Neil Armstrong, first person to walk on moon, dies at 82

From LA Times: Neil Armstrong, first person to walk on moon, dies at 82

Neil Armstrong, the U.S. astronaut who was the first person to set foot on the moon, firmly establishing him as one of the great heroes of the 20th century, has died. He was 82.

Armstrong died following complications from cardiovascular procedures, his family announced Saturday.
When he made that famous step on July 20, 1969, he uttered a phrase that has been carved in stone and quoted across the planet: "That's one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind."
 
Armstrong spoke those words quietly as he gazed down at his, the first human footprint on the surface of the moon. In the excitement of the moment, the "a" was left out -- either because Armstrong omitted it or because it was lost in the static of the radio transmission back to Earth.

For the usually taciturn Armstrong, it was a rare burst of eloquence seen and heard by 60 million television viewers worldwide. But Armstrong, a reticent, self-effacing man who shunned the spotlight, was never comfortable with his public image as a courageous, historic man of action.

"I am, and ever will be, a white-sock, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer," Armstrong once told a National Press Club gathering.

Perhaps.

How many other nerdy engineers flew 78 combat missions as a Navy jet fighter pilot during the Korean War? Logged more than 1,000 hours as a test pilot in some of the world's fastest and most dangerous aircraft? Or became one of the first civilian astronauts and commanded Apollo 11, the first manned flight to land on the moon?
 
In the years that followed the flight of Apollo 11, Armstrong was asked again and again what it felt like to be the first man on the moon. In answering, he always shared the glory: "I was certainly aware that this was the culmination of the work of 300,000 to 400,000 people over a decade."

Neil Alden Armstrong was born Aug. 5, 1930, on his grandfather's farm near Wapakoneta, Ohio.

His father, Stephen Armstrong, was a civil servant who audited county records in Ohio and later served as assistant director of the Ohio Mental Hygiene and Corrections Department. The family of his mother, Viola, owned the farm.

For more than a decade, his family lived in a succession of Ohio cities to accommodate his father's job before settling down in Wapakoneta.

After his father bought him a ride in a Ford Trimotor transport plane in 1936, Armstrong rushed home and began building model airplanes and a wind tunnel to test them.

A good student, Armstrong was a much-decorated Boy Scout and played the baritone horn in a school band. But aviation always came first.

In 1945, he started taking flying lessons, paying for them by working as a stock clerk at a drugstore. On his 16th birthday, he got his pilot's license but didn't yet have a driver's license.

Upon graduating from high school in 1947, he was awarded a Navy scholarship to Purdue University. When the Korean War started in 1949, Armstrong was called to active duty.

After flight training, Armstrong was assigned to the carrier Essex, flying combat missions over North Korea. Although one of the Panther jets he flew off the carrier was crippled by enemy fire, he nursed the plane back over South Korea before bailing out safely. Recognized as an outstanding pilot with a flair for leadership, he received three Air Medals before finishing his active duty in 1952.

He returned to Purdue and earned a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1955

Within months, he was a civilian test pilot for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He was soon stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, chronicled by author Tom Wolfe as the home to pilots with "The Right Stuff."
Aviators were closely scrutinized there, evaluated carefully as they pushed high-performance aircraft to "the edge of the envelope" and quizzed repeatedly about the scientific implications of their work.

"A lot of people couldn't figure Armstrong out," Wolfe wrote. "You'd ask him a question and he would just stare at you with those pale blue eyes of his.

"And you'd start to ask the question again, figuring that he hadn't understood, and -- click -- out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories or whatever else was called for.

"It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer."

Armstrong had dated a sorority beauty queen, Janet Shearon, at Purdue, and they were married in 1956. For a while they lived in a small shack without indoor plumbing in the San Gabriel Mountains overlooking Edwards.
Children soon followed. A son, Eric, in 1957 and a daughter, Karen, two years later. The couple had a second son, Mark, in 1963, a year after Karen died of a brain tumor. True to form, Armstrong did not speak publicly about the tragedy or any other aspects of his family life.

Instead, he concentrated on his work.

By 1963, NASA was striving to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's goal of beating the Soviet Union in the space race and putting an American on the moon. Kennedy wanted some civilian astronauts, and Armstrong was one of the first.

In 1966, he made his first space flight, with fellow astronaut David R. Scott. Their ship, Gemini 8, was docking with an unmanned Agena rocket when a malfunctioning thruster sent the interlocked space vehicles tumbling uncontrollably.

Unperturbed, Armstrong disconnected the two vehicles, brought Gemini 8 back under control and made a safe emergency landing in the Pacific. NASA officials cited his "extraordinary piloting skill."

Two years later, a lunar landing training vehicle he was piloting suffered control failure just 200 feet off the ground. Armstrong ejected, parachuting to safety.

On Jan. 1, 1969, he was named commander of Apollo 11, the first manned spaceship scheduled to land on the moon. His crewmates were fellow space veterans Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins.

Five months later, the massive Apollo 11 spaceship was nudged carefully onto the launch pad at what was then called Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The vehicle was as long as a football field, tipped on end. It consisted of the command module Columbia, which would carry the three astronauts on their 238,000-mile journey and in which Collins would orbit the moon; the lunar lander the Eagle, which would carry Armstrong and Collins down to the lunar surface; and a huge Saturn booster rocket to hurl the whole thing into space.

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off. Two and a half hours later, after an orbit and a half around the Earth, onboard rockets fired to send the spaceship on its three-day trip to the moon.

Once in lunar orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin clambered into the Eagle and descended toward the lunar surface, leaving Collins to circle above them.

The landing wasn't easy. The lunar surface was rockier than expected, and Armstrong had to pilot the fragile craft horizontally until he found a safe, flat spot.

On July 20, 1969, at 1:04:40 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the small spacecraft came to rest gently near the moon's dry Sea of Tranquillity.

"The Eagle has landed," Armstrong radioed back to Earth.

At New York's Yankee Stadium, 16,000 fans stood up and cheered.

Six hours and 52 minutes later, as an onboard television camera sent grainy but stunning images back for the world to see, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on lunar soil.

There had been some dispute over who would be first, Armstrong or Aldrin, but Donald "Deke" Slayton, head of the astronaut corps, said he made the decision.

"Neil was the commander," Slayton once said. "He had the seniority, and that was all there was to it."
Aldrin stepped out of the Eagle a few minutes after Armstrong. The pair spent about 21/2 hours on the lunar surface, collecting dozens of soil and rock samples, setting up seismic equipment, planting an American flag and taking photographs.

"Isn't this fun?" the usually reserved Armstrong remarked jocularly at one point, patting Aldrin on the shoulder as they bounded about in the low lunar gravity.

As they climbed back into the Eagle, they left behind a plaque that reads: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon. We come in peace for all mankind."

Within hours, the Eagle had lifted off from the moon, rejoined the Columbia and the three astronauts were on their way back to Earth.

On July 24, 1969, Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific about 950 miles south of Hawaii. To assure they weren't carrying any lunar organisms, the astronauts were placed in quarantine for 18 days. President Nixon waved to them through a window of their isolation chamber.

On Aug. 13, 1969, the nation saluted them. They appeared in a parade in New York City in the morning and another in Chicago in the afternoon. That night, they were honored by 1,400 at a state dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Nixon gave them each the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Then the trio left on a 22-nation tour, during which they met the queen of England, the shah of Iran and the pope.
The public adulation eventually dimmed for Aldrin and Collins — but not Armstrong. He was in demand, and whenever he made a public appearance people clamored for his autograph.
It all made him uncomfortable.

He worked a NASA desk job in Washington for a couple years and after earning a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at USC, he returned to Ohio. For a decade, he taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

He bought a secluded, 200-acre dairy farm near Lebanon, Ohio, and occasionally ventured into town for a quiet lunch at a local cafe. The town respected his privacy and he said he enjoyed doing the moderate physical work required on a farm.

When called by his country, he responded, serving in 1985 on the National Commission on Space and in 1986 as vice chairman of the presidential commission that investigated the crash of the space shuttle Challenger.
He continued to fly, piloting a light plane he kept at a nearby airport. He served on the boards of several large corporations, and as chairman of AIL Technologies, an aerospace electronics firm on Long Island, N.Y.
He even surprised everyone and did a television commercial for Chrysler.

In 1994, Armstrong divorced his wife of 38 years. Shortly afterward, he married the former Carol Knight, a woman 15 years his junior, and receded further from public life.

The closest he came to describing what the Apollo 11 mission meant to him was during a Life magazine interview several weeks before the flight.

"The single thing which makes any man happiest is the realization that he has worked up to the limits of his ability, his capacity," Armstrong said. "It's all the better, of course, if this work has made a contribution to knowledge, or toward moving the human race a little farther forward."
Information on survivors was not immediately available.