Buzz Aldrin

His father had picked the service for him. Edwin Aldrin Sr. flew for the Army in the First World War, ran the Army's test pilot school at McCook Field, then left for a job at Standard Oil, and he lined up an Annapolis appointment for his son from a New Jersey senator. The son got seasick and thought ships were a distraction from airplanes, and made his father go back and have the nomination switched to West Point. He entered in 1947, finished first in his class as a plebe, and graduated third in the class of 1951. The name everyone uses came from his sister Fay Ann, who as a small child turned brother into buzzer. He made Buzz his legal first name in 1988.

NASA turned him down first. He had flown 66 missions over Korea in F-86s and shot down two MiG-15s, but when Astronaut Group 2 was picked in 1962 he was rejected for not being a test pilot, and his request for a waiver was refused. So he finished an MIT doctorate in January 1963 on line-of-sight guidance for manned orbital rendezvous, dedicated it to the crews of the present and future space programs with the line if only I could join them, and was selected nine months later. The nickname Dr. Rendezvous was not always meant kindly. On Gemini 12 in November 1966 he spent about five and a half hours outside the spacecraft across three excursions and finally made spacewalking routine, largely by training underwater. Eagle landed on July 20, 1969 with roughly 25 seconds of fuel left.

His mother's maiden name was Moon, and she killed herself in May 1968, 14 months before her son walked on it. Aldrin believed his fame after Gemini 12 had contributed. Her own father had also died by suicide, and Aldrin thought the illness ran in the family. He came out of the lunar module second because of where the two men stood in a cramped cabin, and because the senior astronauts would not back him when he argued for the original checklist order. Michael Collins said Aldrin resented not being first more than he enjoyed being second. Afterward came four weeks in a psychiatric ward at Wilford Hall, retirement from the Air Force in 1972, a job selling used cars that he had no talent for, an arrest for disorderly conduct, and in October 1978 the last drink.

He is still here. At 96 he is the last of the Apollo 11 crew and the oldest living astronaut, Armstrong having died in 2012 and Collins in 2021. The record since 1969 is a jumble: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Mars cycler orbit proposed in 1985, a Congressional Gold Medal in 2011, an honorary promotion to brigadier general in 2023, a Pixar character named after him, and a punch thrown in 2002 at a conspiracy theorist who had poked him with a Bible, which prosecutors declined to charge. In 2018 his children sought guardianship over him, alleging dementia, and he sued them back. Both sides withdrew in March 2019. His fourth wife, Anca Faur, died in October 2025.

Buzz Aldrin's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous article
  The MIT doctorate that got him into the astronaut corps 1963
• Gemini 12 mission
  Three excursions outside the spacecraft, about five and a half hours in all 1966
• Apollo 11 mission
  Lunar module pilot and the second person to walk on the Moon 1969
• Return to Earth book
  The memoir that put his depression and his drinking on the record 1973
• The Aldrin cycler invention
  A trajectory for repeated Earth-Mars transits on less propellant 1985
• Magnificent Desolation book
  The second memoir, written with Ken Abraham 2009

• January 20, 1930 aged 0 Born at Mountainside Hospital in Glen Ridge, New Jersey
• June 5, 1951 aged 21 Graduates third in his West Point class and takes an Air Force commission
• June 4, 1953 aged 23 Shoots down his second MiG-15 over North Korea The gun camera footage ran in Life magazine.
• 1962 aged ~32 NASA rejects his application because he is not a test pilot His request for a waiver was also refused.
• October 18, 1963 aged 33 Selected for Astronaut Group 3, the first astronaut with a doctorate
• November 11, 1966 aged 36 Launches on Gemini 12 and solves the spacewalking problem
• May 1968 aged 38 His mother dies by suicide He carried the belief that his fame after Gemini 12 had contributed.
• July 21, 1969 aged 39 Steps onto the Moon 19 minutes after Neil Armstrong He had privately taken communion in the lunar module and kept it quiet, because of a lawsuit over the Genesis reading on Apollo 8.
• October 1978 aged 48 Stops drinking for good

• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. crewmate
• Michael Collins 1930–2021
  Apollo 11 command module pilot who orbited alone behind the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below. crewmate
• Margaret Hamilton b. 1936
  Directed development of the Apollo onboard flight software and popularized the term software engineering. wrote the flight software
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. built the rocket
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. set the deadline