My best friend Jacqui invited me to a special National Osteoporosis Foundation Silouhette Ball tonight. Some of the celebrities that were there include Paula Zahn (CNN Anchor), Joan Rivers and Buzz Aldrin (2nd human to walk on the moon), etc. This is Buzz with his wife. Buzz was honored with the prestigious Ethel LeFrak award.
Here is some information about Buzz:
Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin, Sc.D (born January 20, 1930 as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.) is an American pilot and astronaut who became the second human to set foot on the Moon (after Neil Armstrong) during the Apollo 11 mission, the first manned lunar landing.
He graduated third in his class in 1951 with a bachelor of science degree. Aldrin was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and served as a jet fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, where he flew 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres and shot down two Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 aircraft. After leaving Korea, Aldrin was an aerial gunnery instructor at Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada, and later an aide to the dean of faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy. After leaving this assignment, Aldrin flew F-100 Super Sabres as a flight commander at Bitburg, Germany.
Aldrin left military service to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate of science in Astronautics. His graduate thesis was Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous. After leaving MIT, he returned to the Air Force and was assigned to the Gemini Target Office of the Air Force Space Systems Division in Los Angeles, and later to Edwards Air Force Base at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. In March 1972, Aldrin retired from active duty after 21 years of service.
Aldrin has had a much more public persona than Neil Armstrong, and there has been much speculation that he was initially chosen to be the first astronaut out of the Lunar Module, and therefore the first to walk on the moon. The LM’s hatch opened inwards and to the right, making it impossible for Aldrin (the lunar module pilot), on the right-hand side, to egress first. (Source: Wikipedia)
Buzz is my hero!
“making it impossible for Aldrin (the lunar module pilot), on the right-hand side, to egress first”
Nonsense. Neil Armstrong was chosen to be the first man on the moon because he was the only civilian astronaut in the Apollo program. With the U.S. in Vietnam, the slightest appearance of militarizing the moon was politically unappealing.
I don’t consider Aldrin “2nd” on the moon. He and Armstrong landed together…in fact the lunar module was tilting slightly in Aldrin’s direction so technically Aldrin was the first to land on the moon. (lol)
Trivia Question: Who was the first to play chess on the moon?
He’s a colonel, not a captain ;-).
The question of how they decided which astronaut would get out of the capsule first is discussed at length in the biography of Armstrong that came out last year. See the Wikipedia article about Armstrong for a cite. Basically there’s no definite conclusion.