Buzz Aldrin
American astronaut who, with Neil Armstrong, walked on the Moon during Apollo 11 in 1969.
Biography
Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. was born in 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He graduated third in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1951 and joined the Air Force, flying 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres in the Korean War and shooting down two MiG-15s.
He later earned a doctorate in astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a thesis on orbital rendezvous, which earned him the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous". NASA chose him as an astronaut in 1963, the first with a doctorate. On Gemini 12 in November 1966 he made three spacewalks, showing that astronauts could work effectively outside a spacecraft.
On Apollo 11 he piloted the lunar module Eagle and on 21 July 1969 became the second person to walk on the Moon, after Neil Armstrong.
He left NASA in 1971 to command the Air Force Test Pilot School and retired from the Air Force in 1972. His memoirs describe his later struggles with depression and alcoholism. He has since campaigned for space exploration, especially a crewed mission to Mars, and devised the Aldrin cycler trajectory. He is the last surviving Apollo 11 crew member.
