Buzz Aldrin wrote his way to the Moon with a doctorate on orbital rendezvous
NASA turned Buzz Aldrin down in 1962 because he had never been a test pilot. So he leaned on something no other candidate had: an MIT doctorate on how spacecraft could meet in orbit. Picked the following year, he became the first astronaut with a doctorate, and in July 1969 the second man to walk on the Moon.
His name started as a family joke. One of his older sisters, Fay Ann, could not say brother and came out with buzzer, which shrank to Buzz; in 1988 it became his legal first name. His father, an Army aviator turned Standard Oil executive, pushed him towards the Naval Academy and even secured an appointment, but young Edwin got seasick and considered ships a distraction from aircraft. He persuaded his father to switch the nomination to West Point, where he was top of his class after his first year and graduated third in 1951.
He picked the new Air Force, and, ignoring his father's advice to fly bombers for leadership experience, chose fighters. Flying F-86 Sabres in Korea he completed 66 combat missions and downed two MiG-15s, with his gun-camera film printed in Life magazine. Later he flew nuclear-armed F-100s in Europe before heading to MIT in 1959 for a master's degree that grew into a doctorate on line-of-sight rendezvous guidance, which he dedicated to current and future astronauts, adding that he wished he could join them.
When NASA reopened selection in 1963, it accepted 1,000 jet hours instead of test-pilot experience, and he had around 2,200. Colleagues dubbed him Dr. Rendezvous, not always kindly. He was slated only as a backup until the deaths of the Gemini 9 crew in a 1966 air crash reshuffled the rota and put him on Gemini 12, where he spent more than five hours outside the capsule. On Apollo 11 he stepped onto the surface nineteen minutes after Armstrong, and privately took communion, the first food and drink consumed on the Moon.
After leaving NASA in 1971 he wrote openly about depression and alcoholism, designed a Mars trajectory called the Aldrin cycler, and is now the last surviving Apollo 11 crew member.
Source: Buzz Aldrin
