Neil Armstrong’s Moon Landing
The Historic First Step That Changed the World
Neil Armstrong, an astronaut, was the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. This is thought to be the greatest technological feat in human history. Armstrong became famous after arriving on the moon, but the Navy pilot from Ohio never liked being the center of attention. Armstrong refused to take credit for his part in the historic Apollo 11 mission until the day he died in 2012. He often said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” which are his famous words from the first time he set foot on the moon.
A Boyhood Dream That Took Flight in Ohio
Neil Armstrong had a dream of flying his whole life. He was born on August 5, 1930, not far from Wapakoneta, Ohio. This is less than 60 miles from Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright brothers worked. Neil’s first plane ride was in 1936, when he was six years old. It was in a “Tin Goose” Ford tri-motor passenger plane. He was hooked. Armstrong got his license as a student pilot when he was 16 years old, before he even had a driver’s license.
Armstrong went to Purdue University on a Navy scholarship in 1947 to study aeronautical engineering. As part of Armstrong’s scholarship, the Navy taught him how to fly attack planes in Florida. The start of the Korean War forced Armstrong to stop going to college and fly 78 combat flights. He flew the F-9F Panther jet, which was one of the first jet fighters to take off from a ship.
College, Combat, and Courage in the Skies
When Neil Armstrong finished college, he went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). In 1958, NACA changed its name to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). People knew the shy kid from Ohio as one of the bravest and best test pilots at NASA’s Flight Research Center (now called the Armstrong Flight Research Center) at California’s Edwards Air Force Base.
The Test Pilot Who Pushed the Limits
Neil Armstrong was a test pilot for seven years and flew 200 different planes that pushed the limits of speed and altitude. The famous X-15 was one of these planes. Armstrong flew the needle-nosed X-15 to the edge of space and hit speeds of more than 4,000 mph high above the California desert. Armstrong’s steady hand as a test pilot was a big part of why NASA’s first Mercury astronauts were able to do well. He would soon be like them.
The Armstrong family had both happy and sad times in 1962. NASA picked Neil to train as an astronaut in Houston, but he and his wife, Janet, lost their second child, a brain tumor that could not be removed. Her name was Karen, and she was two years old.
The Gemini 8 Crisis: Armstrong’s Calm Saved Lives
Neil Armstrong spent a lot of time getting ready for the Gemini program, which was the next step NASA would take to get to the moon. Armstrong was picked to be the command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission in 1966. It was the first time that NASA astronauts tried to “rendezvous and dock” two spacecraft in orbit, which is a difficult and dangerous maneuver. Armstrong and his copilot, David Scott, went into orbit in March 1966 and safely docked with the target spacecraft Agena. But quickly things went wrong. The thruster on the Gemini 8 transport stopped working, and the two spacecraft that were linked together began to veer off course.
Armstrong got off the Agena so that he wouldn’t catch fire in the air around Earth. When the weight of the Agena was taken away, though, the Gemini ship went into a spiral that Armstrong couldn’t stop. The end-over-end spin was putting a lot of pressure on both astronauts, and they were about to pass out when Armstrong turned on a set of secondary thrusters and got control of the Gemini ship back. There is no doubt that Armstrong’s nerves as a test pilot saved the lives of both men.
Apollo 11: Commanding the Mission to the Moon
Neil Armstrong was chosen for the last mission to the moon, Apollo, but he almost never got back into space. Armstrong was in Houston on May 6, 1968, for his 22nd test flight of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, a rough-and-tumble practice plane. Without any notice, the LLRV lost its way. Just seconds before the LLRV crashed in a fiery blast, Armstrong jumped out and parachuted to safety.
Armstrong didn’t give up. He kept training, and NASA picked him to be the spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, which was the mission to land the first people on the moon. Buzz Aldrin was the pilot of the lunar module, and Michael Collins was the pilot of the command module that went around the moon. Aldrin pushed hard to be the first person to walk on the moon, but Armstrong was chosen because he was cool, confident, and didn’t have any ego.
On July 20, 1969, when Armstrong led the Lunar Module toward the moon’s surface, those nerves that he was known for were on full show. As the spacecraft’s fuel ran out, Armstrong had to switch to manual control to steer it away from a field of “Volkswagen-sized”-sized rocks and safely land the astronauts on the moon’s silty dirt. Millions of people watched the live broadcast on TV as the shy pilot from Ohio climbed down the Lunar Module and said the famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The connection was so static-filled that the “a” could not be heard, but Armstrong swore that he had said it.
Post-Moon Fame and a Quiet Life of Service
Armstrong became the most well-known person in the world overnight. There was a ticker-tape parade in New York City to welcome Armstrong and the other men from Apollo 11 home. Four million people watched. Armstrong didn’t want the fame and praise, though. For a while, he worked at NASA’s offices in Washington, D.C., as a desk worker. In 1970, he got his master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California.
He left NASA in 1971 and became an engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, which is where he was born. In 1986, he joined the Rogers Commission that was looking into what happened with the Challenger shuttle. Later, Armstrong was on the boards of several aircraft companies and spoke to Congress about how important it was to keep up a manned space program.
Armstrong gave an interview on 60 Minutes in 2005, which was very rare for him. He was asked directly if the attention that came with being the first person to walk on the moon made him feel bad. “No, I just don’t deserve it,” Armstrong said with a smile. “That role was given to me by circumstance.” That wasn’t supposed to happen. He had surgery to fix his heart in 2012, but he later died from problems that came up afterward. He was 82 years old.