How old was Neil Armstrong?

Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio, United States. He flew as a naval aviator in the Korean War, studied aeronautical engineering, and later worked as a test pilot for NACA and then NASA, flying, among other aircraft, the X-15 rocket plane. When the space agency brought him into its astronaut corps in 1962, he was one of the few civilians in a group of military pilots.

In March 1966, Armstrong commanded Gemini 8 and carried out the first docking in orbit of two spacecraft; a stuck control thruster sent the capsule into a spin and forced an early abort of the mission. On July 20, 1969, he landed on the Moon as commander of Apollo 11 alongside Edwin Aldrin and became the first human being to set foot on its surface. He was then about thirty-eight years old, and that was his last spaceflight: in 1971 he left NASA and taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati until 1979.

Armstrong died on August 25, 2012, in Cincinnati, just weeks after turning 82. Anyone asking about his age today is really looking for one of two dates: his birth year, 1930, or the year of his death, 2012. Between the two lay a life that was deliberately low-key after 1969. Armstrong rarely gave interviews, stopped signing autographs, and routinely credited the tens of thousands of engineers, technicians, and flight controllers of the Apollo program. His contemporaries described him as a reserved engineer who saw the trip to the Moon as a technical task rather than a personal feat.