On August 5, 1930, a baby boy named Neil Armstrong was born on a farm near Wapakoneta, Ohio. He took his first airplane ride at age six in a rickety Ford Trimotor, and from that day on, the sky was the place he wanted to be. He earned his pilot's license at sixteen, before he even had a driver's license. He flew Navy jets in the Korean War and later tested experimental rocket planes that could climb to the very edge of space.
NASA picked Neil as an astronaut in 1962. He commanded Gemini 8, which performed the first docking of two spacecraft, and even survived a wild emergency when the capsule started spinning out of control. Then in January 1969 he got the call: he would command Apollo 11, the mission that would try to land humans on the Moon. He was famously calm. Reporters joked you could check his pulse during liftoff and barely notice it.
On July 20, 1969, Neil climbed down a ladder from the lunar module Eagle and pressed his boot into the gray dust of the Moon, saying, 'That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' About 600 million people watched live on television, more than had ever watched anything. Neil went home to Ohio, taught engineering, and stayed humble for the rest of his life. His bootprint is still up there, unchanged by wind or rain, because the Moon has neither.
