Neil Armstrong(1930–2012)

Neil Alden Armstrong was born on the family farm near Wapakoneta in Auglaize County, western Ohio, on 5 August 1930, the eldest of three children of Stephen Koenig Armstrong, a state auditor for the Ohio government, and Viola Louise Engel, the daughter of German Lutheran farmers. The Armstrong line came down to him from Adam Armstrong of Borthwickbrae in Roxburghshire on the Scottish Borders, who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1736 with his sons after a hard generation of cattle-reiving and clearance-pressure on the Liddesdale watershed; the family had been Borderers since before they had been a surname. Stephen Armstrong's auditing work moved the family between sixteen Ohio towns before Neil's fifteenth birthday. Neil read every book on aeronautics the Wapakoneta public library held, paid for flying lessons at fifteen by working at the local drugstore and bakery, and held a student pilot's licence before he held a driver's licence.

He took an aeronautical-engineering scholarship to Purdue University in September 1947 under the Navy's Holloway Plan, which paid the tuition for two years' study in exchange for three years of active service. He completed the first two years of the degree, was called to active naval service in 1949, and qualified as a naval aviator in August 1950 at twenty. He flew seventy-eight combat missions over Korea in 1951 and 1952 in F9F Panthers from the carrier USS Essex, was awarded the Air Medal with two Gold Stars and the Korean Service Medal, and was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Sariwon on 3 September 1951 in an action that required him to bail out of a damaged Panther over friendly territory. He completed his Purdue degree in 1955 and joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became NASA in 1958) as a research test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. He flew the X-15 rocket-plane seven times to the edge of space between 1960 and 1962, reaching Mach 5.74 and 207,500 feet.

He was selected as one of the second group of nine NASA astronauts in September 1962, along with the Gemini and Apollo cohort that would fly to the moon. He commanded Gemini 8 in March 1966, the first space mission to dock with another vehicle in orbit; a thruster failure rolled the docked spacecraft into a one-rotation-per-second tumble that nearly killed the crew, and Armstrong's recovery of control was one of the moments that put him at the head of the Apollo command pile. On 16 July 1969 he commanded the launch of Apollo 11 from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center with Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins. The lunar module Eagle, with Armstrong manually flying the descent the last two thousand feet on twenty seconds of fuel after the autopilot overshot the planned landing site, touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity at 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969. Six hours later, at 02:56 UTC on 21 July, Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the Eagle and was the first human to set foot on the surface of another world.

He spent two and a half hours on the lunar surface with Aldrin, planted the flag, set out the seismometer and laser reflector experiments, took the photograph of Aldrin in the helmet visor that has become one of the most-reproduced single images of the twentieth century, and lifted off in the ascent stage of Eagle twenty-one and a half hours after landing. The three astronauts splashed down in the Pacific on 24 July and were placed in three weeks' biological quarantine. Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the Robert J. Collier Trophy and the Sylvanus Thayer Award. He gave the Apollo speeches and the world tour through 1969 and 1970 with care and visible discomfort; the publicity of being the first man on the moon was a thing he never grew comfortable with, and he turned almost all of the autograph and endorsement opportunities away.

He resigned from NASA in 1971 and took the chair of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati from 1971 to 1979, teaching graduate-level engineering courses to small classes through the 1970s in the academic life he had wanted since his Purdue years. He served on the Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster, on the boards of several engineering firms, and gave a small number of carefully chosen speeches. He kept the silence about Apollo that he had kept since 1969. He died at the Mercy Health hospital in Cincinnati on 25 August 2012, aged eighty-two, of complications following coronary surgery. He was buried at sea off the Atlantic coast of the United States on 14 September 2012, by his own request and in the naval tradition of his Korean War service. The Armstrong name today carries his memory as the surname of the man who took the first step that ended a hundred thousand years of human confinement to a single planet, on the night of 20 July 1969, and who lived the next forty-three years declining most of the celebrity attached to it.