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At 84 years of age, Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin still has a lot
to say. And with a lifetime of experiences behind him
– and ahead of him yet as well – he’s hoping those in
power in Washington, D.C. and at NASA will listen to his plans
to colonize the planet Mars during the next four decades.
July 20th, 2014 marks 45 years since
Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael
Collins ventured to the Moon during
the Apollo 11 mission. While Collins
stayed in orbit aboard the Columbia
module, Armstrong and Aldrin made
history by taking the Eagle module
down to the surface and creating
celestial body.
Forever known as ‘the second man
to walk on the Moon,’ Aldrin has been
the more outspoken of the trio in the
decades since. While Armstrong
advocated for going back to the
Moon, believing that there was much
left to learn from the Earth’s nearby
satellite, Aldrin has been a strong
proponent of extending mankind’s
grasp by aiming instead for the Red
Planet.
Despite a busy speaking schedule
as the 45th anniversary nears, Aldrin
was gracious enough to spend nearly
an hour and a half speaking with
RocketSTEM over the phone from his
was pretty busy when ‘beep, beep,
beep, beep’ went overhead as I was
nuclear weapons on my aircraft. So
that was not foremost in my mind.”
“I discovered a couple of years
later in Time magazine that the
human beings who would be
carrying out America’s human space
program had to have attended test
pilot training. I had not chosen to
do that and was about to embark
“My education was paid for by
the Air Force Institute of Technology
in Dayton, Ohio, which emanated
out of an Air Corps engineering
school where my father was the
commandant
between
1920
and 1925. The school of aviation
technology that my father was the
beginnings of as a result of his MIT
doctoral work, became the institution
that sponsored and paid for my
doctor of science at the same place,
MIT, which launched me on a space
career as Dr. Rendezvous.”
to become part of the third group of
to hold a doctorate, an education
which would become important to
docking and rendezvous techniques
varied and the shared knowledge
was immense, but this reporter did his
best to absorb all that Aldrin had to
say.
Becoming an astronaut did not
always seem to be in the cards for
Aldrin, who holds degrees from West
Point (B.S. in Mechanical Engineering)
and MIT (Doctorate of Science in
jets for the U.S. Air Force during the
Korean War and was decorated
after shooting down two Mig-15s.
But it was a decision he made after
the war that he thought might have
closed the door on him becoming an
astronaut.
Awareness of the possibility of
space exploration “really originated
for the ordinary citizen in 1957 with
Sputnik. Now we just assume that
the Russians did Sputnik because the
Russians did Sputnik. But why? Why
didn’t the United States do that?
There probably were reasons, but I
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Buzz Aldrin speaking about his experiences at the Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center in during a
celebration marking the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.
Credit: Tom Usciak
so that it probably would not have
made sense to follow back with test
pilot training. That essentially wrote off
that profession, but that didn’t mean
that I didn’t have an interest and
that I didn’t see the parallel between
an ideal intercept and rendezvous in
space.
he devised for orbiting spacecraft
were among the keys to the success
of the Gemini and Apollo programs.
Those same techniques are still used
by spacecraft to this date.
“As crew assignments came out
for the progressive Gemini program,
was scheduled to be on the backup
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