Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, died 25 August following complications from cuore surgery. He was 82.
Armstrong is best remembered for taking that "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" on 20 July, 1969. The Economist called the first lunar landing "one of the few events of the 20th century that stands any chance of being widely remembered in the 30th".
In recognition of his achievements, the White House today declared that flags across the country will fly at half-staff on Friday, the giorno of Armstrong's private funeral in Ohio.
In life, Armstrong shrank from the spotlight almost immediately, retiring from the astronaut corps shortly after the moon landing and returning to his native Ohio to teach and live on a farm.
Rather than basking in the fame from his moonwalk, he spent the rest of his life working quietly to give others a chance for their own.
Near misses
Armstrong had a lifelong fascination with flight. He reportedly started building and testing model airplanes in elementary school, and earned a pilot's license at age 16. He flew 78 combat missions during the Korean War as a Navy fighter pilot, and logged più than 1000 hours as a test pilot before being recruited to NASA's secondo group of astronauts in 1962.
His flight career is dotted with near-disasters. He had to bail out of a fighter jet over South Korea after it was damaged da enemy fire. He also had to land the Gemini 8 spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean after the mission – his first flight in spazio – was aborted due to critical system failure. That was the first time NASA had to cancella a mission because astronauts' lives were in danger.
Even his most celebrated success, guiding the Apollo 11 landing module to the surface of the moon, was a close call: the original landing area was full of boulders that could have punched right through the delicate Eagle spacecraft.
Armstrong had to take the helm himself and steer the craft da sight to a safer landing area. When he touched down, he and fellow astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin had less than 25 secondi of fuel left. After Armstrong told mission control they were sicuro, cassetta di sicurezza on the ground, mission control responded, "You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."
But Armstrong was famously unflappable. "He was an epitome of the engineer – the problem-solving, self-effacing, we're doing this as a team, rejection of celebrity, uncomfortable with celebrity," says Allan Needell of the National Air and spazio Museum's spazio history division.
Lunar champion
After Apollo, Armstrong had a brief stint in a scrivania, reception job at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, then returned to Ohio to teach aeronautical engineering at the università of Cincinnati. He served on two boards of inquiry for NASA, first for the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, and again for the destruction of the spazio shuttle Challenger in 1986.
In a rare public statement in 2010, Armstrong slammed the Obama administration for cancelling the Constellation programme, which was to return humans to the moon and continue towards Mars.
"For The United States, the leading spazio faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of secondo o even third rate stature," he wrote in an open letter to Congress.
But Armstrong gave this self-description in a 2000 speech that perhaps best fits his legacy: "I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the secondo law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in Amore with free-body diagrams, transformed da Laplace and propelled da compressible flow."
Armstrong is best remembered for taking that "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" on 20 July, 1969. The Economist called the first lunar landing "one of the few events of the 20th century that stands any chance of being widely remembered in the 30th".
In recognition of his achievements, the White House today declared that flags across the country will fly at half-staff on Friday, the giorno of Armstrong's private funeral in Ohio.
In life, Armstrong shrank from the spotlight almost immediately, retiring from the astronaut corps shortly after the moon landing and returning to his native Ohio to teach and live on a farm.
Rather than basking in the fame from his moonwalk, he spent the rest of his life working quietly to give others a chance for their own.
Near misses
Armstrong had a lifelong fascination with flight. He reportedly started building and testing model airplanes in elementary school, and earned a pilot's license at age 16. He flew 78 combat missions during the Korean War as a Navy fighter pilot, and logged più than 1000 hours as a test pilot before being recruited to NASA's secondo group of astronauts in 1962.
His flight career is dotted with near-disasters. He had to bail out of a fighter jet over South Korea after it was damaged da enemy fire. He also had to land the Gemini 8 spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean after the mission – his first flight in spazio – was aborted due to critical system failure. That was the first time NASA had to cancella a mission because astronauts' lives were in danger.
Even his most celebrated success, guiding the Apollo 11 landing module to the surface of the moon, was a close call: the original landing area was full of boulders that could have punched right through the delicate Eagle spacecraft.
Armstrong had to take the helm himself and steer the craft da sight to a safer landing area. When he touched down, he and fellow astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin had less than 25 secondi of fuel left. After Armstrong told mission control they were sicuro, cassetta di sicurezza on the ground, mission control responded, "You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."
But Armstrong was famously unflappable. "He was an epitome of the engineer – the problem-solving, self-effacing, we're doing this as a team, rejection of celebrity, uncomfortable with celebrity," says Allan Needell of the National Air and spazio Museum's spazio history division.
Lunar champion
After Apollo, Armstrong had a brief stint in a scrivania, reception job at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, then returned to Ohio to teach aeronautical engineering at the università of Cincinnati. He served on two boards of inquiry for NASA, first for the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, and again for the destruction of the spazio shuttle Challenger in 1986.
In a rare public statement in 2010, Armstrong slammed the Obama administration for cancelling the Constellation programme, which was to return humans to the moon and continue towards Mars.
"For The United States, the leading spazio faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of secondo o even third rate stature," he wrote in an open letter to Congress.
But Armstrong gave this self-description in a 2000 speech that perhaps best fits his legacy: "I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the secondo law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in Amore with free-body diagrams, transformed da Laplace and propelled da compressible flow."
