How does neil armstrong look like?

The image everyone remembers — white suit, gold visor, the lander reflected in the faceplate — is Buzz Aldrin, photographed by Armstrong. Armstrong held the camera for most of the excursion, which is why his own face is scarce in the surface record and why he is so routinely mistaken for the figure in the visor shot. Pictures of him on the Moon do exist, but they are few, mostly distant, and taken while he was working.

The best likeness from the mission was made after the moonwalk, when the camera was turned on the commander inside the lunar module as it rested on the surface on 20 July 1969: a smiling astronaut in a cramped cabin at the end of a very long day. Official portraits show a different register of the same man — a square face, fair hair and a wide, faintly reluctant smile, in the white A7L suit with the helmet held under one arm. Photographs from his flying years show a slighter figure in a flight suit beside the X-15, hair cropped short, squinting into desert light.

The biography fits the face. Armstrong was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, on 5 August 1930, flew 78 combat missions in F9F-2 jets as a naval aviator, then became a research pilot, making seven X-15 flights that reached 207,500 feet and 3,989 mph (Mach 5.74). He commanded Gemini 8 in March 1966 and set foot on the Moon on 20 July 1969. He withdrew from public life afterwards, and the man who died on 25 August 2012, aged 82, was recognizably the same broad-browed engineer of the Apollo portraits.