BUZZ ALDRIN

Edwin Eugene Aldrin was born in Worchester, Massachusetts, in 1896, not long after his parents, brother, and two sisters had immigrated to the USA from Sweden. After World War One he became a friend of Orville Wright. Later, while serving in the Philippines, he married Marion Gaddys Moon, the daughter of an Army chaplain. On his return to the USA in 1928 Aldrin left the Army to become a stockbroker. Three months prior to the financial crash of August 1929 he sold his stocks, bought a large house in Montclair, New Jersey, and joined Standard Oil to expand the market for petroleum by promoting commercial aviation. In 1938 he left Standard Oil to become an aviation consultant, and in World War Two joined the Army as a colonel in the Air Force.

Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr was born on 20 January 1930 – a new brother for 3- year-old Madeline and 1-year-old Fay Ann. As Fay Ann pronounced ‘brother’ as ‘buzzer’, he gained the nickname ‘Buzz’. He had his first ride in an aeroplane at 2 years of age, when his father flew to Florida, but was sick for most of the journey. At school his priority was sports, at which he was extremely competitive, with his father cheering him on – as long as he excelled, his father was content. On leaving high school in 1947 Buzz accepted his father’s case for attending a military school, but dismissed his father’s recommendation of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, opting instead for the Military Academy at West Point, New York. Instead of going to summer camp as he usually did, he attended a 6-week school in order to prepare for the entrance examinations, in which he scored sufficiently well to be accepted. The first-year curriculum gave more or less equal time to scholastics and athletics. One-third of the course work was in mathematics, at which he excelled, with the result that he was rated first in both scholastics and athletics. At his graduation in 1951, at the age of 21, he was rated third in his class of 435 students.

In his final year at West Point, Buzz and his father agreed that he should join the Air Force, but while his father favoured multi-engine school because it would inevitably lead to command of a crew, Buzz wished to be a fighter pilot. After 6 months of basic flight training, 3 months of fighter pilot training, and 3 months at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, learning to fly the F-86 fighter-interceptor, he was

posted to the 51st Fighter Wing, arriving in Seoul, South Korea, on 26 December 1951. Although the war was less intense by the time he was ready for his first operational mission in February 1952, on 14 May he shot down a MiG during a patrol over North Korea (his gun camera film of the pilot ejecting was featured in Life magazine a week later) and on 7 June shot down a second. By the ceasefire on 1 July 1952 he had clocked up a total of 66 missions. He returned to Montclair in December. Prior to his Korean deployment he had accompanied his parents to a cocktail party where one of his father’s acquaintances, Mrs Evelyn Archer, invited him to dinner to meet her daughter, Joan, who had just gained her degree from Columbia and was hoping to make a career as a television actress. Michael Archer, her father, was an oil executive. Although Buzz and Joan had not corresponded while he was in Korea, he phoned her on his return and asked her to accompany him to a New Year’s Eve party, which she did. They met twice more before he returned to Nellis as a gunnery instructor (he had gained two ‘combat kills’, after all), and they kept in touch. Some time later, Buzz invited Joan for a week’s sightseeing in Las Vegas, which, although nearby for him, represented a major trip for her. As her mother had been killed in an air crash while Buzz was in Korea, Joan asked her father to accompany her. On the penultimate day Buzz proposed marriage, to which Joan agreed with her father’s consent. When Buzz’s parents were informed, they were delighted. Buzz and Joan were married on 29 December 1954, and two days later they left for Maxwell Field, Alabama, where Buzz was to spend 4 months in squadron officer school. He was then assigned as aide to the Dean of the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and as a flight instructor six months later. In August 1956 he went to Bitburg in West Germany to fly the F – 100 with the 36th Fighter Wing. In June 1959 they returned to the USA to enable Buzz to gain a postgraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to advance his military career. One option was a masters degree as a preliminary to attending Experimental Test Pilot School. If he took a doctorate, he would, on graduating, have exceeded the age limit for Experimental Test Pilot School. He opted therefore for a doctorate in astronautics – a new subject that was clearly going to become important to the Air Force. In May 1961, when John F. Kennedy initiated the ‘Moon race’, Aldrin was 30 years old and well into his doctorate. In December 1962, with a thesis entitled Line of Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous in draft, he was sent to the Air Force’s Space Systems Division in Los Angeles. When NASA invited applications for its third intake of astronauts in June 1963, he noted that the requirement for test pilot experience had been relaxed; now 1,000 hours of jet time was sufficient. He applied, and on 17 October was announced as one of 14 new astronauts. The family set up home in Nassau Bay, one of many new housing developments near the Manned Spacecraft Center.

In view of his background, Aldrin’s assigned specialism was mission planning, working with the Trajectories and Orbits group led by Howard W. ‘Bill’ Tindall, which studied every contingency involving the computer that would process either radar tracking or sextant sightings to compute a sequence of manoeuvres designed to make a rendezvous in space – the primary objective of the Gemini program was to demonstrate rendezvous techniques for Apollo. He tutored Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford for Gemini 6, which was to attempt the first rendezvous. As Aldrin noted, “It was essential for the pilot to understand what the computer was doing, and to make sure it made no errors that went unnoticed – i. e. the pilot must know how to guide the computer to the correct conclusion.” When Aldrin was assigned as backup pilot for Gemini 10, the frustration was that the system of ‘rotation’ introduced by Slayton – although not rigidly followed, by which, after serving in a backup capacity, a crew would skip two missions and fly the next – would in this case lead nowhere since the program was to finish with Gemini 12. Nevertheless, Aldrin was delighted to get a crew assignment because, having served in a backup capacity for Gemini he would rank ahead of the total ‘rookies’ when it came to selecting the early Apollo crews. Fate intervened, however. On 28 February 1966 Elliot See and his partner for Gemini 9, Charles Bassett, died in an air crash. In reshuffling the crews, Slayton advanced Lovell and Aldrin from backing up Gemini 10 to backing up Gemini 9, which put them in line to fly Gemini 12. When the radar on that mission failed, Aldrin completed the rendezvous by computing the manoeuvres manually, and later, during a record three spacewalks, he demonstrated a mastery of the art of working in weightlessness that paved the way for such activities to be included on Apollo missions. Although Aldrin had not been as involved in the development of the LM as some of his peers, his expertise made him well suited to accompany Armstrong on the first lunar landing attempt.

At the time of Apollo 11, the Aldrin family comprised Buzz and Joan, sons Michael, aged 13, and Andrew, 11, and daughter Janice, 11.