Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin was born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. on January 20, 1930, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; the nickname 'Buzz' came from a younger sister's mispronunciation of 'brother,' and he made it his legal first name in 1988. He graduated third in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and became a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, flying 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres during the Korean War. Rather than pursue test-pilot school, Aldrin earned a doctorate in astronautics from MIT, writing a thesis on orbital rendezvous that would prove directly relevant to spaceflight and earn him the nickname 'Dr. Rendezvous.' NASA selected him in its third astronaut group in 1963.

Aldrin flew two missions. On Gemini 12, launched November 11, 1966, he set a benchmark for productive spacewalking. Earlier Gemini extravehicular activities had left astronauts exhausted and overheated, but Aldrin, drawing on underwater training and careful body-positioning techniques, completed three EVAs totaling more than five hours without difficulty, demonstrating that useful work outside a spacecraft was possible and helping to make the Apollo program feasible. His second flight was Apollo 11, launched July 16, 1969, on which he served as lunar module pilot. On July 20 he followed Neil Armstrong onto the surface to become the second person to walk on the Moon, describing the stark lunar landscape as 'magnificent desolation.' Before leaving the module, he privately took communion, the first religious ceremony performed on another world. The two astronauts spent about two and a half hours walking on the surface, deploying experiments and collecting samples, while Michael Collins orbited overhead.

Across his career Aldrin logged roughly 290 hours in space, including some eight hours of spacewalking that reshaped how astronauts operate outside their craft. After leaving NASA and the Air Force, he wrote candidly about the depression and alcoholism he battled following the mission, an unusually honest account for an astronaut of his era, in memoirs including 'Return to Earth' and 'Magnificent Desolation.' He has spent decades as a tireless advocate for human exploration of Mars, promoting a low-energy 'Aldrin cycler' trajectory to shuttle crews between Earth and the red planet, and supporting STEM education through his ShareSpace Foundation. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, Aldrin is now retired and, as one of the last surviving Apollo moonwalkers, remains among the most visible living witnesses to humanity's first journeys to another world.