Neil Armstrong

On 21 July 1969 (20 July in American time zones) Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, stepped onto the Moon, the first person ever to walk there; before that the American had been a naval aviator, test pilot and engineer. The landing fulfilled the goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and marked the high point of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. A private, reserved man, Armstrong spent the rest of his life largely avoiding the celebrity his single step brought him.

Armstrong was born on 5 August 1930 near Wapakoneta, Ohio. His father was a state auditor, and the family moved between many Ohio towns before settling back in Wapakoneta in 1944. He was fascinated by flight from early childhood, built model aircraft, and earned a student pilot's certificate on his 16th birthday, before he had a driving licence. He was also an Eagle Scout.

In 1947 he went to Purdue University in Indiana to study aeronautical engineering, on a navy scholarship scheme that required him to break off his studies for flight training and service. He became a naval aviator in 1950 and in the Korean War flew 78 combat missions in F9F Panther jets from the aircraft carrier USS Essex. On one mission in September 1951 his aircraft was damaged by a cable stretched across a valley, and he flew it back to friendly territory before ejecting. He left active service in 1952, returned to Purdue and graduated in 1955.

Armstrong joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1955 and soon moved to its High-Speed Flight Station in the California desert, at Edwards Air Force Base; in 1958 the NACA became the core of NASA, the space agency created under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In all he flew over 200 different models of aircraft, and at Edwards he made seven flights in the rocket-powered X-15, in which he reached an altitude of about 63 kilometres and a speed of more than five times the speed of sound. Colleagues regarded him as an exceptionally capable engineer-pilot, though not all of his flights went smoothly; on one in 1962 he overshot and flew far beyond the planned landing area.

He married Janet Shearon in 1956 and they had three children. Their daughter Karen developed a brain tumour and died in January 1962, aged two, a loss that friends believed affected him deeply. Later that year NASA selected him in its second group of astronauts, as one of the first civilians in the corps.

Armstrong's first spaceflight, Gemini 8 in March 1966, with David Scott, achieved the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit, joining their capsule to an uncrewed Agena target vehicle. Soon afterwards a thruster on the Gemini capsule stuck open, sending the joined craft and then the capsule alone into a spin approaching one revolution per second, close to the point at which the crew might black out. Armstrong regained control by switching to the re-entry thrusters, which under mission rules meant the flight had to be cut short. The cool handling of the crisis strengthened his reputation within NASA. In May 1968, while training for lunar landings in an awkward experimental craft known as the flying bedstead, he ejected just before it crashed and burned, and was reportedly back at his desk the same afternoon.

Armstrong was named commander of Apollo 11 in January 1969, with Buzz Aldrin as lunar module pilot and Michael Collins as command module pilot. They were launched from Florida on a Saturn V rocket on 16 July 1969. On 20 July Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module Eagle while Collins remained in orbit in Columbia. During the descent the guidance computer repeatedly flashed alarms because it was overloaded with data, and as they approached the surface Armstrong saw that the automatic system was taking them towards a field of large boulders. He took manual control and flew on to find a clear spot, landing in the Sea of Tranquillity with less than a minute of descent fuel remaining. His report to Houston, "The Eagle has landed", came at 20:17 UTC.

Several hours later, at 02:56 UTC on 21 July, Armstrong climbed down the ladder and stepped onto the Moon, saying, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." He later insisted that he had said "a man", a word that may have been lost in transmission. Hundreds of millions of people watched on television. He and Aldrin spent about two and a half hours outside, collecting rock samples, setting up experiments and planting an American flag. They left a plaque and a small package of memorials that included medals honouring the Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov. The crew returned safely to Earth on 24 July, spent three weeks in quarantine, and then undertook a world tour.

Armstrong never flew in space again. After a short spell as a NASA administrator in Washington, D.C., he left the agency in 1971 and until 1979 held a teaching post in aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and afterwards served on the boards of several companies. He was vice-chairman of the presidential commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. He gave few interviews, stopped signing autographs when he found his signatures being sold, and rarely traded on his fame, which earned him a reputation as a recluse that friends said was exaggerated. He and Janet divorced in 1994, and that year he married Carol Held Knight.

Armstrong died on 25 August 2012 in Cincinnati, aged 82, from complications after heart bypass surgery; years later it emerged that the hospital had paid his family a settlement over his post-operative care. He was buried at sea in the Atlantic. His honours included the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and, in 1978, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

The first Moon landing is often seen as a decisive moment in the Cold War competition for prestige and technology, and the achievement of a vast team of some 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo programme. Armstrong himself always stressed that team, and his modesty and reluctance to claim personal glory became a central part of how he is remembered.