Maybe not the first on the Moon, but a pioneer in so many other ways…
Neil should have taken a lesson from Buzz. Because Armstrong had the camera, most of the pictures of the first men on the moon are of Aldrin.
Well, it’s like vacation pix where you never see Dad.
Eh, Buzz is ok, buy my guy is Michael Collins.
Highly recommended:
I do suppose one reason to love Aldrin was when he punched out Bart Sibrel, the moon hoax promoter. I go back and watch it every so often for fun. He put the dude on his butt!
When I have to pick my favorite spacemen, I favor those who did cameos on 30 Rock.
Just a few years ago, Aldrin went to the South Pole, and then had to be medevaced with altitude sickness. IIRC, he was 86 years old.
That guy must be a genetic cross between George Burns and Betty White, and I hope he lives longer than either of them.
My favorite trivia bit from that rescue:
I remember that, and in this case, his name really WAS Dr. David Bowie.
The first picture of him in that Dr. Bowie article shows him with watches on both wrists. One set to local time, and the other to Sea of Tranquility time?
Buzz has the sense of humor to laugh at himself as well.
As I recall, Buzz struggled mightily when he first returned home. Once you’ve made it to the moon, what else is there, right? Buzz drank too much and burned through two marriages before finally getting sober for good in 1978. Like many people with big smiles, this man knows dark times. I say that with respect; his is a life lived deeply.
There was a treasure hunting show a couple of years ago where the treasure hunter’s father was friends with an astronaut who had made detailed maps while on orbit. They were shipwrecks and were made with some undefined technology on board the craft. The treasure guy was following up and had visited a couple of the sites. It was quite interesting and I have wondered if anything has continued in the quest.
Was the astronaut Aldrin?
This sounds like a Gordon Cooper sort of thing.
Yeah, he was the young Antarctican.
mmm
I have long heard that Aldrin was an active alcoholic when he took his moon flight and somehow managed to keep that off NASA’s radar, and he feared going into DTs on the flight.
The communion wine that he brought with him wouldn’t have been sufficient to stave it off, either.
I’d always understood that he became an alcoholic only after the Apollo 11 mission, but perhaps not.
If he was at the point of having DTs on the mission, that’s certainly incompatible with him only becoming an alcoholic after. But if it wasn’t quite that bad, it might be a reasonable point of debate as to when he actually became an alcoholic. My grandmother was a college professor and, in retrospect, a very high-functioning alcoholic for most of her career, only becoming a low-functioning cause for concern after she retired.
I have a relative who didn’t realize he was an alcoholic, nor did his family, until he had an emergency hospitalization, and had a seizure the next day when he didn’t have his “daily drink”. He had become physically addicted to his “daily drink” which I did happen to see on one occasion; it was a tumbler half-full of vodka, so I wasn’t as surprised as they were.