Who Was the Second Man to Walk on the Moon?

 

Buzz Aldrin is a former astronaut, engineer, and fighter pilot from the United States. As a pilot on the Gemini 12 mission in 1966, Aldrin completed three spacewalks, and as the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, he and mission commander Neil Armstrong were the first two persons to walk on the Moon. Aldrin is presently the final remaining crew member of Apollo 11, following the deaths of Armstrong in 2012 and Michael Collins in 2021.

Aldrin was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1951 with a degree in mechanical engineering, third in his class. During the Korean War, he was commissioned into the United States Air Force and served as a jet fighter pilot. He completed 66 combat missions and downed two MiG-15 fighter jets.

Aldrin was selected as a member of NASA's Astronaut Group 3 after completing a Sc.D. in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, making him the first astronaut with a doctoral degree. Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous was his dissertation thesis, earning him the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous" from fellow astronauts. His first space journey, on Gemini 12, took place in 1966, and he spent more than five hours on extravehicular activities. Three years later, on July 21, 1969, at 03:15:16 UTC, Aldrin stepped onto the Moon for the first time, nineteen minutes after Armstrong, while command module pilot Collins remained in lunar orbit.