Who was Neil Armstrong, the first human to step on the Moon?

55 years ago, on July 20, military pilot, test pilot and aerospace engineer, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon . It was 5:17 p.m. Brasília time when the then commander of Apollo 11 stepped out of the lunar module and left his footprint in the regolith. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said.

Years later, he insisted to reporters that he had not said “the” man, but “a” man. In any case, the feat, broadcast to the world on TV, made Armstrong the most famous man on the planet, just before his 39th birthday. A week later, he was welcomed as a hero, along with Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, in the Pacific Ocean.

But at the height of his fame, he decided to shun the spotlight and return to his home state of Ohio, where he was born on a farm in 1920. His next journey included a career as a college professor at the University of Cincinnati, where he joined the faculty of the School of Aerospace Engineering in 1971.

In an interview with NBC News’ Mach section, Armstrong’s official biographer James Hansen said that “it was never about fame or fortune for him. It was about flying.” Author of the book “First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong,” which served as the basis for the 2018 film starring Ryan Gosling, Hansen sums up the commander’s motto: “We’re going to fly this module to a successful landing, and not kill ourselves.”

The boy who liked to fly

Encouraged by his father Stephen, who took him to the Cleveland Air Races when he was two, Neil boarded a plane for the first time at the age of five, also taken by his father. When his siblings June and Dean were born, he would have them fly the wooden planes he made from the upstairs of the house and control their landings on the ground with a popsicle stick.

So it’s no surprise that Armstrong received his first pilot’s license at age 16, before he even had a driver’s license. After graduating from high school, he attended Purdue University in West Lafayette, where he earned a degree in space engineering on a U.S. Navy scholarship.

After serving in the Korean War as a pilot and graduating from Purdue, Armstrong married his first wife, Janet, in 1956 and began working as a test pilot at Edwards AFB in California, where they moved. According to his biographer, when flying over his home, the pilot would tilt the wings of the plane to say “hello” to his wife and son.

In January 1962, Neil and Janet’s daughter Karen died at the age of three from a brain tumor. The tragedy had a major impact on the pilot’s life, even affecting the quality of his flying. Friends and co-workers say he aged rapidly during this prolonged episode, which he kept quiet about for many years.

Joining NASA and flying to the Moon

Still grieving, Armstrong was selected for NASA’s Astronaut Corps in September 1962, and the family moved to Lancaster, California. He was not yet considered a star pilot, and his first mission was to Gemini VIII in 1965, as a reserve pilot.

In 1967, the White House wanted a civilian to be the commander of the lunar mission, and NASA leaders chose Neil Armstrong not only as the commander of the Apollo 11 mission, but also as the first man to leave the module and set foot on the lunar surface. Since he was very reserved, the only explanation for his choice was his emotional stability and his humble and professional personality.

In the 2018 film, there is a mysterious scene that actually happened and was not in the mission script. Near the end of the planned time to stay on the Moon, 21 hours and 36 minutes, Armstrong left the lunar module and went to the Little West crater, where he dropped an object he had carried in his so-called personal property kit.

With time almost up, the commander had to rush back to the lunar module, and his heart rate rose to over 180 bpm. Since the lunar module’s TV camera was not pointed at him, we don’t know what he left behind. In the film, Ryan Gosling drops a bracelet belonging to his daughter Karen.

The scene is not in Hansen’s book, but it is true that each astronaut took his or her own kit with personal or third-party items to be left on the Moon. Before the flight, each one wrote down what he or she was taking into space in a kind of contents declaration.

Hansen knew this and asked Armstrong to show his during one of the interviews for the book. The “first man” said he would look for the small inventory and, when he found it, he would show it to him. He didn’t. He died on August 25, 2012, at the age of 82, from hospital complications following heart bypass surgery.

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