Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin: The Man Who Solved Rendezvous

Before the hatch opened on the most watched night in human history, the lunar module *Eagle* held a private ceremony. Buzz Aldrin poured wine into a small chalice, read from John 15:5, and took communion on the surface of the Moon — the first food and liquid consumed there. He kept it quiet, because NASA was still being sued over the Genesis reading from Apollo 8. Nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong, he climbed down the ladder and delivered the finest three-word review the Moon has ever received: "Magnificent desolation."

The Boy from Montclair

Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. was delivered at Mountainside Hospital in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on January 20, 1930, to an Army aviator turned Standard Oil executive and a woman whose maiden name — improbably — was Moon. His sister Fay Ann could not manage "brother" and produced "buzzer"; the nickname stuck so thoroughly that in 1988 he made it his legal first name. At Montclair High School he played center on the undefeated 1946 state championship football team while carrying an A average. He entered West Point in 1947, finished his plebe year first academically, pole-vaulted for the academy, and graduated on June 5, 1951, third in his class with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Sabres Over the Yalu

In December 1952 Aldrin joined the 16th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing at Suwon Air Base. He flew 66 combat missions in the F-86 Sabre and shot down two MiG-15s. The first, on May 14, 1953, near the Yalu River, was captured on gun-camera film that *Life* magazine published on June 8 — the enemy pilot ejecting, frame by frame, into the American living room. The second kill, on June 4, came after a series of scissor maneuvers and a jammed gun sight. He collected two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Air Medals, then taught aerial gunnery at Nellis and commanded a flight of F-100s in Germany.

Dr. Rendezvous

NASA rejected him. His 1962 application to the second astronaut group failed because he had never been a test pilot, and his request for a waiver was denied. So Aldrin went the other way and out-thought the problem. Sent to MIT by the Air Force Institute of Technology, he earned a doctorate of science in astronautics in January 1963 with a 311-page thesis titled "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous." He dedicated it "to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs" — a job application disguised as scholarship. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum describes it as genuine rocket science rather than rocket engineering: complicated physics turned into a procedure a pilot could actually fly, using a programmable sight reticle to initiate, monitor and correct an intercept by hand. On October 18, 1963, NASA selected him for Astronaut Group 3. He was the first astronaut to hold a doctorate, and the corps called him Dr. Rendezvous, not always kindly.

Gemini 12, and the Fix for Spacewalking

Gemini 12 lifted off on November 11, 1966, at 20:46 UTC from Launch Complex 19, with Jim Lovell in command. When the rendezvous radar failed, Aldrin fell back on a sextant and hand-worked charts and brought the spacecraft to its docking anyway — his thesis, executed in orbit. The mission's real emergency, though, was extravehicular activity: earlier astronauts had exhausted themselves fighting their own suits. NASA rebuilt the approach around him, replacing parabolic-flight practice with underwater training, raising the number of handholds from nine to forty-four, adding foot restraints and workstations, and building two-minute rest periods into the timeline. Aldrin's three spacewalks totaled roughly five hours and twenty-one minutes — a 2-hour-20-minute standup EVA on November 12 that set a record, a 2-hour-6-minute free-flight EVA on November 13, and a 55-minute standup on November 14 — and closed out the Gemini program's EVA objectives without drama. The technique he validated is still how astronauts train.

Eagle

Apollo 11 launched July 16, 1969, at 13:32 UTC. *Eagle* touched down on July 20 at 20:17:40 UTC with roughly 25 seconds of fuel remaining. The checklists had once put the lunar module pilot out the hatch first; the physical geometry of the cabin made Armstrong's exit easier, and senior astronauts saw no reason to rewrite it. Aldrin's boot touched the surface at 03:15:16 UTC on July 21. He set up the seismometer and the laser retroreflector, hammered a core tube into ground that refused it, and helped collect 21.55 kilograms of the Moon. Because he carried the camera for most of the walk, the iconic photographs of a man on the Moon are almost all photographs of Aldrin; Armstrong appears in only two color frames, a fact nobody noticed until the film came home. They left an Apollo 1 patch and medallions honoring Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov. Splashdown came July 24 at 16:50 UTC. Aldrin's career total: 289 hours 53 minutes in space, 7 hours 52 minutes of it outside.

The Fall

What followed is the least discussed and most useful part of his life. Made commandant of the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards in 1971 with neither test-pilot nor managerial experience, he was blamed for two crashes attributed to thin supervision. He suffered clinical depression and spent four weeks at Wilford Hall Medical Center. His mother had killed herself in May 1968, as had her father; Aldrin came to regard the vulnerability as inherited. He retired as a colonel on March 1, 1972, after 21 years, and published *Return to Earth* in 1973, an autobiography that said the words depression and alcoholism out loud when astronauts were not supposed to have interiors. He sold used cars, badly, admitting he had "no talent" for it. He was arrested for disorderly conduct. He stopped drinking in October 1978 and never started again, and spent years helping other alcoholics, among them the actor William Holden. *Magnificent Desolation* (2009) told the rest.

Second Act

Sobriety returned him to orbital mechanics. In 1985 he devised the Aldrin Cycler, a trajectory that loops perpetually between Earth and Mars so that crews ride a moving station rather than burn propellant for the whole trip — a 5.5-month transit he still refines with engineers at Purdue. He joined the University of North Dakota's aerospace college the same year to help build its space studies program, founded Starcraft Boosters in 1996 to design reusable launchers, sat on the Mars Society steering committee, and in 2015 published a Florida Institute of Technology master plan for putting humans on Mars before 2040. He also punched a Moon-landing conspiracy theorist in the jaw in Beverly Hills on September 9, 2002, after being poked with a Bible and called a coward and a liar; prosecutors declined to charge him. At 86 he became the oldest person to reach the South Pole. Buzz Lightyear is named after him.

Why Buzz Is Called a Genius

The honest case rests on one document and one flight. The thesis is the thing: taking the geometry of two objects converging at orbital speed and reducing it to something a human being could execute manually, in a cramped capsule, with a reticle and a sextant — and then, on Gemini 12, doing exactly that when the radar quit. That is a specific and rare cognitive gift: the translation of hard physics into flyable procedure. The Smithsonian's judgment is measured and worth quoting for what it does not claim — Aldrin's work was "rocket science," real physics, as against the superb engineering intuition of Armstrong, and he was the first astronaut to hold a doctorate.

The counter-case is substantial and Aldrin's own life supplies most of it. Rendezvous theory was not his invention; NASA had teams working the problem, and his contribution was distinguished partly because he was one of the very few people who both understood the math and would be strapped into the vehicle. Away from that narrow problem his judgment was ordinary or worse: he was a poor administrator at the Test Pilot School, a self-confessed failure as a salesman, and for a decade a man whose illness ran his life. Sources do not show serious figures calling him a genius; they show a first-rate applied mind with one decisive idea, backed by physical courage and, later, unusual candor. That is enough. Inflating it would insult the achievement.

Legacy

Aldrin received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 13, 1969, the Collier Trophy that year, the Hubbard Medal in 1970, the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011, and the Starmus Festival's Stephen Hawking Medal for science communication in 2019. A crater near the Apollo 11 site carries his name, as do asteroid 6470 and, since 2016, the middle school in Montclair. Armstrong died in 2012 and Michael Collins in 2021, leaving Aldrin the last man alive who flew Apollo 11 and, as of 2025, the oldest living astronaut — still arguing, at every opportunity, that the Moon was never the destination.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1969
• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Military Academy and Severn School
• Worked as air force officer, fighter pilot and astronaut