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Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also an aerospace engineer, naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. Before becoming an astronaut, Armstrong was an officer in the U.S. Navy and served in the Korean War. After the war, he earned his bachelor's degree at Purdue University and served as a test pilot at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics High-Speed Flight Station, now known as the Dryden Flight Research Center, where he logged over 900 flights. He later completed graduate studies at the University of Southern California.
A participant in the U.S. Air Force's Man in Space Soonest and X-20 Dyna-Soar human spaceflight programs, Armstrong joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962. He made his first space flight, as command pilot of Gemini 8, in 1966, becoming NASA's first civilian astronaut to fly in space. On this mission, he performed the first docking of two spacecraft, with pilot David Scott.
Armstrong's second and last spaceflight was as mission commander of the Apollo 11 moon landing, in July 1969. On this mission, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface and spent two and a half hours exploring, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the Command Module. Along with Collins and Aldrin, Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon; in 1978, President Jimmy Carter presented Armstrong the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978; he and his former crewmates received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.
Armstrong died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 25, 2012, at the age of 82, after complications from coronary artery bypass surgery.
Early years
Neil Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio, to Stephen Koenig Armstrong and Viola Louise Engel. He was of Scottish, Irish, and German ancestry and had two younger siblings, June and Dean. Stephen Armstrong worked as an auditor for the Ohio state government; the family moved around the state repeatedly after Armstrong's birth, living in 20 towns. Neil's love for flying grew during this time, having gotten off to an early start when his father took his two-year-old son to the Cleveland Air Races. When he was five, he experienced his first airplane flight in Warren, Ohio on July 20, 1936 when he and his father took a ride in a Ford Trimotor, also known as the "Tin Goose".
His father's last move was in 1944, back to Neil's birthplace, Wapakoneta, in Auglaize County. Armstrong attended Blume High School and took flying lessons at the county airport. He earned his flight certificate at age 15, before he had a driver's license. Armstrong was active in the Boy Scouts and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. As an adult, he was recognized by the Boy Scouts of America with its Distinguished Eagle Scout Award and Silver Buffalo Award. On July 18, 1969, while flying towards the Moon inside the Columbia, Armstrong greeted the Scouts: "I'd like to say hello to all my fellow Scouts and Scouters at Farragut State Park in Idaho having a National Jamboree there this week; and Apollo 11 would like to send them best wishes". Houston replied: "Thank you, Apollo 11. I'm sure that, if they didn't hear that, they'll get the word through the news. Certainly appreciate that." Among the very few personal items that Neil Armstrong carried with him to the Moon and back was a World Scout Badge.
In 1947, at age 17, Armstrong began studying aeronautical engineering at Purdue University. He was the second person in his family to attend college. He was also accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The only engineer he knew (who had attended MIT) dissuaded him from attending, telling Armstrong that it was not necessary to go all the way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a good education. His college tuition was paid for under the Holloway Plan: successful applicants committed to two years of study, followed by three years of service in the U.S. Navy, then completion of the final two years of the degree. At Purdue, he earned average marks in his subjects, with a GPA that rose and fell during eight semesters. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1955, and a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1970. Armstrong was later awarded honorary doctorates by several universities.
Test pilot
Following his graduation from Purdue, Armstrong decided to become an experimental research test pilot. He applied at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base; although they had no open positions, they did forward his application to the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, where Armstrong began working at Lewis Field in March 1955. Armstrong's stint at Cleveland lasted a couple of months, and by July 1955, he returned to Edwards AFB for his new job.
On his first day at Edwards, Armstrong was tasked his first assignments, which were to pilot chase planes during releases of experimental aircraft from modified bombers. He also flew the modified bombers, and on one of these missions had his first flight incident at Edwards. On March 22, 1956, Armstrong was in a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, which was to air-drop a Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket. He sat in the right-hand pilot seat while the left-hand seat commander, Stan Butchart, flew the B-29.
As they ascended to 30,000 feet (9.1 km), the number-four engine stopped and the propeller began windmilling (rotating freely) in the airstream. Hitting the switch that would stop the propeller's spinning, Butchart found the propeller slowed but then started spinning again, this time even faster than the other engines; if it spun too fast, it would break apart. Their aircraft needed to hold an airspeed of 210 mph (338 km/h) to launch its Skyrocket payload, and the B-29 could not land with the Skyrocket still attached to its belly. Armstrong and Butchart brought the aircraft into a nose-down alignment to increase speed, then launched the Skyrocket. At the instant of launch, the number-four engine propeller disintegrated. Pieces of it damaged the number-three engine and hit the number-two engine. Butchart and Armstrong were forced to shut down the number-three engine, due to damage, and the number-one engine, due to the torque it created. They made a slow, circling descent from 30,000 ft (9,000 m) using only the number-two engine, and landed safely.
Armstrong's first flight in a rocket plane was on August 15, 1957, in the Bell X-1B, to an altitude of 11.4 miles (18.3 km). The nose landing gear broke on landing, which had happened on about a dozen previous flights of the Bell X-1B due to the aircraft's design. He later flew the North American X-15 seven times; his penultimate flight reached an altitude of 207,500 feet (63.2 km).
Armstrong was involved in several incidents that went down in Edwards folklore and/or were chronicled in the memoirs of colleagues. The first occurred during his sixth X-15 flight on April 20, 1962, while Armstrong tested a self-adjusting control system. He flew to a height of over 207,000 feet (63 km), (the highest he flew before Gemini 8), but the aircraft nose was held up up too long during descent and the X-15 bounced off the atmosphere back up to 140,000 feet (43 km). At that altitude, the air is so thin that aerodynamic surfaces have almost no effect. He flew past the landing field at Mach 3 (2,000 mph (3,200 km/h)) at over 100,000 feet (30 km) in altitude, and ended up 40 miles (64 km) south of Edwards (legend has it that he flew as far as the Rose Bowl in Pasadena). After sufficient descent, he turned back toward the landing area, and barely managed to land without striking Joshua trees at the south end. It was the longest X-15 flight in both time and distance from the ground track.
Four days later, Armstrong was involved in a second incident, when he flew for the only time with Chuck Yeager. Their job, flying a Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star, was to evaluate Smith Ranch Dry Lake for use as an emergency landing site for the X-15. In his autobiography, Yeager wrote that he knew the lake bed was unsuitable for landings after recent rains, but Armstrong insisted on flying out anyway. As they attempted a touch-and-go, the wheels became stuck and they had to wait for rescue. Armstrong tells a different version of events, where Yeager never tried to talk him out of it and they made a first successful landing on the east side of the lake. Then Yeager told him to try again, this time a bit slower. On the second landing, they became stuck and according to Armstrong, Yeager was in fits of laughter.
Many of the test pilots at Edwards praised Armstrong's engineering ability. Milt Thompson said he was "the most technically capable of the early X-15 pilots." Bill Dana said Armstrong "had a mind that absorbed things like a sponge." Those who flew for the Air Force tended to have a different opinion, especially people like Yeager and Pete Knight, who did not have engineering degrees. Knight said that pilot-engineers flew in a way that was "more mechanical than it is flying," and gave this as the reason why some pilot-engineers got into trouble: their flying skills did not come naturally.
A few weeks later on May 21, 1962, Armstrong was involved in what Edwards' folklore called the "Nellis Affair." He was sent in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter to inspect Delamar Dry Lake in southern Nevada, again for emergency landings. He misjudged his altitude, and also did not realize that the landing gear had not fully extended. As he touched down, the landing gear began to retract; Armstrong applied full power to abort the landing, but the ventral fin and landing gear door struck the ground, damaging the radio and releasing hydraulic fluid. Without radio communication, Armstrong flew south to Nellis Air Force Base, past the control tower, and waggled his wings, the signal for a no-radio approach. The loss of hydraulic fluid caused the tail-hook to release, and upon landing, he caught the arresting wire attached to an anchor chain, and dragged the chain along the runway.
It took thirty minutes to clear the runway and rig an arresting cable and Armstrong telephoned Edwards and asked for someone to collect him. Milt Thompson was sent in an F-104B, the only two-seater available, but a plane Thompson had never flown. With great difficulty, Thompson made it to Nellis, but a strong crosswind caused a hard landing and the left main tire suffered a blowout. The runway was again closed to clear it, and Bill Dana was sent to Nellis in a T-33 Shooting Star, but he almost landed long—and the Nellis base operations office decided that to avoid any further problems, it would be best to find the three NASA pilots ground transport back to Edwards.
Armstrong made seven flights in the X-15 from November 1960 to July 1962. He reached a top altitude of 207,500 feet (63.2 km) in the X-15-3, and a top speed of Mach 5.74 (3,989 mph (6,420 km/h)) in the X-15-1; he left the Dryden Flight Research Center with a total of 2,400 flying hours. Over his career, he flew more than 200 different models of aircraft.
Astronaut career
Armstrong in an early
Gemini spacesuit
In 1958, he was selected for the U.S. Air Force's
Man In Space Soonest program. In November 1960, Armstrong was chosen as part of the pilot consultant group for the
X-20 Dyna-Soar,
a military space plane under development by Boeing for the U.S. Air
Force, and on March 15, 1962, he was selected by the U.S. Air Force as
one of seven pilot-engineers who would fly the space plane when it got
off the design board.
In the months after the announcement that applications were being
sought for the second group of NASA astronauts, Armstrong became more
and more excited about the prospects of both the
Apollo program
and of investigating a new aeronautical environment. Armstrong's
astronaut application arrived about a week past the June 1, 1962,
deadline. Dick Day, with whom Armstrong had worked closely at Edwards,
saw the late arrival of the application and slipped it into the pile
before anyone noticed
. At
Brooks Air Force Base
at the end of June, Armstrong underwent a medical exam that many of the
applicants described as painful and at times seemingly pointless.
Deke Slayton
called Armstrong on September 13, 1962, and asked whether he would be
interested in joining the NASA Astronaut Corps as part of what the press
dubbed "the
New Nine";
without hesitation, Armstrong said yes. The selections were kept secret
until three days later, although newspaper reports had been circulating
since earlier that year that he would be selected as the "first
civilian astronaut.
" Armstrong was one of two civilian pilots selected for the second group; the other was
Elliot See, also a former naval aviator
. See was scheduled to command
Gemini 9, but died in a
T-38 crash in 1966 that also took the life of crewmate
Charles Bassett. Armstrong was the first American civilian in space, but the first civilian was
Valentina Tereshkova of the
Soviet Union, nearly three years earlier. A textile worker and amateur parachutist, she was aboard
Vostok 6 when it launched on June 16, 1963.
Gemini program
Gemini 8
Armstrong, 35, suiting up
for
Gemini 8 in March 1966
The crew assignments for
Gemini 8 were announced on
September 20, 1965, with Armstrong as Command Pilot and David Scott as
Pilot. Scott was the first member of the third group of astronauts to
receive a prime crew assignment. The mission launched on March 16, 1966;
it was to be the most complex yet, with a rendezvous and docking with
the unmanned
Agena target vehicle, the second American
extra-vehicular activity (EVA) by Scott. In total, the mission was planned to last 75 hours and 55 orbits. After the Agena lifted off at 10 a.m.
EST, the
Titan II carrying Armstrong and Scott ignited at 11:41:02 am EST, putting them into an orbit from where they would chase the Agena.
The rendezvous and first-ever docking between two spacecraft was successfully completed after 6.5 hours in orbit.
Contact with the crew was intermittent due to the lack of tracking
stations covering their entire orbits. Out of contact with the ground,
the docked spacecraft began to roll, and Armstrong attempted to correct
this with the
Orbital Attitude and Maneuvering System
(OAMS) of the Gemini spacecraft. Following the earlier advice of
Mission Control, they undocked, but found that the roll increased
dramatically to the point where they were turning about once per second,
which meant the problem was in their Gemini's attitude control.
Armstrong decided the only course of action was to engage the Reentry
Control System (RCS) and turn off the OAMS. Mission rules dictated that
once this system was turned on, the spacecraft would have to reenter at
the next possible opportunity. It was later thought that damaged wiring
made one of the thrusters become stuck in the on position.
Recovery of
Gemini 8 from
the western Pacific Ocean;
Armstrong sitting to the right.
Throughout the astronaut office there were a few people, most notably
Walter Cunningham,
who publicly stated that Armstrong and Scott had ignored the
malfunction procedures for such an incident, and that Armstrong could
have salvaged the mission if he had turned on only one of the two RCS
rings, saving the other for mission objectives. These criticisms were
unfounded; no malfunction procedures were written and it was possible to
turn on only both RCS rings, not just one or the other.
Gene Kranz
wrote, "the crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong
because we trained them wrong." The mission planners and controllers had
failed to realize that when two spacecraft are docked together, they
must be considered to be one spacecraft.
Armstrong himself was depressed that the mission had been cut short, canceling most mission objectives and robbing Scott of his
EVA.
Gemini 11
The last assignment for Armstrong in the
Gemini program was as the back-up Command Pilot for
Gemini 11, announced two days after the landing of
Gemini 8. Having trained for two flights, Armstrong was quite knowledgeable about the systems and was more in a teaching role for the rookie backup Pilot,
William Anders. The launch was on September 12, 1966, with
Pete Conrad and
Dick Gordon on board, who successfully completed the mission objectives, while Armstrong served as
CAPCOM.
Following the flight, President
Lyndon B. Johnson asked Armstrong and his wife to take part in a 24-day goodwill tour of South America.
[52] Also on the tour, which took in 11 countries and 14 major cities, were Dick Gordon,
George Low, their wives, and other government officials. In
Paraguay, Armstrong impressed dignitaries by greeting them in their local language,
Guarani; in Brazil he talked about the exploits of the Brazilian-born
Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was regarded as having beaten the
Wright brothers with the
first flying machine with his
14-bis.
Apollo program
On January 27, 1967, the date of the
Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong was in Washington, D.C., with
Gordon Cooper,
Dick Gordon,
Jim Lovell and
Scott Carpenter for the signing of the United Nations
Outer Space Treaty.
The astronauts chatted with the assembled dignitaries until 6:45 p.m.
when Carpenter went to the airport, and the others returned to the
Georgetown Inn, where they each found messages to phone the
Manned Spacecraft Center. During these telephone calls, they learned of the deaths of
Gus Grissom,
Ed White and
Roger Chaffee. Armstrong and the group spent the rest of the night drinking scotch and discussing what had happened.
On April 5, 1967, the same day the
Apollo 1 investigation
released its report on the fire, Armstrong assembled with 17 other
astronauts for a meeting with Deke Slayton. The first thing Slayton said
was, "The guys who are going to fly the first lunar missions are the
guys in this room."
According to
Eugene Cernan,
Armstrong showed no reaction to the statement. To Armstrong it came as
no surprise—the room was full of veterans of Project Gemini, the only
people who could fly the lunar missions. Slayton talked about the
planned missions and named Armstrong to the backup crew for
Apollo 9, which at that stage was planned to be a
medium Earth orbit test of the
Lunar Module-
Command/Service Module combination. After design and manufacturing delays in the Lunar Module (LM),
Apollo 9 and
Apollo 8 swapped crews. Based on the normal crew rotation scheme, Armstrong would command
Apollo 11.
To attempt to give the astronauts experience with how the LM would fly on its final landing descent, NASA commissioned
Bell Aircraft to build two
Lunar Landing Research Vehicles,
later augmented with three Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTV).
Nicknamed the "Flying Bedsteads", they simulated the Moon's one-sixth of
Earth's gravity by using a
turbofan
engine to support the remaining five-sixths of the craft's weight. On
May 6, 1968, about 100 feet (30 m) above the ground, Armstrong's
controls started to degrade and the LLTV began banking.
He ejected safely (later analysis suggested that if he had ejected 0.5
seconds later, his parachute would not have opened in time). His only
injury was from biting his tongue. Even though he was nearly killed,
Armstrong maintained that without the LLRV and LLTV, the lunar landings
would not have been successful, as they gave commanders valuable
experience in the behavior of lunar landing craft.
Apollo 11
After Armstrong served as backup commander for
Apollo 8, Slayton offered him the post of commander of
Apollo 11 on December 23, 1968, as
Apollo 8 orbited the Moon.
In a meeting that was not made public until the publication of
Armstrong's biography in 2005, Slayton told him that although the
planned crew was Armstrong as commander, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin
and command module pilot Michael Collins, he was offering the chance to
replace Aldrin with Jim Lovell. After thinking it over for a day,
Armstrong told Slayton he would stick with Aldrin, as he had no
difficulty working with him and thought Lovell deserved his own command.
Replacing Aldrin with Lovell would have made Lovell the Lunar Module
Pilot, unofficially the lowest ranked member, and Armstrong could not
justify placing Lovell, the commander of
Gemini 12, in the number 3 position of the crew.
A March 1969 meeting between Slayton, George Low,
Bob Gilruth, and
Chris Kraft
determined that Armstrong would be the first person on the Moon, in
some part because NASA management saw Armstrong as a person who did not
have a large ego.
A press conference held on April 14, 1969 gave the design of the LM
cabin as the reason for Armstrong's being first; the hatch opened
inwards and to the right, making it difficult for the lunar module
pilot, on the right-hand side, to egress first. Slayton added,
"Secondly, just on a pure protocol basis, I figured the commander ought
to be the first guy out. . . . I changed it as soon as I found they had
the time line that showed that. Bob Gilruth approved my decision."
At the time of their meeting, the four men did not know about the hatch
issue. The first knowledge of the meeting outside the small group came
when Kraft wrote his 2001 autobiography.
On July 16, 1969, Armstrong received a crescent moon carved out of
Styrofoam from the pad leader,
Guenter Wendt, who described it as a key to the Moon. In return, Armstrong gave Wendt a ticket for a "space taxi" "good between two planets".
Voyage to the Moon
Aldrin took this picture of Armstrong in the cabin after the completion of the
EVA on July 21, 1969.
During the
Apollo 11 launch, Armstrong's heart reached a top rate of 110 beats per minute.
He found the first stage to be the loudest—much noisier than the
Gemini 8
Titan II launch—and the Apollo CSM was relatively roomy compared to the
Gemini capsule. This ability to move around was suspected to be the
reason why none of the
Apollo 11 crew suffered from
space sickness, while members of previous crews did. Armstrong was especially happy, as he had been prone to
motion sickness as a child and could experience
nausea after doing long periods of
aerobatics.
The objective of
Apollo 11 was to land safely rather than to
touch down with precision on a particular spot. Three minutes into the
lunar descent burn, Armstrong noted that craters were passing about two
seconds too early, which meant the
Eagle would probably touch down beyond the planned landing zone by several miles.
As the
Eagle's landing
radar acquired the surface, several computer error alarms appeared. The first was a code
1202
alarm, and even with their extensive training, neither Armstrong nor
Aldrin was aware of what this code meant. They promptly received word
from CAPCOM in Houston that the alarms were not a concern; the 1202 and
1201 alarms were caused by an
executive overflow in the
lunar module computer. As described by Buzz Aldrin in the documentary
In the Shadow of the Moon,
the overflow condition was caused by his own counter-checklist choice
of leaving the docking radar on during the landing process, so the
computer had to process unnecessary radar data and did not have enough
time to execute all tasks, dropping lower-priority ones. Aldrin stated
that he did so with the objective of facilitating re-docking with the CM
should an abort become necessary, not realizing that it would cause the
overflow condition.
When Armstrong noticed they were heading towards a landing area which
he believed was unsafe, he took over manual control of the LM, and
attempted to find an area which seemed safer, taking longer than
expected, and longer than most simulations had taken.
For this reason, there was concern from mission control that the LM was running low on fuel.
Upon landing, Aldrin and Armstrong believed they had about 40 seconds
worth of fuel left, including the 20 seconds worth of fuel which had to
be saved in the event of an abort.
During training, Armstrong had landed the LLTV with less than
15 seconds left on several occasions, and he was also confident the LM
could survive a straight-down fall from 50 feet (15 m) if needed.
Analysis after the mission showed that at touchdown there were 45 to 50
seconds of propellant burn time left.
The landing on the surface of the moon occurred at 20:17:39
UTC on July 20, 1969.
When a sensor attached to the legs of the still hovering Lunar Module
made lunar contact, a panel light inside the LM lit up and Aldrin called
out, "Contact light." As the LM settled on the surface Aldrin then
said, "Okay. Engine stop," and Armstrong said, "Shutdown." The first
words Armstrong intentionally spoke to Mission Control and the world
from the lunar surface were, "Houston,
Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed." Aldrin and Armstrong celebrated with a brisk handshake and
pat on the back before quickly returning to the checklist of tasks
needed to ready the lunar module for liftoff from the Moon should an
emergency unfold during the first moments on the lunar surface.
During the critical landing, the only message from Houston was
"30 seconds",
meaning the amount of fuel left. When Armstrong had confirmed
touch-down, Houston expressed its worries during the manual landing as
"You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again".
First Moon walk
Although the official NASA flight plan called for a crew rest period before
extra-vehicular activity, Armstrong requested that the EVA be moved to earlier in the evening,
Houston time. Once Armstrong and Aldrin were ready to go outside,
Eagle was depressurized, the hatch was opened and Armstrong made his way down the ladder first.
At the bottom of the ladder, Armstrong said "I'm going to step off the LEM now" (referring to the
Apollo Lunar Module). He then turned and set his left boot on the surface at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969,
then spoke the famous words "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
Armstrong did not prepare his famous
epigram in advance. In a 1983 interview with
George Plimpton in
Esquire Magazine,
it was revealed that Armstrong "had produced the lines on his own...and
the words were composed not on the long trip up there, as had been
supposed by most of his colleagues, nor beforehand but
after the actual landing of
Eagle
on the moon's surface." He explained to Plimpton that "I always knew
there was a good chance of being able to return to Earth, but I thought
the chances of a successful touchdown on the moon surface were about
even money—fifty-fifty... Most people don't realize how difficult the
mission was. So it didn't seem to me there was much point in thinking of
something to say if we'd have to abort landing."
The broadcast did not have the "a" before "man", rendering the phrase a
contradiction (as
man in such use is synonymous with
mankind).
NASA and Armstrong insisted for years that static had obscured the "a",
with Armstrong stating he would never make such a mistake, but after
repeated listenings to recordings, Armstrong admitted he must have
dropped the "a".
Armstrong later said he "would hope that history would grant me leeway
for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended,
even if it was not said—although it might actually have been".
It has since been claimed that acoustic analysis of the recording reveals the presence of the missing "a";
Peter Shann Ford, an Australia-based computer programmer, conducted a
digital audio analysis and claims that Armstrong did, in fact, say "a
man", but the "a" was inaudible due to the limitations of communications
technology of the time.
Ford and James R. Hansen, Armstrong's authorized biographer, presented
these findings to Armstrong and NASA representatives, who conducted
their own analysis.
Armstrong found Ford's analysis "persuasive."
However, the article by Ford was published on Ford's own web site rather than in a
peer-reviewed scientific journal, and linguists David Beaver and
Mark Liberman wrote of their skepticism of Ford's claims on the blog
Language Log. Thus, NASA's transcript continues to show the "a" in parentheses.
When Armstrong made his proclamation,
Voice of America was rebroadcast live via the
BBC and many other stations worldwide. The estimated global audience at that moment was 450 million listeners,
out of a then estimated world population of 3.631 billion people.
Armstrong, immediately before
taking the first step on the Moon.
About 20 minutes after the first step, Aldrin joined Armstrong on the
surface and became the second human to set foot on the Moon, and the
duo began their tasks of investigating how easily a person could operate
on the lunar surface. Early on, they unveiled a plaque commemorating
their flight, and also planted the
flag of the United States.
The flag used on this mission had a metal rod to hold it horizontal
from its pole. Since the rod did not fully extend, and the flag was
tightly folded and packed during the journey, the flag ended up with a
slightly wavy appearance, as if there were a breeze.
Shortly after their flag planting, President
Richard Nixon
spoke to them by a telephone call from his office. The President spoke
for about a minute, after which Armstrong responded for about thirty
seconds.
In the entire
Apollo 11 photographic record, there are only
five images of Armstrong partly shown or reflected. The mission was
planned to the minute, with the majority of photographic tasks to be
performed by Armstrong with a single
Hasselblad camera.
After helping to set up the
Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package,
Armstrong went for a walk to what is now known as East Crater, 65 yards
(59 m) east of the LM, the greatest distance traveled from the LM on
the mission. Armstrong's final task was to leave a small package of
memorial items to deceased Soviet
cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and
Vladimir Komarov, and
Apollo 1 astronauts
Gus Grissom,
Ed White and
Roger B. Chaffee. The time spent on EVA during
Apollo 11 was about two and a half hours, the shortest of any of the six Apollo lunar landing missions;
each of the subsequent five landings were allotted gradually longer periods for EVA activities—the crew of
Apollo 17, by comparison, spent over 22 hours exploring the lunar surface.
In a 2010 interview, Armstrong explained that NASA limited his
moonwalk to two hours because they were unsure how the spacesuits would
handle the extreme temperature of the Moon.
Return to Earth
The
Apollo 11 crew and President
Nixon during the post-mission quarantine period.
After they re-entered the LM, the hatch was closed and sealed. While
preparing for the liftoff from the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin
discovered that, in their bulky spacesuits, they had broken the ignition
switch for the ascent engine; using part of a pen, they pushed the
circuit breaker in to activate the launch sequence.
The lunar module then continued to its rendezvous and docked with
Columbia,
the command and service module. The three astronauts returned to Earth
and splashed down in the Pacific ocean, to be picked up by the
USS Hornet.
After being released from an 18-day quarantine to ensure that they
had not picked up any infections or diseases from the Moon, the crew
were feted across the United States and around the world as part of a
45-day "Giant Leap" tour. Armstrong then took part in
Bob Hope's 1969
USO show, primarily to Vietnam.
In May 1970, Armstrong traveled to the Soviet Union to present a talk
at the 13th annual conference of the International Committee on Space
Research; after arriving in
Leningrad from Poland, he traveled to Moscow where he met
Premier Alexei Kosygin. He was the first westerner to see the supersonic
Tupolev Tu-144 and was given a tour of the
Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, which Armstrong described as "a bit Victorian in nature".
At the end of the day, he was surprised to view delayed video of the launch of
Soyuz 9—it had not occurred to Armstrong that the mission was taking place, even though
Valentina Tereshkova had been his host and her husband,
Andriyan Nikolayev, was on board.
Life after Apollo
Teaching
Armstrong announced shortly after the
Apollo 11 flight that he did not plan to fly in space again. He was appointed Deputy Associate Administrator for aeronautics for the
Office of Advanced Research and Technology, Advanced Research Projects
Agency (
ARPA), but served in this position for only a year, and resigned from it and NASA as a whole in 1971.
He accepted a teaching position in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the
University of Cincinnati, having decided on Cincinnati over other universities, including his
alma mater,
Purdue, because it had a small aerospace department; he hoped that the
faculty members would not be annoyed that he came straight into a
professorship with only the USC master's degree. He began the work while stationed at Edwards years before, and finally completed it after
Apollo 11
by presenting a report on various aspects of Apollo, instead of a
thesis on the simulation of hypersonic flight. The official job title he
received at Cincinnati was University Professor of Aerospace
Engineering. After teaching for eight years, he resigned in 1979 without
explaining his reason for leaving.
NASA accident investigations
Armstrong served on two spaceflight accident investigations. The first was in 1970, after
Apollo 13,
where as part of Edgar Cortwright's panel, he produced a detailed
chronology of the flight. Armstrong personally opposed the report's
recommendation to re-design the service module's oxygen tanks, the
source of the explosion. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the
Rogers Commission which investigated the Space-shuttle
Challenger disaster of that year. As vice-chairman, Armstrong was in charge of the operational side of the commission.
Business activities
After Armstrong retired from NASA in 1971, he acted as a spokesman
for several businesses. The first company to successfully approach him
was
Chrysler,
for whom he appeared in advertising starting in January 1979. Armstrong
thought they had a strong engineering division, plus they were in
financial difficulty. He later acted as a spokesman for other companies,
including
General Time Corporation and the
Bankers Association of America. He acted as a spokesman for U.S. businesses only.
Along with spokesman duties, he also served on the board of directors
of several companies, including Marathon Oil, Learjet, Cinergy
(Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company), Taft Broadcasting, United
Airlines, Eaton Corporation, AIL Systems and Thiokol. He joined Thiokol's board after he served on the Rogers Commission; the
Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed due to a problem with the Thiokol-manufactured solid
rocket boosters. He retired as chairman of the board of EDO Corporation
in 2002.
Voice actor
In 2010 he voiced the character of Dr. Jack Morrow in
Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, a 2010 animated educational sci-fi adventure film initiated by JPL/NASA through a grant from Jet Propulsion Lab.
Illness and death
Photograph of Armstrong as a boy at his family memorial service in
Indian Hill, Ohio near Cincinnati on August 31, 2012.
Armstrong underwent bypass surgery on August 7, 2012, to relieve
blocked coronary arteries. He died on August 25, in Cincinnati, Ohio, after complications resulting from the cardiovascular procedure. After his death, Armstrong was described, in a statement released by the
White House, as "among the greatest of American heroes—not just of his time, but of all time". The statement further said that Armstrong had carried the aspirations
of the United States' citizens and that he had delivered "a moment of
human achievement that will never be forgotten."
His family released a statement describing Armstrong as a "reluctant
American hero [who had] served his nation proudly, as a navy fighter
pilot, test pilot, and astronaut ... While we mourn the loss of a very
good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves
as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make
their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits,
and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves. For those who
may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor
his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time
you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you,
think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink." This prompted many responses, including the
Twitter hashtag "#WinkAtTheMoon".
Armstrong's colleague on the
Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin,
said that he was "deeply saddened by the passing. I know I am joined by
millions of others in mourning the passing of a true American hero and
the best pilot I ever knew. I had truly hoped that on July 20th, 2019,
Neil, Mike and I would be standing together to commemorate the 50th
Anniversary of our moon landing...Regrettably, this is not to be."
Apollo 11 Command Module pilot Michael Collins said, of Armstrong, "He was the best, and I will miss him terribly." NASA Administrator
Charles Bolden
said that: "As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be
included in them, remembered for taking humankind's first small step on a
world beyond our own".
A tribute was held in Armstrong's honor on September 13 at
Washington National Cathedral, whose Space Window depicts the
Apollo 11 mission and holds a sliver of moon rock amid its stained-glass panels. In attendance were Armstrong's Apollo 11 crewmates, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin; Eugene A. Cernan, the
Apollo 17
mission commander and last man to walk on the moon; and former Senator
and astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. In a
eulogy, Charles Bolden said, "Neil will always be remembered for taking
humankind's first small step on a world beyond our own, but it was the
courage, grace, and humility he displayed throughout this life that
lifted him above the stars." Eugene Cernan recalled Armstrong's low-fuel
approach to the moon: "When the gauge says empty we all know there's a
gallon or two left in the tank!"
Diana Krall sang the song "
Fly Me to the Moon". Michael Collins led prayers. Aldrin and Collins left immediately after the event. The
Apollo 15 commander,
David Scott, spoke to the press; he recalled the
Gemini 8
mission with Armstrong when he spoke, possibly for the first time,
about an incident in which glue spilled on his harness and prevented it
from locking correctly minutes before the hatch had to be sealed or the
mission aborted. Armstrong then called on back-up pilot
Pete Conrad
to solve the problem, which he did, to continue the mission without
stopping the countdown clock. "That happened because Neil Armstrong was a
team player, he always worked on behalf of the team."
On September 14, Armstrong's cremated remains were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean during a
burial-at-sea ceremony aboard the
USS Philippine Sea. Flags were flown at
half-staff on the day of Armstrong's funeral.
Legacy
Armstrong received many honors and awards, including the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, the Sylvanus Thayer Award, the
Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautics Association, and the
Congressional Gold Medal. The lunar crater
Armstrong, 31 mi (50 km) from the
Apollo 11 landing site, and
asteroid 6469 Armstrong are named in his honor. Armstrong was also inducted into the
Aerospace Walk of Honor and the
United States Astronaut Hall of Fame. Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crewmates were the 1999 recipients of the
Langley Gold Medal from the Smithsonian Institution.
Throughout the United States, there are more than a dozen elementary, middle and high schools named in his honor, and many places around the world have streets, buildings, schools, and other places named for Armstrong and/or Apollo. In 1969, folk songwriter and singer
John Stewart
recorded "Armstrong", a tribute to Armstrong and his first steps on the
moon. Purdue University announced in October 2004 that its new
engineering building would be named
Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering in his honor, the building cost $53.2 million and was dedicated on October 27, 2007,
during a ceremony at which Armstrong was joined by fourteen other Purdue
Astronauts. In 1971, Armstrong was awarded the
Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy at West Point for his service to the country. The
Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum is located in his hometown of
Wapakoneta, Ohio, although it has no official ties to Armstrong and the airport in
New Knoxville where he took his first flying lessons is named for him.
Michael Collins,
President George W. Bush, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin during celebrations of the 35th anniversary of the
Apollo 11 flight, July 21, 2004
Armstrong's authorized biography,
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,
was published in 2005. For many years, Armstrong turned down biography
offers from authors such as Stephen Ambrose and James A. Michener, but
agreed to work with
James R. Hansen after reading one of Hansen's other biographies.
In a 2010
Space Foundation survey, Armstrong was ranked as the #1 most popular space hero.
The press often asked Armstrong for his views on the future of spaceflight. In 2005, Armstrong said that a
manned mission to Mars will be easier than the
lunar challenge
of the 1960s: "I suspect that even though the various questions are
difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced
when we started the Apollo [space program] in 1961." In 2010, he made a
rare public criticism of the decision to cancel the
Ares 1 launch vehicle and the
Constellation moon landing program. In an open public letter also signed by Apollo veterans
Jim Lovell and
Gene Cernan,
he noted, "For The United States, the leading space faring nation for
nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and
with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an
indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of
second or even third rate stature". Armstrong had also publicly recalled his initial concerns about the
Apollo 11
mission, when he had believed there was only a 50% chance of landing on
the moon. "I was elated, ecstatic and extremely surprised that we were
successful", he later said.
On November 18, 2010, at age eighty, Armstrong said in a speech during the
Science & Technology Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, that he would offer his services as commander on a mission to Mars if he were asked.
In September 2012,
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that the first
Armstrong-class oceanographic research ship will be named
RV Neil Armstrong.
The ship (currently under construction) will be a modern oceanographic
research platform capable of supporting a wide range of oceanographic
research activities conducted by academic groups.
The
Space Foundation named Neil Armstrong as a recipient of its 2013 General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award.
| Neil Armstrong |
|---|
Armstrong in July 1969
 |
| NASA Astronaut |
| Other names |
Neil Alden Armstrong |
| Nationality |
American |
| Status |
Deceased |
| Born |
August 5, 1930
Wapakoneta, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died |
August 25, 2012 (aged 82)
Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
| Previous occupation |
Naval aviator, test pilot |
| Time in space |
8 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds |
| Selection |
1958 USAF Man In Space Soonest
1960 USAF Dyna-Soar
1962 NASA Group 2 |
| Total EVAs |
1 |
| Total EVA time |
2 hours 31 minutes |
| Missions |
Gemini 8, Apollo 11 |
| Mission insignia |
  |
| Awards |
  |
