Astronaut
Buzz Aldrin
Notes from Evan Smith
"It all comes down to this: He walked on the moon. That's what the history books say, and that's what his obituary will say. Whatever else he's accomplished in his life, it pales by comparison to that simple fact, which puts him in one of the most exclusive clubs on this or any other planet. It was on July 20 1969, that Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot on the first manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 11, spent two and a half hours on the surface of the moon, following his colleage Neil Armstrong in making a giant step for mankind. He had been selected by NASA six years earlier to be in the only third group of astronauts. Three years earlier, he had performed the first-ever successful space walk. By the time he resigned from NASA in 1971, he had spent nearly 290 hours in space, and nearly 8 hours outside one or another spacecraft. Edwin Eugene Aldrin was born 79 years ago in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He was nicknamed Buzz as a child -- his sister mispronounced "brother" as "buzzer," which got shortened to buzz. After graduating third in his class at West Point, he flew 66 combat missions for the Air Force in Korea. When the war ended, he was assigned to an Air Force Base in Nevada, where he was an aerial gunnery instructor. Upon completion of his doctorate in Astronautics from MIT, he entered Air Force test pilot school and then, not long after, became an astronaut. Since retiring from the Air Force in 1972, he has been perhaps the world's leading advocate for manned space exploration, and he has collected his fair share of awards and accolades, including the Congressional Gold Medal, which was awarded at a White House ceremony earlier this year by President Obama. He has also written several books, most recently Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, which chronicles, quite literally, his difficult reentry from space and the astronaut's life when he returned to earth.
Always interesting, always pugnacious, I had a chance to sit with him a few weeks ago when he travelled from his home in California to Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and his tales of that fateful day forty years ago were simply riveting ... as you're about to hear." - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 12.17.09
