Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrinis an American engineer and former astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, he was one of the first two humans to land on the Moon, and the second person to walk on it. He set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on July 21, 1969, following mission commander Neil Armstrong. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer with the Command Pilot rating...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth20 January 1930
CityGlen Ridge, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
NASA's been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve, and it's sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation it provides to young people.
People come up to me and say, 'It's too bad the space program got canceled.' This is not the case, and yet that is what most of the public thinks has happened.
Certainly, you can't participate in such a momentous program and not have the reminders of it have an effect on your life. What a wonderful gift for a person to receive.
Program Alarm, it's a 1202.
Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?
I was an outsider. I was the egghead from academia who got in because the rules had changed. While I looked for validation from my fellow contemporaries, I instead found jealousy and envy. I did not find team spirit. This led to dissatisfaction, an unease.
The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream,
why can't the average citizen? That's what I've been promoting in the last several years.
It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.
Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience.
What's aero braking? That's a way to use the gravity and upper atmosphere of Earth to sling shot a ship out either deeper into space, or slow it down to be 'captured' by Earth's gravity.
Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.
There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?'
My father's an early aviator, and my first flight was with him at age two. Now, despite the fact that I got sick on the flight, I still enjoyed it, I believe.