Buzz Aldrin achieved almost as much as a human being could during the 20th century and has been cherished by the world’s community.
Edwin ( Buzz) Aldrin, Jr. was born in New Jersey at the brink of the Great Depression in 1930, and ever since has routinely (and boldly) gone where no man has gone before and face-punches the hell out of anyone who isn’t down with it.
Accordingly, he has lived a fascinating life worth looking at and taking inspiration from.
Aldrin always kept his eyes on his goal and never gave up.
The nickname “Buzz” came from the way his sister Fay Ann said the word buzzer instead of brother.
His family shortened the nickname to “Buzz.” Aldrin , who would make it his legal first name in 1988.
Named for his father Edwin Eugene Aldrin,Sr- a colonel in the U.S. Air Force,an aviation pioneer, and good friend of aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army Chaplain. (Some call it coincidence and some call it destiny, and some would argue that they’re the same thing. )
The family lived in the house his father bought just months before the stock market crash of 1929.
During the Great Depression, the stock market lost almost 90% of its value between between 1929 and 1933, but it did not hit the Aldrin family as much as most people.
At Montclair High School, Aldrin was a pole-vaulter and a 165 lb. center on an undefeated state-championship football team.
That didn’t make much of an impression at his next stop: the United States Military Academy at West Point.
“They were looking for much bigger guys with much bigger records,” .
In 1947, Aldrin graduated from Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey, his father, himself an officer, urged Buzz to attend the Naval Academy.
But Buzz wanted to enroll at the Military Academy at West Point.
This was partly because he was impressed by his sister’s boyfriend, a West Point cadet who was pictured on the cover of LIFE magazine.
His father relented to his son’s wishes,
Luckily for him, he was accepted and began his training there in 1947, but it was at the expense of another opportunity that most people dream of having: a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Though Aldrin turned down a free ride at M.I.T., he would get another shot at studying at the prestigious school.
After a summer of hitching around Europe on military planes, Buzz took well to the discipline and strict regimens -he was 1st in class his freshman year.
He graduated 3rd in class in 1951 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and officially entered the United States Air Force.
He again scored near the top of his class in flight school and began fighter training later that year.
During his time in the military, Aldrin joined the 51st Fighter Wing, where he flew in 66 combat missions over Korea,which he barely survived.
He shot down two Soviet MiG-15 s and damaged another while tearing through the skies in a F-86 Sabre, which earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in combat.
A cease-fire was declared between North and South Korea in 1953.
Several years later he served as a flight commander at US bases in Germany.
Aldrin patrolled the border with the Eastern Block, preparing for a nuclearized World War III.
Aldrin’s attention turned from the skies to the stars in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 the world’s first satellite into the Earth’s orbit and its signal could be received worldwide, firing the starting gun for the space race.
The greatest scientists in the US and the Soviet Union were locked in an epic era, as both countries were fighting to be the first world superpower to put a man up onto the surface of the Moon, and Buzz Aldrin decided he wanted to get in on that intellectual deathmatch.
In 1959 Buzz completed his tour of duty as an Air Force fighter pilot in Germany.
Upon his return to the US he considered two paths that could lead him toward the newly started US space program underway: experimental test pilot school (a prerequisite for NASA’s astronaut corps) or earning a graduate degree in astronautics.
Then just to prove that he wasn’t all ass-kicking and no brains, he did the latter, and went out and got his Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT.
With a mixture of respect and sarcasm, Buzz earned the nickname of Dr. Rendezvous after his thesis on Manned Orbital Rendezvous.
Its dedication reads:
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!.
Now, not only is it somewhat difficult to pass classes like Rocket Propulsion and Astrodynamics at one of the world’s premier engineering schools, his 1337 book-learning skills were so intense that his doctoral thesis techniques were actually incorporated into NASAs manual of standard operating procedures.
(The docking and rendezvous techniques he devised for spacecraft in Earth and lunar orbit became critical to the success of the Gemini and Apollo programs, and are still used today. )
Flying a spacecraft is very different than flying a plane. There is no true up or down and the dynamics of orbital flight make maneuvering to dock, or rendezvous, two spaceships very complex.
I focused my research on solving the problems of speed and centrifugal energy which lead to an ‘orbital paradox’ – a situation in which a pilot who speeds up to catch another craft in a higher orbit will end up in an even higher orbit, traveling at a slower speed and watching the second craft fly off into the distance.
The solution to this paradox is counter intuitive, and required new orbital mechanics and procedures.
Later, after joining the NASA astronaut corps, I spent time translating complex orbital mechanics into relatively simple flight plans for my colleagues – they thanked me (with a mixture of respect and sarcasm) with the nickname Dr. Rendezvous..
Buzz Aldrin – Waterkeeper, Fall 2005
Initially rejected when he applied for NASA’s second group of astronauts on the basis that he was not a test pilot, he applied again.
Fortunately, NASA changed its test pilot school requirement when he applied the 2nd time, and Buzz was accepted into the 3rd group of NASA’s pioneer astronauts in October, 1963.
Three years later, Buzz’s first mission was the last flight of the Gemini Program.
Gemini was an early NASA human spaceflight program. Gemini helped NASA get ready for the Apollo moon landings.
10 crews flew missions on the 2-man Gemini spacecraft. The Gemini missions were flown in 1965 and 1966, between the Mercury and Apollo programs.
During the Gemini 12 mission, Buzz was able to test his orbital rendezvous theories when a broken radar connection threatened Gemini’s docking maneuvers with Agena, the vehicle it was scheduled to rendezvous with in orbit.
Using the strategies he’d outlined at MIT, Buzz programmed the computer to complete the docking successfully.
Aldrin made his first trip into space as pilot of Gemini 12.
He was only able to crack the Apollo flight rotation only after his friend and classmate Ed White was killed in a launchpad fire during a training exercise.
The objective was to figure out how long humans could survive in space without losing muscle coordination, or, dying a horrific death, so you can pretty much see how crazy it was for Aldrin to volunteer for this insanity.
Aldrin’s job was basically to go out on the longest space walk ever attempted and see whether or not it would kill him.
Of course, Buzz wasn’t screwing around – he trained relentlessly in the days leading up to the mission, gaining strength and much-needed conditioning by scuba diving and spending extended periods moving around in underwater environments.
It worked!
He went out and ran around in the deadly vacuum of space for 5½ hours, and returned to his craft alive and intact.
For the record, the last time a NASA astronaut when on a spacewalk, he turned back after 33 minutes.
Well, as we all know, the pinnacle of Aldrin’s astronaut career was the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 – one of the defining moments of the 20th century.
Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, carrying Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Service Module (Columbia) Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module (LM) Pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.
On July 19, Apollo 11 flew behind the Moon, out of contact with Earth, and entered lunar orbit.
On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM, made a final check, and separated from Columbia, on its 13th lunar orbit. Problems began immediately as radio links with Earth started to fade in and out.
At Mission Control Flight Director Gene Kranz gave the crew “Go” for powered descent and communication was immediately lost again as the descent engine fired.
Unknown to Kranz this triggered a 13-minute life-or-death struggle, 385,000 kilometres from Earth.
Within minutes the on board computer — crucial to the landing — started flashing a “1202” error code that the crew had never before seen — and the sound of the master alarm filled the tiny cabin.
“Give us a reading on the twelve-oh-two,” Armstrong demanded tensely.
At Mission Control a team scrambled to try to find an answer — the error code meant that the 32K memory of the computer was struggling but still working and able to perform its mission-critical tasks.
Armstrong had an answer: “We’re go on that alarm!”
4 more error alerts sounded in the cabin. “The same type, we’re go,” Armstrong was told.
But there was another problem — Armstrong and Aldrin found they had overshot the planned landing zone and were flying over a vast crater field.
Running low on fuel, Armstrong searched for a new landing zone through his commander’s window.
Mission Control called a 60-second fuel warning.
As Armstrong focused intently on a flat spot ahead, while Aldrin called out speed and range, Mission Control called a 30-second fuel warning.
Seconds later, as the descent engine kicked up clouds of dust, a long metal rod that extended from the landing legs touched the lunar plain.
A blue light on the console signalled their arrival. Armstrong’s voice crackled from the speakers at Mission Control — he said simply, “the Eagle has landed.”
Aldrin as a devout Christian, the first thing Aldrin did was give thanks to God.
Aldrin, seated next to Neil Armstrong, became the first person to celebrate a religious sacrament on a heavenly body outside Earth.
The ordained Presbyterian elder wrote in a piece for Guideposts in 1970 he chose Holy Communion because his pastor at Webster Presbyterian, Dean Woodruff, often spoke about how God reveals Himself through the everyday elements.
“I wondered if it might be possible to take communion on the moon,”
Aldrin recalled a year after the mission, “symbolizing the thought that God was revealing Himself there, too, as man reached out into the universe.
For there are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”
And on July 20, 1969, after the Eagle lunar lander touched down on the surface of the moon, Aldrin pulled out the wafer that was in a plastic packet and the wine, along with a small silver cup provided by his church, which he kept in his “personal-preference kit,” before he spoke into the radio, according to the Religion News Service.
I would like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be,” Aldrin said, “to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”
Aldrin silently read from John 15:5, which he penned on a 3-by-5-inch notecard: “As Jesus said: I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in Him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.”
“Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot,” Aldrin said, referring to the lunar module, shortly after the Eagle lunar lander touched down on the surface of the moon July 20, 1969.
“In the radio blackout I opened the little plastic packages which contained bread and wine,” Aldrin said. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me.
In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”
He later wrote NASA requested he not read the Bible verse “because of the O’Hair lawsuit,” after Apollo 8 read 10 passages from Genesis about the creation of the world and an atheist sued.
Although the lawsuit was eventually dropped, the space program was nervous about including any more faith declarations. But Aldrin managed to get another verse in before once again stepping foot on earth.
At the end of the mission, when Aldrin was headed back to earth, he read aloud a second verse, from the Old Testament, he scrawled on the same notecard, Psalm 8: 3-4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest Him?”
It was one of the first computers to use integrated circuits, so instead of filling an entire room, it squeezed into a box just a couple of feet in size.
The AGC didn’t have a processor as we know it, but it instead used around 5,600 electronic gates that allowed it to perform operations at 0.043 MHz – roughly 40,000 a second.
For this momentous, insanely-dangerous mission, Buzz was basically strapped into a giant flying explosion that blasted off, went from zero to 24,300 miles per hour in about 2 seconds (it took them less than a minute to blow past the speed of sound), and catapulted off to infinity and beyond.
109 hours into the mission, the Lunar Module Eagle left the Command Service Module, determined to carry Armstrong and Aldrin to the surface of the Moon.
As one can imagine, it may be difficult to have a delicious meal up in space, especially on the first go around.
Buzz Aldrin’s favorite food was shrimp cocktail—dehydrated, of course. As Aldrin wrote, “We had very small shrimp that had a little bit of cocktail sauce, and when exposed to water, were very very tasty.”
Taste is a bit skewed in space, so the reason for the apparent shrimp cocktail taste sensation can be explained by the horseradish inside the cocktail sauce.
While in space, fluids shift toward to upper body, resulting in a feeling of sinus congestion for the astronauts. So, even though the shrimp cocktail may not have been great, it was able to open up the sinuses, lending the astronauts a sense of relief during dinner.
Things didn’t start off so great in the LM. Almost immediately, all of these alarms and klaxons started going off as the on-board computer was becoming fried with an overload of information.
The 2 astronauts flipped the lander onto manual control, descended 50,000 feet at 60 miles an hour, and touched down with just 20 seconds of fuel remaining in the LM’s descent engine.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew out of the landing craft and spent two hours flipping out on the surface before running back to the LM, blasting off, and giving each other some 360-degree Zero-G High-Fives.
They ran around, collected forty-seven pounds of moon rocks, planted a flag, looked around in awe.
Aldrin and Armstrong returned to the module ready to begin their ride back home, but they found a broken circuit breaker, from the ascent engine, laying on the floor of the module.
Now, the ascent engine was one of the most important components of the module for lifting it off of the moon, and after they radioed ground control for a solution, they were told to wait overnight for a response.
This meant the crew was faced with the possibility of being grounded on the moon indefinitely.
So, what does Buzz Aldrin do? He didn’t let this scare him off, and laid down and went to sleep.
But it was his knowledge of engineering and his gift for improvisation that may have saved the mission.
After getting some shut-eye, Buzz decided to take the matter into his own hands.
The broken switch left them without a way to ignite the engine, so Buzz, realizing his fingers were too large, created a make-shift circuit breaker switch by simply jamming his felt-tip pen into the mechanism.
This successfully primed the module for takeoff, and the mission was back underway.
To this day, Buzz still has the very same pen he used to ignite the module back towards earth at his home.
The spacecraft turned around, and hurtled into Earth’s atmosphere at 35,000 feet per second, smashed ass-first into the Pacific Ocean without even breaking a sweat, and rode home on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.
All told, these men had spent 8 days in space, and when they came back pretty much everyone thought they were thoroughly amazing.
Launching yourself into space comes with some serious risks.
Now, imagine you are attempting to be the first humans to fly into space, yet you have no life insurance policy to cover your family in case things go wrong.
That was the case for all 3 astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, as both Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong were also unable to afford the insurance policy required for an astronaut.
Because of the lack of a plan for their families should something happen on the mission, Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins came up with a plan.
While they were in pre-launch quarantine, they took matters into their own hands and decided to sign hundreds of autographs, which they then sent to a friend who would be responsible for distributing the memorabilia to their families in the case of tragedy.
Afterwards, they got parades, won a ton of medals, and even got a couple stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (an estimated 600 million people – one-fifth of the world’s population at the time – tuned in on their TVs to watch Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface… that should also probably give you some indication of how big of a deal this was).
In recalling the moon mission, Aldrin rattles off his lunar activities with a nonchalance that belies their enduring significance.
“I pranced in front of the camera to demonstrate the mobility you have [with so little gravity], collected a bunch of rocks, set up experiments, took a bunch of pictures, put up a flag, saluted the flag, unveiled a plaque which said, ‘We came in peace for all mankind,’ and made an appointment to have dinner with the President.”
In the famous photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon before reentering the lunar module, there are clear, thick black marks under his knees.
These marks were the result of him trying to reboard the lander and failing.
When attempting his jump back aboard, he didn’t push with enough force and ended up crashing his shins into the ladder.
“There is no place on Earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the lunar surface…What I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years…Beyond me I could see the moon curving away—no atmosphere, black sky.
Cold.
Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up.”
“Armstrong described the lunar surface as ‘beautiful,’” Aldrin says. “I thought to myself, It’s not really beautiful. It’s magnificent that we’re here, but what a desolate place we are visiting.”
In the book, he writes, “Those words seemed to describe my own inner turmoil as I thought about the days ahead.”
“Magnificent Desolation” is the way that Buzz Aldrin once described his impression of being on the moon.
I’ll let him take it away:
The phrase is also the title of his autobiography, published in 2009.
Tellingly, on the 10th anniversary of the moon landing, Aldrin was asked if he would like to return to the moon.
While Armstrong and Michael Collins—the third member of the Apollo 11 crew—said they would jump at the chance, Aldrin demurred. “I’m not sure I would go again.”
Buzz Aldrin is a man who dots his i’s, crosses his t’s, and keeps his paper trail. NASA learned this after he returned back from the Apollo 11 mission when he submitted an expense report to the government agency.
This expense claim was for the travel excursion he took during the journey, from Houston, Texas all the way to the moon, and was for an amount of $33.31.
He briefly headed the US Air Force Test Pilot School in California in 1971, where he regularly clashed with his superiors.
Like his mother, Aldrin suffered from depression and began to drink.
He retired in 1972 after 21 years of service.
With so much time having passed since the Apollo 11 mission, Aldrin is interested in setting straight the historical record.
While the moon landing is now largely remembered as an apolitical event and an achievement for all mankind, Aldrin reminds us that the space program began in the 1960s as another front in the Cold War.
“It was designed to have an impact on the stalemate over Mutually Assured Destruction with the Soviet Union,” he says. “Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn’t compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda.
But people have short memories.”
Aldrin’s account of his life after the moonwalk reads like a rock star’s confessional. Among his admissions: sneaking into a NASA doctor’s stash of booze while in quarantine after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
“My friend Jack Daniel’s, however, never failed to lift my spirits, albeit falsely,” he writes. Aldrin further owns up to thoughts of suicide, drunken car crashes, several affairs, and a couple of messy divorces.
During his bout with depression in the ‘70s, Aldrin needed to find a new job.
Eventually, he found himself selling cars in Beverly Hills, though he was quite unsuccessful and never actually sold a single car.
After several false starts, Aldrin conquered his addiction and his depression, getting sober in 1978, after he broke down his girlfriend’s door in a drunken rage.
He even served as chairman of the National Association of Mental Health.
He detailed much about his early struggles in a previous memoir, Return to Earth (Random House, 1973).
Although Aldrin conquered his alcohol addiction, he remained a headstrong and often enigmatic person to those close to him.
He lashed out when conspiracy theorists asked him to swear on the Bible that he actually went to the moon.
So here’s a funny story.
Apparently there are some people out there still think the moon landing was a hoax faked by the government for some obscure reason which probably makes little to no sense.
In 2002, a conspiracy theorist named Bart Sibrel decided he was going to make a revolutionary, earth-shattering documentary proving once and for all that the moon landing was actually shot on some Hollywood back lot sound stage or some other such hoax. .
Sibrel approached Aldrin with a camera crew and insisted that the moon landing was a fraud.
In order to most effectively prove his point and act like a rational human being, this amateur film director ran up to the 72 year-old Aldrin and his daughter outside of a hotel and started yelling a bunch of crazy stuff at the American astronaut.
After initially ignoring him, Aldrin finally lost his temper when Sibrel called him “a coward, a liar, and a thief.”
Buzz took one look at this guy, said nothing, and coldcocked him in the chops which left the joker staggered and dazed.
The resulting video clip has become a cult classic on YouTube.
I’m not entirely sure what happened afterwards, but my guess is that the cops showed up, took one look at Buzz Aldrin, and then maced the conspiracy theorist with a bunch of crazy pepper spray stuff and arrested him for violating every conceivable statute relating to “Criminal Stupidity”.
Still moving forward, Aldrin wrote more books, filed patents, founded a company, and started a foundation.
He is still involved in space exploration to this day: Aldrin is campaigning for a manned mission to Mars and recently shared some hopeful remarks in a speech at George Washington University, “A flight [to Mars] could be cruising past Venus by 2024.”
He also was part of the 2nd exploration team that went down to investigate the wreckage of the Titanic , which is pretty sweet because it means that during his insane life pushing the envelope of reality in every possible direction (250,000 miles above the Earth, and 2.5 miles below the waves. )
However, Aldrin does not take kindly to companies using his image for commercial purposes.
He has sued Omega watches, the brand he wore during the moon landing, for using his image without permission, as well as Topps trading cards for selling Buzz Aldrin trading cards.
After the release of Toy Story, Aldrin admitted to considering suing Disney, but eventually decided against it.
In 2016, Buzz Aldrin was in Antarctica on an expedition to the South Pole, which has the most similar conditions to Mars of anywhere on planet Earth.
Aldrin arrived at the South Pole on November 29th,2016 and was supposed to stay until December 8th.
Unfortunately, Aldrin had to be evacuated after suffering from altitude sickness.
He fell ill and his condition “deteriorated,” according to the tour company White Desert.
After consulting the White Desert doctor and the US Antarctic Program doctor, Aldrin was evacuated on the first available flight to McMurdo Station, a research station on the Antarctic coast run by the National Science Foundation.
From there, he was flown to Christchurch and transferred to a local medical facility. Aldrin was found to have liquid in his lungs, he was given antibiotics and kept in the hospital overnight.
Now, Buzz wants to go to Mars. Well, not him personally, but he is an advocate for human settlement on Mars. He doesn’t believe the journey to be the difficult part, but rather the settlement, as figuring out how to sustain life on the red planet is the challenge.
Believing that the generation of people born after the year 2000 will be the first to explore Mars, Aldrin has even collaborated on a children’s book in an effort to encourage and inspire the youth.
Written with Marianne Dyson and published by National Geographic in 2015, the book is titled Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet. This came after his 2013 book encouraging commercial space travel, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration.