Magnificent Desolation: Buzz Aldrin’s Moon Walk and Its Aftermath

Under pressure to perform, he had no opportunity to embrace the moment.

Everyone remembers the name of the first man who walked on the moon. Many remember the second, but it is a smaller number. And most of us recall the first words that Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on the moon, said when he stepped down onto the lunar surface that first time. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But who remembers Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s first words?

Buzz Aldrin was an unusual man for an astronaut. He had been part of the third group of astronauts. (The story of the first batch of seven was documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.) Buzz was the first astronaut with a doctoral degree. The others nicknamed him Dr. Rendezvous because his doctoral thesis at M.I.T. had been on “Manned Orbital Rendezvous.”

He was unusual for another reason as well. He had a poet’s heart. Though driven to be the best in everything he did (in part due to an overbearing father) and though a member of the first mission to the moon and the first moon landing — the culmination point of all his childhood dreams — it later left him depressed to have not been selected to walk first on the moon. He felt he’d let his father down, had failed.