Biography
Few men can claim that at one point they were the most famous person on the planet. It’s easier to make that claim when you’re the first person from the planet to set foot on a heavenly body beyond the planet itself. Such is the tale of Neil Armstrong, the famous American astronaut who was the first man to walk on the surface of the moon, but also a famous aeronautical engineer and a professor of some renown. Armstrong was born in 1930 in the tiny town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, which boasted a population of just 5,378 the year of his birth. He attended Purdue University where he studied aeronautical engineering, paid for by the US Navy in exchange for his service. He was born to be a pilot, going on his first airplane ride at age 5, far earlier than most Americans of the era. After two years of college at Purdue, he moved on to two years of flight training and one year as an aviator in the Navy. In 1951, he was activated for combat in the Korean War, and within two months, was flying reconnaissance missions in the active combat zone. He flew 20 combat missions and won multiple medals.
After returning to Purdue to graduate, Armstrong became an experimental research test pilot. Several times he piloted the North American X-15, a rocket-powered aircraft that set multiple altitude records with him at the controls, reaching 207,000 feet in 1962 and reached a speed of Mach 3. He was never the top pilot, but his engineering background allowed him to understand exactly how the aircraft were designed to work. In 1962, he was chosen as one of the second group of astronauts in the newly-formed NASA. He first flew into space in 1966 onboard the Gemini 8, NASA’s most complex mission to date. Armstrong was the captain of the flight that lasted 75 hours and orbited the Earth 55 times.
In 1967, Armstrong learned he would be one of the first astronauts to fly a lunar mission. He was later named commander of Apollo 11. Apollo 11 left Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. The ship touched down on the moon four days later, with Armstrong the first man out of the landing module. Armstrong famously said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” as he stood on the surface for the first kind. After returning to Earth, he retired from NASA and became an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati., teaching classes in aircraft design, experimental flight mechanics, and other topics. Although he left NASA, Armstrong remained an integral part of the space program. He was part of the investigation team into the malfunction of Apollo 13 in 1970 and again
