject no one had yet solved in practice, and it would prove to be exactly what the Apollo program needed.

NASA selected Aldrin in 1963. His Gemini 12 mission in November 1966 was the decisive demonstration that astronauts could perform meaningful work in the vacuum of space. Previous Gemini spacewalks had been plagued by exhaustion: working in a pressurized suit against the resistance of the vacuum was far harder than anyone had anticipated, and astronauts had been returning incapacitated. Aldrin solved the problem methodically. He had trained underwater for weeks, had insisted on hand and foot restraints being bolted to the exterior of the spacecraft, and had devised a systematic approach to every task that kept his heart rate below 125. He spent five hours outside the capsule over three spacewalks and came back in better condition than anyone who had done it before. The techniques he developed became standard practice for all subsequent spacewalks, including those on the lunar surface.

On July 20, 1969, Aldrin descended the ladder of the Eagle lunar module nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong and became the second human being to stand on the surface of another world. His first words on the lunar surface — "magnificent desolation" — were not planned, not rehearsed, and not part of any mission script. They were simply what he saw: a landscape of absolute beauty and absolute emptiness, grey dust stretching to a horizon that curved too quickly, under a black sky that held the Earth like a marble in a museum case. Before descending the ladder, in a private moment, he had taken out a small kit containing bread and wine and administered communion to himself — the first religious ceremony performed on another world. He did not announce it publicly at the time, concerned about a lawsuit brought by the atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair over the Apollo 8 crew's reading of Genesis.

Aldrin and Armstrong spent two hours and thirty-one minutes on the lunar surface, collecting 47.5 pounds of samples, deploying scientific instruments, and planting the American flag. When they returned to Earth, Aldrin discovered that the experience of having walked on the Moon was not the triumphant conclusion to anything — it was more like the end of a purpose. He suffered severe depression in the years after Apollo 11, struggled with alcoholism, went through two divorces, and eventually rebuilt himself through brutal honesty about his own failures in a memoir that no other astronaut of his generation would have written. He became an advocate for Mars exploration, a pop-culture fixture, and a man who at eighty-six years old was still showing up at press conferences in a bomber jacket, demanding to know when humanity was going back to space. He is, by some distance, the most interesting person who has ever walked on the Moon.

In the decades after Apollo, Aldrin channeled his expertise and restless energy into advocacy for the future of human spaceflight. He developed the "Aldrin Mars Cycler," a spacecraft trajectory concept that uses gravitational mechanics to create a perpetual shuttle route between Earth and Mars, requiring minimal propulsion after initial launch. It remains one of the most seriously discussed concepts in Mars mission planning. He founded ShareSpace Foundation to promote STEM education and space tourism, wrote multiple books on space policy, and became the most publicly active of the Apollo astronauts, determined to keep the dream of deep space exploration alive. He punched a conspiracy theorist who confronted him in 2002. He appeared on Dancing with the Stars. He is ninety-four years old as of 2024 and still talking about Mars.