Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., January 20, 1930) is an American former astronaut, Air Force fighter pilot, and engineer who became the second person to walk on the Moon.[1][4] As lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, he stepped onto the surface on July 20, 1969, nineteen minutes after commander Neil Armstrong, and described the landscape as "magnificent desolation."[1][4]

Aldrin's influence on spaceflight began before he ever flew. His 1963 MIT doctoral thesis on orbital rendezvous supplied techniques that NASA put to use during Gemini, and his spacewalks on Gemini 12 in 1966 showed that an astronaut could do sustained useful work outside a spacecraft, something every previous American EVA had struggled with, clearing a path for the Apollo program.[2][6] After Apollo he wrote candidly about depression and alcoholism, then rebuilt his public life as an advocate for Mars settlement, proposing the Earth-Mars cycler trajectory that bears his name.[14][17]

As of 2026 Aldrin is 96 years old, the oldest living astronaut and one of four surviving moonwalkers. He remains a supporter of NASA's Artemis program, which flew a crewed lunar flyby in April 2026.[23][25]

Early life and Korean War

Buzz Aldrin grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated from Montclair High School in 1947. The lifelong nickname came from a sister, Fay Ann, who pronounced "brother" as "buzzer," and Aldrin later made Buzz his legal first name.[4][5] Sources differ on where the birth itself took place: NASA's astronaut biography and the New Mexico Museum of Space History give Montclair, while the Associated Press gives neighboring Glen Ridge.[1][4][23]

He entered West Point in 1947, graduated third in the class of 1951, and took a commission in the Air Force rather than the Navy service his father had preferred.[1][5] He reached Korea the day after Christmas 1951 and flew 66 combat missions in the F-86 Sabre, shooting down two MiG-15s.[1][5] Gun-camera film from one of those engagements caught the MiG pilot ejecting, reportedly the first photographs of an ejection in air combat, and ran in Life magazine soon afterward.[5]

Assignments after Korea kept him in fighters and in the schoolhouse. He was an aerial gunnery instructor at Nellis Air Force Base, then aide to the dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy, then a flight commander flying F-100s at Bitburg, Germany.[1]

Dr. Rendezvous

Buzz Aldrin passed up test pilot school in favor of graduate study, earning a Doctor of Science degree in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. His thesis, "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous," worked out how a pilot could bring two spacecraft together in orbit using visual sightings and simple onboard calculations, a foundation of practical orbital mechanics for crewed flight.[1][5] The Air Force then sent him to the Gemini Target Office of its Space Systems Division in Los Angeles, where the same problem was the day job.[1]

NASA announced its third group of astronauts on October 18, 1963, fourteen men in all.[3] Aldrin was the first astronaut to hold a doctorate.[6] His MIT specialty followed him into the astronaut office, where colleagues called him "Dr. Rendezvous."[3] NASA credits his Gemini work on spacewalk techniques and procedures with helping open the way to Apollo.[2]

Gemini 12

Gemini 12, flown November 11-15, 1966, was Buzz Aldrin's first spaceflight and the closing mission of NASA's Gemini program.[7][8] The deaths of the Gemini 9 prime crew, Elliot See and Charles Bassett, in a T-38 crash on February 28, 1966 forced a reshuffle of flight assignments across the program.[11] In June 1966 NASA named Gemini 7 veteran Jim Lovell and the rookie Aldrin as the prime crew for the final mission.[8]

Gemini 12 lifted off from Cape Canaveral on November 11, 1966, at 3:46:33 p.m. EST and splashed down in the western Atlantic on November 15 after 94 hours 34 minutes and 59 revolutions.[7] The rendezvous radar went erratic during the approach to the Agena target vehicle and had to be switched off.[8] At a range of about 74 miles Aldrin pulled out a sextant and a slide rule, measured the angle between the horizon and the Agena, and worked the maneuvers by hand from his own doctoral methods.[6] The docking went ahead on the third revolution.[7][8]

The mission's larger achievement was extravehicular activity. Spacewalkers on earlier Gemini flights had exhausted themselves fighting their pressurized suits, with heart rates spiking and visors fogging. On September 12, 1966, at a swimming pool at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, Aldrin became the first astronaut to rehearse a spacewalk in neutral buoyancy, working through the tasks against submerged mockups of the Gemini and Agena spacecraft; he went back for more sessions in October, less than a month before launch.[9] The spacecraft itself was fitted with extra handrails and handholds, overshoe foot restraints, and a waist tether, and the timeline was paced deliberately so that he could rest.[6] Aldrin logged 5 hours 30 minutes outside across three excursions: a standup EVA of 2 hours 29 minutes in the open hatch, a 2 hour 6 minute umbilical spacewalk to a workstation on the Agena adapter, and a final standup EVA of 55 minutes.[7] He finished each one without distress and afterwards put the result down largely to the pool.[9] The flight proved that astronauts could do useful work in open space, a prerequisite for everything from Apollo to the International Space Station.[9][10]

Apollo 11

Buzz Aldrin served as lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, launched on July 16, 1969, with commander Neil Armstrong and command module pilot Michael Collins. During the descent to the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, Aldrin called out altitude and velocity readings while Armstrong flew the lunar module Eagle to a landing with less than a minute of usable propellant remaining.[1]

Armstrong left the spacecraft first, and the reason was the cabin. Eagle's hatch opened inward, past the right-hand crew station that was Aldrin's, so Aldrin would have had to climb over his commander in a cramped cabin in a pressurized suit to get out ahead of him. Apollo spacecraft program manager George Low announced the order publicly on April 14, 1969, three months before launch.[26]

Before the moonwalk, Aldrin asked over the open radio link that anyone listening "pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way," then took communion with a chalice and consecrated wine he had carried in his personal preference kit. NASA did not broadcast the ceremony.[12]

Aldrin followed Armstrong onto the surface and completed a lunar EVA of 2 hours 15 minutes.[1] He deployed the passive seismic experiment and the solar wind collector, took core samples, kicked the regolith for soil cohesion tests, and photographed his own bootprint for the penetration experiment.[12] Many of the mission's most reproduced photographs, including the visor portrait taken by Armstrong, show Aldrin. The crew returned to Earth on July 24 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom that year.[1] Between September 29 and November 5 they flew the Giantstep goodwill tour at President Richard Nixon's request, a 38-day circuit of 29 cities in 24 countries with 22 press conferences along the way.[13]

Missions

Buzz Aldrin flew two space missions, Gemini 12 in 1966 and Apollo 11 in 1969, and logged 289 hours 53 minutes in space across them, of which 7 hours 52 minutes were spent outside the spacecraft.[1][2]

MissionDatesRoleNotes
Gemini 12November 11-15, 1966PilotRecord 5 h 30 min of EVA across three excursions; manual rendezvous after radar failure
Apollo 11July 16-24, 1969Lunar module pilotSecond person on the Moon; 2 h 15 min lunar EVA

Struggles and recovery

Buzz Aldrin resigned from NASA in July 1971 and returned to the Air Force as commander of the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. He retired from active duty in March 1972 after 21 years of service.[1][2]

The years that followed brought clinical depression and alcoholism, which he described in his 1973 autobiography "Return to Earth."[1][17] Aldrin has said the illness ran in the family, that both his parents were alcoholics, and that the hardest part was accepting that he needed help; his drinking peaked in the mid-1970s and he has not had a drink since 1978.[17] He joined the board of the National Association for Mental Health in the early 1970s and served as its national chairman, touring the country to talk about his own depression at a time when few public figures discussed it.[17]

Mars advocacy and the Aldrin cycler

From the 1980s onward Buzz Aldrin turned his orbital rendezvous expertise toward Mars. In 1985 he proposed what is now called the Aldrin cycler: a spacecraft placed on a periodic trajectory that swings repeatedly between Earth and Mars with only moderate maneuvers, its orbit sustained largely by gravity assists at Earth, so that crews could ride a large, well-shielded vehicle between the planets while smaller craft handle departures and arrivals. He worked the trajectory up with Dennis Byrnes of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and James Longuski of Purdue University; their joint paper in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets in 1993 published the orbit and 15 years of computed encounters, and proposed a station on the cycler as a radiation shelter and living quarters for the transit.[14]

He wrote a run of books alongside the advocacy, among them "Men from Earth" (1989) on the Apollo program,[1] and on August 27, 2015 he joined the Florida Institute of Technology as a research professor of aeronautics to establish the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute. Its brief was his "Cycling Pathways to Occupy Mars" plan, a sequence of progressive missions to cis-lunar space, asteroids, the Martian moon Phobos, and eventually the surface of Mars, with lunar resources developed commercially and internationally to support the eventual settlement.[15] That ordering, the Moon as a stepping stone rather than a destination, has been the consistent line of his public advocacy, and permanent settlement of Mars is a goal also pursued by SpaceX with its Starship program. The education work he started in the 1990s now runs as the Aldrin Family Foundation, a nonprofit operated by his family that builds classroom STEAM material, including printed lunar maps and a program that puts student-built satellites in orbit.[16]

Awards and honors

Buzz Aldrin holds the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to the Apollo 11 crew in 1969,[1] and the Congressional Gold Medal, presented in 2011;[19] the Air Force added an honorary brigadier general's rank in 2023.[20]

HonorYearNote
Harmon International Trophy1967Aviation and astronautics award[1]
Presidential Medal of Freedom1969Awarded to the Apollo 11 crew[1]
International Space Hall of Fame1982New Mexico Museum of Space History[4]
National Aviation Hall of Fame2000Enshrined at Dayton, Ohio[21]
Congressional Gold Medal2011New Frontier medal, authorized August 7, 2009, presented in the Capitol Rotunda on November 16, 2011[18][19]
Honorary brigadier general, USAF2023Ceremony at Los Angeles Air Force Base, May 5, 2023[20]

His NASA biography also lists the Robert J. Collier Trophy and the Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, without giving the years.[1] He holds honorary degrees from six colleges and universities, and both the asteroid 6470 Aldrin and Aldrin crater on the Moon are named for him.[1][4]

Later life

Buzz Aldrin stayed a public figure well into his nineties, attending Apollo anniversaries, White House events, and launches. In December 2016, at 86, he was evacuated from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station with fluid in his lungs, flown out to McMurdo Station and then to New Zealand, after a tourist trip that had already made him, by the National Science Foundation's reckoning, the oldest person to reach the South Pole.[22] He married Anca Faur, a chemical engineer and executive of his company Buzz Aldrin Ventures, on his 93rd birthday in January 2023. She died of cancer in October 2025.[23]

Following the death of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell on August 7, 2025, Aldrin became the oldest living astronaut.[23][24] He is one of four Apollo moonwalkers still alive, alongside David Scott, Charles Duke, and Harrison Schmitt.[23] He turned 96 on January 20, 2026, and his family said in a December 2025 post that he was still grieving his wife and would be moving closer to relatives in Southern California.[23] Three months later NASA flew Artemis II, sending four astronauts around the Moon between April 1 and April 10, 2026, the first crew to leave low Earth orbit since Apollo 17.[25]

References

  1. Buzz Aldrin, Ph.D. (Colonel, USAF, Ret.) NASA Astronaut (Former) - NASA biographical data sheet, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
  2. Former Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin - NASA.
  3. 60 Years Ago: NASA Selects Its Third Group of Astronauts - NASA History, 2023.
  4. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. - New Mexico Museum of Space History, International Space Hall of Fame.
  5. Buzz - Air & Space Forces Magazine.
  6. Gemini XII Crew Masters the Challenges of Spacewalks - NASA.
  7. Gemini XII - NASA mission page.
  8. 55 Years Ago: Gemini XII Closes Out a Successful Program, Paves the Way for Apollo - NASA History.
  9. Building on a Mission: Neutral Buoyancy Facilities for Spacewalk Training - NASA History.
  10. Learning How to Work in Space: Buzz Aldrin and Gemini XII - Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
  11. 55 Years Ago: Remembering Elliot See and Charles Bassett - NASA History.
  12. 50 Years Ago: One Small Step, One Giant Leap - NASA History.
  13. 50 Years Ago: Apollo 11 Astronauts Return from Around the World Goodwill Tour - NASA History.
  14. Cycler orbit between Earth and Mars - Dennis V. Byrnes, James M. Longuski and Buzz Aldrin, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, vol. 30 no. 3, 1993 (NASA Technical Reports Server).
  15. Buzz Aldrin Space Institute Formed at Florida Institute of Technology - Florida Institute of Technology, August 27, 2015.
  16. Aldrin Family Foundation - Aldrin Family Foundation (official site).
  17. Buzz Aldrin: Down to Earth - Psychology Today, 2001.
  18. New Frontier Congressional Gold Medal Act, Public Law 111-44 - U.S. Government Publishing Office, August 7, 2009.
  19. Honoring NASA's Pioneering Astronauts - NASA, November 16, 2011.
  20. SSC Hosts Ceremony for Legendary Astronaut and Fighter Pilot Buzz Aldrin's Honorary Appointment to Brigadier General - Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, May 5, 2023.
  21. Buzz Aldrin - National Aviation Hall of Fame.
  22. Buzz Aldrin gets visit from NASA after polar evacuation - Phys.org (Associated Press), December 2016.
  23. Oldest astronaut Buzz Aldrin turns 96 as new moon astronauts share Apollo inspirations - Phys.org (Associated Press), January 2026.
  24. Acting NASA Administrator Reflects on Legacy of Astronaut Jim Lovell - NASA, August 8, 2025.
  25. NASA Welcomes Record-Setting Artemis II Moonfarers Back to Earth - NASA, April 10, 2026.
  26. 50 Years Ago: Apollo 11 Preparations in April 1969 - NASA History.