Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the Moon, and spent the rest of his life declining to trade on it. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio in 1930, he had a pilot's licence before a driver's licence, studied aeronautical engineering at Purdue on a Navy scholarship, and flew seventy-eight combat missions in Korea, once ejecting after his F9F Panther struck an anti-aircraft cable. He became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, flying the X-15 rocket plane to over 200,000 feet and around Mach 5. He was an engineer first and a pilot second, which is largely why he was chosen. He joined the astronaut corps in 1962 and commanded Gemini 8 in March 1966, performing the first docking of two spacecraft. A stuck thruster then sent the joined vehicles tumbling at one revolution per second; Armstrong undocked and used the re-entry control system to stop it, saving the crew and ending the mission early. In 1968 he ejected from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle less than a second before it crashed, and reportedly went back to his desk that afternoon. On 20 July 1969 he flew Apollo 11's lunar module Eagle manually past a boulder-strewn crater with the computer throwing 1202 alarms, landing with about twenty-five seconds of fuel margin. He stepped onto the surface and said that it was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, watched by an estimated 600 million people. He resigned from NASA in 1971 and taught engineering at the University of Cincinnati for eight years. He gave few interviews, signed no autographs after they began selling, and served on the boards investigating Apollo 13 and Challenger. He died in 2012.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: astronaut, pilot, engineer
