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Neil Armstrong

Armstrong

Neil Armstrong will always be remembered as the first man to walk on the moon. He has died on Saturday 25th of August, weeks after heart surgery and days after his 82nd birthday.

Neil A. Armstrong, was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, on August 5, 1930. He served as a naval aviator between 1949 and 1952. In 1955 he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) a predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency (NASA).

Armstrong gained his status as an astronaut in 1962. He then was assigned as command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission. Gemini 8 was launched on March 16, 1966, and Armstrong performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space.

As spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission, Armstrong became the first man to land on the moon and the first to step on its surface.

He was Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati between 1971-1979. During the years 1982-1992, Armstrong was chairman of Computing Technologies for Aviation, Inc., Charlottesville, Va.

In an address to America’s National Press Club in 2000, Armstrong offered the following self-portrait: “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.”

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