The most famous photograph of a man on the moon almost certainly shows Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong, because NASA forgot to plan who would hold the camera. This episode goes inside that spacesuit to trace a fiercely independent life, from a New Jersey kid nicknamed by a sister who could not say brother, to the West Point cadet who defied his father's bomber plans, flew 66 combat missions in Korea, and shot down two MiG-15s.

We follow Aldrin's MIT doctorate on orbital rendezvous, the counterintuitive physics of catching a target in orbit by slowing down, and the Gemini 12 mission where he cracked the spacewalk fatigue problem and manually navigated a docking with a sextant after the radar failed. Then the Apollo 11 descent, the 1202 alarms, communion in the lander, and the crash that followed: clinical depression, alcoholism, a stint sell ...