His father relented to his son's wishes, and after a summer of hitching around Europe on military planes, Aldrin officially entered the United States Air Force in 1951. Military CareerĪldrin's father felt his son should continue on to multi-engine flight school so that he could eventually take charge of his own flight crew, but Aldrin wanted to become a fighter pilot. He graduated third in his class in 1951 with a B.S. He took well to the discipline and strict regimens and was the first in his class his freshman year. In 1947, Aldrin graduated from Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and headed to the U.S. His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was a colonel in the U.S. His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army chaplain. His family shortened the nickname to "Buzz." Aldrin would make it his legal first name in 1988. He earned his nickname, "Buzz," as a child when his little sister mispronounced the word "brother" as "buzzer. on January 20, 1930, in Montclair, New Jersey. Early Lifeįamed astronaut Buzz Aldrin was born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. Aldrin later worked to develop space-faring technology and became an author, writing several sci-fi novels, children's books and memoirs including Return to Earth (1973), Magnificent Desolation (2009) and No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon (2016). In 1969, Aldrin, along with Neil Armstrong, made history when they walked on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. In 1963, he was selected by NASA for the next Gemini mission. Aldrin became a fighter pilot and flew in the Korean War. Air Force, was the one who originally encouraged his interest in flight. And the person who helped to solve it was none other than Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.Buzz Aldrin's father, a colonel in the U.S. Solving that challenge was a feat of science, not engineering. This necessary part of the mission involves complicated physics. There is an exception, a major one, which proves the rule: the difficulty of rendezvousing and docking spacecraft in orbit. Unfortunately, “Rocket Engineering,” although more accurate, does not roll off the tongue as easily. Most of “rocket science” consists not of physics but chemical engineering-producing chemical reactions in an engine to yield the required thrust-and mechanical engineering-designing a lightweight structure able to survive the forces of a voyage into space. Einstein’s relativity and Schrödinger’s quantum physics played only minor roles, if any. Astronaut William Anders replied, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now.” Getting the Apollo 8 crew to and from the Moon was not an easy task, but the physics behind that feat was drawn from the work first described by Newton in the 17th Century. According to folklore, as the Apollo 8 crew was returning from the first orbit of the Moon in December 1968, the young son of one of the mission controllers asked who was driving the spaceship. Launching rockets is hard, but as my colleagues in the Museum’s Department of Space History remind me, it is more a matter of engineering than science. In general, “rocket science”-with its companion phrase “brain surgery”- implies something that is very hard to do. was having difficulty keeping up with Soviet accomplishments in space. The origins of the term are obscure, but it may have originated in the months after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, when the U.S. The term “rocket science” is part of our vernacular, but people who actually design, build, and operate rockets do not use that term.
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