Who was Neil Armstrong?

Armstrong was born in Ohio on August 5, 1930. Sent to Korea in 1950, he flew 78 combat missions from the aircraft carrier USS Essex. He later completed an aeronautical engineering degree at Purdue and a master's in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California, and joined the agency that preceded NASA as a research pilot. There he flew the X-15, the rocket plane capable of reaching 4,000 mph, and over the course of his career he flew more than 200 different aircraft models, including jets, rockets, helicopters, and gliders. That dual background as engineer and test pilot explains the composure with which he would later resolve two life-threatening situations in spaceflight.

He was selected as an astronaut in 1962. On March 16, 1966, he commanded Gemini VIII alongside David Scott: they achieved the first docking between two vehicles in space, with an Agena rocket, but the combined spacecraft ended up spinning out of control and the mission ended in an emergency splashdown in the Pacific. Three years later, on July 20, 1969, at 22:56 EDT, he climbed down the lunar module's ladder and spoke the words that became common heritage: that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. With Buzz Aldrin, he spent more than two and a half hours working outside the spacecraft, on the surface.

Armstrong did not turn his fame into a public career. Between 1971 and 1979 he taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati and later worked in the private sector, always away from the spotlight. He died on August 25, 2012, at age 82.