The Apollo 11 crew was awarded the New Frontier Congressional Gold Medal in the Capitol Rotunda in 2011.

Most of the iconic photographs of an astronaut on the Moon taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts are of Aldrin; Armstrong appears in just two color photographs. On May 5, 2023, he received an honorary promotion to the rank of brigadier general in the United States Air Force, as well as being made an honorary Space Force guardian. On August 13, the three astronauts rode in ticker-tape parades in their honor in New York and Chicago, attended by an estimated six million people.It was not a trailblazing mission; rendezvous from above had already been successfully performed by Gemini 9, and the tethered vehicle exercise by Gemini 11.

The astronauts embarked on a 38-day world tour on September 29 that brought the astronauts to 22 foreign countries and included visits with leaders of multiple countries. To be in sync involves getting two humans aligned in the right direction and having them understand what the other is doing, thinking, or dreaming. In 1970 he commented: "It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements. Emily Yuen, former chef at Japanese comfort food spot Bessou, opened Lingo last year, serving eclectic Japanese fare and New American dishes with Japanese accents.Aldrin shortly hit upon a more universally human reference on the voyage back to Earth by publicly broadcasting his reading of the Old Testament's Psalm 8:3–4, as Aldrin records: "When I considered the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him. The panels had been jettisoned before the separation maneuver so they closely followed the spacecraft until the first mid-course correction. He developed the Aldrin cycler, a special spacecraft trajectory that makes travel to Mars more efficient in terms of time and propellant.