Buzz Aldrin's "Mars Exploration Crew" Jacket

Directly from the Personal Collection of Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin

BUZZ ALDRIN'S "MARS EXPLORATION CREW" JACKET

Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin made history in July 1969 when Aldrin and Armstrong landed at Tranquility Base on the lunar surface, taking humanity's first steps on another world. Decades after that historic mission, Aldrin remains a champion of space exploration and a fierce advocate of the next adventure in human spaceflight: Mars.

In 2013, Aldrin published Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, which detailed his argument for why permanent settlement on Mars is the next important step not only for the United States but for humanity in the cosmos. In the Apollo era, Aldrin earned the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous" among the astronaut crops for his PhD dissertation from MIT relating to crewed orbital rendezvous (a problem NASA had to solve in order to make the Moon landing possible). Aldrin's Martian manifesto posits proposes a system of 'cycling pathways’: one or potentially two Earth-Mars spacecraft (what he refers to as a ‘Cycler’) that travel between Earth and Mars to build the infrastructure for long term human habitation in that corner of the solar system.

This jacket puts that determination and passion for humanity's next chapter in space on full display.