In the Shadow of the Moon (film) Augmenting the archival audio and video are contemporary interviews with some surviving Apollo era astronauts, including Al Bean, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, John Young, David Scott, Charlie Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. The former astronauts have the only speaking roles in the movie, although occasional supplementary information is presented on screen with text and archival television footage presents the words of journalists such as Jules Bergman and Walter Cronkite. The only surviving moon walker at the time not to participate was Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon. The documentary shares its name with a
Buzz Aldrin shot down two MiG-15 aircraft. After earning a Sc.D. degree in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aldrin was selected as a member of NASA's Astronaut Group 3, making him the first astronaut with a doctoral degree. His doctoral thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous", earning him the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous" from fellow astronauts. His first space flight was Gemini 12 during which he spent over five hours on extravehicular activity (EVA) outside the spacecraft. Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on July 21, 1969 (UTC), nine minutes after Armstrong first touched the surface,