Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to a very special 350th episode of Awards Chatter, the Hollywood Reporters Awards

podcast. I'm the host Scott Feinberg and it's my great honor to welcome a guest

today who is, or at least has been, out of this world. A living legend, a bona fide American

hero, and a truly historic figure. He's a graduate of West Point, third in the class of 1951, who served as a fighter jet pilot in the US Air Force during the Korean War,

participating in 66 combat missions and destroying two enemy aircraft.

And who then returned Stateside and earned a Doctor of Science degree from MIT in January

1963, writing his thesis about manned orbital rendezvous with the hope that it might help him

to one day become an astronaut like his friend Ed White at the National Aeronautics

and Space Administration or NASA which had been established in 1958.

And sure enough, just a few months later in October 1963, he was part of the third group

invited to join the space program.

His contributions to NASA are numerous and varied, from pioneering underwater training methods

to establishing a record for time spent walking in space during a single mission,

five and a half hours during the November 1966 Gemini 12 mission,

the last of the Gemini missions that paved the way for the Apollo missions. But he is of course best of the Gemini missions.

But he is of course best known as the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned space

flight to land on the moon, an achievement described by the New York Times as,

quote, arguably the most extraordinary feat in human history, close quote. And who on July 20th, 1969 at the age of 39, with an unprecedented audience of some 600 million people

watching on TV all around the world, became the second of only 12 men in history, all Americans, to walk on the moon, a mere 20 minutes after the first man, Neil Armstrong.

He's a 1969 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and now at the age of 90 an Emmy nominee,

along with his sole surviving Apollo 11 colleague Michael Collins,

for best cinematography for a non-fiction program, the excellent CNN documentary Apollo 11.

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