Word: aldrin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three men assigned to pilot Columbia and Eagle to the moon will rank with history's most illustrious explorers. Yet each realizes that the privilege?and the peril?of making man's first lunar landing belongs to them only by an unlikely combination of luck and circumstance. Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, 39, who will steer the lunar module to the surface of the moon, puts it this way: "We've been given a tremendous responsibility by the twists and turns of fate...
...Buzz Aldrin might not have been an astronaut at all but for his persistence, raw determination?and good fortune. He was turned down when he first applied in 1962. Though he was a veteran fighter pilot (two MIGs destroyed, one damaged in 66 Korean missions for the Air Force), NASA regulations at the time demanded that astronauts be graduate test pilots. The next year, after the regulations had been eased to let in combat pilots with more than 1,000 hours of experience flying jets, Aldrin was accepted...
...members of Apollo 11's crew are seasoned, imperturbable astronauts. Armstrong, known as an inscrutable loner, flew Gemini 8 to the first successful space docking. Aldrin, a hard-driving perfectionist, set the record for space walking (5 hr., 30 min.) during the four-day flight of Gemini 12 in 1966. Collins, the most relaxed and outgoing of the three, helped steer Gemini 10 through complicated rendezvous and docking maneuvers...
...close friends. They waste few words on the job, generally talking to each other in technological jargon. Once in a while, Mike Collins cracks a joke. Once in a longer while, Neil Armstrong flashes a fleeting smile. After work, they go their separate ways. It may be true, Aldrin admits, that they have all been somewhat dehumanized by what he calls "the treadmill" of the space program...
...around with a lot of marbles." After the "marbles" began lifting other pilots into space, he changed his mind and in 1962 became one of the second group of astronauts to be chosen. As a civilian, he is paid more than any other astronaut ($30,054 a year, v. Aldrin's $22,650 as an Air Force colonel and Collins' $20,400 as an Air Force lieutenant colonel), a fact that has stirred resentment. There are men in the space program, in fact, who detect behind Armstrong's supercool all-American image a rigid character who has more faith...