How old was Neil Armstrong when he died?

Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. His public life in the strict sense lasted only a few years: after the flight to the Moon in July 1969, he left NASA as early as 1971, taught until 1979 at the University of Cincinnati, and afterward served on the boards of aerospace and technology companies. He remained rooted in Ohio, ran a farm for a time, and rarely appeared in public again, except at anniversaries of the Apollo program. So he spent most of his 82 years of life away from the cameras.

In early August 2012, Armstrong underwent heart surgery; a few weeks later, on August 25, 2012, he died in Cincinnati from complications of that treatment. He was 82. The procedure only became publicly known when the family announced his death, since he too had treated his health as a private matter. In the same statement, the family asked that he be remembered by looking at the Moon on a clear night and giving him a wink.

In September 2012, colleagues, politicians, and astronauts bid him farewell in Washington; shortly after, the ashes of the former naval aviator were committed to the Atlantic from a US Navy ship. Today his name is carried, among other places, by NASA's flight research center in California, where he himself worked as a test pilot. In the years since his death, museums, archives, and biographies have placed Apollo 11 back into the history of an entire program, just as Armstrong himself always insisted that the Moon flight was the achievement of an enormous team.