| Buzz Aldrin | |
|---|---|
NASA Astronaut |
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| Nationality | American |
| Status | Retired |
| Born | January 20, 1930 Glen Ridge, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Other occupation | Fighter pilot |
| Rank | Colonel, USAF |
| Time in space | 12 days, 1 hour and 52 minutes |
| Selection | 1963 NASA Group |
| Total EVAs | 4 |
| Total EVA time | 8 hours 4 minutes |
| Missions | Gemini 12, Apollo 11 |
| Mission insignia | |
Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr., January 20, 1930) is an American mechanical engineer, retired United States Air Force pilot and astronaut who was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history. On July 20, 1969, he was the second human being to set foot on the Moon, following mission commander Neil Armstrong.
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Aldrin was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey,[1][2] to Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Sr., a career military man, and his wife Marion (née Moon).[3][4] He is of Scottish, Swedish,[5] and German[6] ancestry.[7] After graduating from Montclair High School in 1946,[8] Aldrin turned down a full scholarship offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The nickname "Buzz" originated in childhood: the younger of his two elder sisters mispronounced "brother" as "buzzer", and this was shortened to Buzz. Aldrin made it his legal first name in 1988.[9]
Aldrin graduated third in his class at West Point in 1951 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and served as a jet fighter pilot during the Korean War. He flew 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres and shot down two Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 aircraft. The June 8, 1953, issue of LIFE magazine featured gun camera photos taken by Aldrin of one of the Russian pilots ejecting from his damaged aircraft.[10]
After the war, Aldrin was assigned as an aerial gunnery instructor at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and next was an aide to the dean of faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy (which had recently begun operations in 1955). He flew F-100 Super Sabres as a flight commander at Bitburg Air Base, Germany in the 22nd Fighter Squadron. Aldrin then earned his Doctor of Science in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His graduate thesis was Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous. On completion of his doctorate, he was assigned to the Gemini Target Office of the Air Force Space Systems Division in Los Angeles before his selection as an astronaut.
Aldrin was selected as part of the third group of NASA astronauts in October 1963. Test pilot experience was no longer a requirement, so this was the first selection that he was eligible for. After the deaths of the original Gemini 9 prime crew, Elliot See and Charles Bassett, Aldrin was promoted with Jim Lovell to back-up crew for the mission. The main objective of the revised mission (Gemini 9A) was to rendezvous and dock with a target vehicle, but when this failed, Aldrin improvised an effective exercise for the craft to rendezvous with a coordinate in space. He was confirmed as pilot on Gemini 12, the last Gemini mission and the last chance to prove methods for EVA. Aldrin set a record for extra-vehicular activity and proved that astronauts could work outside spacecraft.
On July 20, 1969, he was the second astronaut to walk on the moon and the first to have also spacewalked, keeping his record total EVA time until that was surpassed on Apollo 14. There has been much speculation about Aldrin's desire at the time to be the first astronaut to walk on the moon.[11] According to different NASA accounts, he had originally been proposed as the first to step onto the Moon's surface, but due to the physical positioning of the astronauts inside the compact Lunar Landing Module, it was easier for the commander, Neil Armstrong, to be the first to exit the spacecraft. There was also a desire on NASA's part for the first person to step onto the Moon's surface be a civilian, which Armstrong was.
Buzz Aldrin was the first person to hold a religious ceremony on the Moon. Aldrin is, as he was, a Presbyterian. After landing on the moon, Aldrin radioed Earth: "I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way." He gave himself Communion on the surface of the Moon, but he kept it secret because of a lawsuit brought by atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair over the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8.[12] Aldrin, a church elder, used a pastor's home Communion kit given to him by Dean Woodruff and recited words used by his pastor at Webster Presbyterian Church.[13][14] Webster Presbyterian Church, a local congregation in Webster, Texas, (a Houston suburb near the Johnson Space Center) possesses the chalice used for communion on the moon, and commemorates the event annually on the Sunday closest to July 20.[15] Aldrin, a Freemason, also carried to the Moon a special deputization from Grand Master J. Guy Smith, with which to claim Masonic territorial jurisdiction over the Moon on behalf of the Grand Lodge of Texas.[16]
After leaving NASA, Aldrin was assigned as the Commandant of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. In March 1972, Aldrin retired from active duty after 21 years of service, and returned to the Air Force in a managerial role, but his career was blighted by personal problems. His autobiographies Return To Earth, published in 1973, and Magnificent Desolation, published in June 2009, both provide accounts of his struggles with clinical depression and alcoholism in the years following his NASA career.[17] His life improved considerably when he recognized and sought treatment for his problems, and with his marriage to Lois Aldrin. Since retiring from NASA, he has continued to promote space exploration, including producing a computer strategy game called Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space (1993). To further promote space exploration, and to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing, Buzz teamed up with Snoop Dogg, Quincy Jones, Talib Kweli, and Soulja Boy to create the rap single and video, "Rocket Experience". Proceeds from video and song sales will benefit Buzz's non-profit foundation, ShareSpace.[18] In 1995, he made a featured appearance in the Charlton Heston, Mickey Rooney, Deborah Winters film America: A Call to Greatness, directed by Warren Chaney.[19][20]
He referred to a "Phobos monolith" in a July 22, 2009, interview with C-Span: "We should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that they're going to say 'Who put that there? Who put that there?' The universe put it there. If you choose, God put it there…"[21]
In 1985, Aldrin proposed the existence of a special spacecraft trajectory now known as the Aldrin cycler.[22][23] A spacecraft traveling on an Aldrin cycler trajectory would pass near the planets Earth and Mars on a regular (cyclic) basis. The Aldrin cycler is an example of a Mars cycler. He was also instrumental in the idea of training of astronauts underwater in order to better prepare them for the intricate space walks and duties of maintenance while in space.
In December 2003, Aldrin published in The New York Times an article criticizing NASA's objectives'.[24] In it, he voiced concern about NASA's development of a spacecraft "limited to transporting four astronauts at a time with little or no cargo carrying capability" and declared the goal of sending astronauts back to the moon was "more like reaching for past glory than striving for new triumphs".
In 2009, Aldrin said he did not believe humans were causing current climate change: "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years. If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today. I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it."[25]
Books co-authored by Aldrin include Return to Earth (1973), Men From Earth (1989) and Magnificent Desolation (2009). He has also co-authored with John Barnes the science fiction novels Encounter with Tiber (1996) and The Return (2000).
Aldrin has been married three times: to Joan Archer, with whom he had three children, James, Janice, and Andrew; to Beverly Zile; and to his current wife, Lois Driggs Cannon, whom he married on Valentine's Day, 1988. He filed for divorce from Lois on June 15, 2011, in Los Angeles, citing “irreconcilable differences,” according to his attorney, one day after the couple separated.[26]
His battles against depression and alcoholism have been documented, most recently in Magnificent Desolation.[27][28] Aldrin is an active supporter of the Republican Party, headlining fundraisers for GOP members of Congress.[29] In 2007, Aldrin confirmed to Time magazine that he had recently had a face-lift;[30] he joked that the G-forces he was exposed to in space "caused a sagging jowl that needed some attention."[30]
In 2005, while being interviewed for a documentary titled First on the Moon: The Untold Story, Aldrin told an interviewer that they saw an unidentified flying object. Aldrin told David Morrison, an NAI Senior Scientist, that the documentary cut the crew's conclusion that they were probably seeing one of four detached spacecraft adapter panels. Their S-IVB upper stage was 6,000 miles away, but the four panels were jettisoned before the S-IVB made its separation maneuver so they would closely follow the Apollo 11 spacecraft until its first midcourse correction.[38] When Aldrin appeared on The Howard Stern Show on August 15, 2007, Stern asked him about the supposed UFO sighting. Aldrin confirmed that there was no such sighting of anything deemed extraterrestrial, and said they were and are "99.9 percent" sure that the object was the detached panel.[39][40][41]
Interviewed by the Science Channel, Aldrin mentioned seeing unidentified objects, and he claims his words were taken out of context; he asked the Science Channel to clarify to viewers he did not see alien spacecraft, but they refused.[42]
On September 9, 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel, a proponent of the Apollo moon landing hoax theory, confronted Aldrin and his stepdaughter outside a Beverly Hills, California hotel. Sibrel said "You're the one who said you walked on the moon, when you didn't" and called Aldrin "a coward, and a liar, and a thief."[43] Aldrin then punched Sibrel in the face. Beverly Hills police and the city's prosecutor declined to file charges after witnesses confirmed that Sibrel had initiated physical contact, and that Aldrin had asked Sibrel to leave him alone. Sibrel suffered no serious injuries.[44]
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