Buzz Aldrin service. His father and father's close friend General Jimmy Doolittle attended the formal retirement ceremony. Aldrin's autobiographies "Return to Earth," (1973) and "Magnificent Desolation" (2009), recounted his struggles with clinical depression and alcoholism in the years after leaving NASA. On September 9, 2002, Aldrin was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel on the pretext of being interviewed for a Japanese children's television show on the subject of space. When he arrived, Moon landing conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel accosted him with a film crew and demanded he swear on a Bible that the Moon landings were not faked. After a brief
Buzz Aldrin that was a dead end, as it would be Gemini 13 which did not exist; the last scheduled mission in the program was Gemini 12. But the February 28, 1966, deaths of the Gemini 9 prime crew, Elliot See and Charles Bassett, in an air crash, led to Lovell and Aldrin being moved up one mission on March 21 to backup for Gemini 9, which put them in position as prime crew for Gemini 12. They were officially designated its prime crew on June 17, 1966, with Gordon Cooper and Gene Cernan as their backups. Initially, Gemini 12's mission objectives