How many apollo 11 astronauts are still alive?

Apollo 11 flew with three men, named to the mission only months before launch. Neil Armstrong, the commander and the first person to set foot on another world, died on 25 August 2012. Michael Collins, who stayed in lunar orbit aboard Columbia while his crewmates landed and who described those hours alone on the far side with unusual candour, died in April 2021. Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot and the second man to walk on the surface, was born on 20 January 1930 and is still living (as of September 2026), which leaves exactly one survivor of the crew.

None of them had an obvious second act. Armstrong left NASA within a couple of years and taught aerospace engineering in Ohio, giving few interviews and guarding a privacy often mistaken for reclusiveness. Collins ran the National Air and Space Museum through its formative years and wrote the memoir that pilots still recommend above any other account of the programme. Aldrin, after a public struggle with depression and alcohol that he spoke about when almost nobody did, became the most visible campaigner of the three for sending people to Mars.

The wider group is thinning fast. The men who walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 were all born in the 1930s or earlier, and only a handful remain; the same is true of the command module pilots who waited in orbit overhead and of the flight controllers who talked them through it. Within a decade the landings will pass out of living first-hand memory altogether, which is why agencies, museums and oral history projects have spent recent years recording those voices while there is still someone to record.