No Dream Is Too High - Buzz Aldrin Page 0,30

were more than realized.

In November 1966, Jim Lovell and I flew Gemini 12, the last of the Gemini missions. We orbited Earth for four days, during which I completed three tethered space walks, the first of their kind.

I snapped this photo of myself during one of my Gemini 12 space walks. Little did I know, I was pioneering the art of the selfie in 1966!

Neil Armstrong took this iconic photo of me on the Moon during our Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. I think he was a pretty good photographer, as this picture was quite spontaneous.

I took very few photos on the Moon, because Neil had the camera while I set up the experiments. My son Andy finds it ironic: I never take photos, but one of the few I took has become a historic one!

My bootprint on the Moon looked lonely, so I took another one with my boot in the frame.

My travel voucher to the Moon and back; I was reimbursed $33.31 for a rental car to get to the Kennedy Space Center in time for the launch.

Scuba diving is my favorite thing to do on this planet.

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My son Andy took this photo of me hitching a ride on a whale shark in June 2010 during a dive we did near the Galápagos Islands to celebrate my 80th birthday.

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My Mission Control Director, Christina Korp, keeps me in line, but we also have a lot of fun together. Here we are at Nova Spacefest in Tucson, Arizona, on April 1, 2012.

I love how curious kids are. Whenever my Mascot #1, Brielle Korp, wants to know how something works, I’m happy to show her.

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I have always wanted to go faster and higher, so of course I went (with Christina and my Mascot #2, Logan Korp) to visit the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—the tallest building in the world, with more than 160 stories.

As soon as I got this T-shirt from Christina, I knew it was my new call sign: Get Your Ass to Mars!

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I have always admired Stephen Hawking, and I am proud that we have become friends. Here I visited him at his home in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in March 2015.

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I showed my model of Phobos, one of the Mars moons, to President Obama at the Kennedy Space Center in 2010, and he thought I was trying to give it to him. He almost walked away with it!

I gave testimony to Senator Ted Cruz during a Senate hearing on commercializing space in March 2015. I try to bug Congress to invest in space as much as possible in between my busy travels.

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I enjoyed my part on The Simpsons, but I’m especially proud that I made it as one of the show’s top 25 guest stars; and I got my own figurine!

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Lady Liberty is always a welcome sight whenever I get to New York City—especially by helicopter.

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At Stonehenge in March 2015 I decided to send a message to the cosmos.

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• CHAPTER SEVEN •

FAILURE IS ALWAYS AN OPTION.

People who say “Failure is not an option” are usually trying to motivate others to excellence, and that is noble. But the truth is, if you are afraid to fail, you will probably not accomplish much in life. Imagine if failure were not an option for the space program. We’d have never gotten off the ground.

Years after I had walked on the Moon, my son Andy examined the launch records of the Atlas rocket system, used in four Mercury launches, including Friendship 7, the spacecraft in which John Glenn became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth three times. When Andy studied the history of the Atlas rockets, the precursor to the Saturn rockets used for the Apollo program, he was shocked to discover that they had experienced a 40 percent failure rate. Andy quips that our first astronauts may have had enormous courage, but their sense of judgment must have been seriously impaired! For Apollo 11, we had estimated a 60 percent chance of landing successfully on the Moon and a 95 percent chance of returning home safely. I especially liked that last part!

President Richard Nixon possessed great confidence in the mission of Apollo 11, but he was also a realist. He knew it was possible for us to fail in our attempt to land on the Moon and return home. In a little known document, the president prepared a “what if?” speech in case