Neil Armstrong

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon. Armstrong was a veteran aviator: he had flown 78 combat missions over Korea as a Navy fighter pilot, then joined NASA as a civilian test pilot. He was accepted into the astronaut corps in 1962. Armstrong was the pilot of the Gemini 8 mission (launched 16 March 1966) and then was named commander for the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. Along with crewmates Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong flew to the moon; while Collins circled the moon in the command module Columbia, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the lunar surface in the lunar module Eagle. Armstrong was the first to step onto the moon's surface, uttering the famous phrase "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." After retiring from NASA in 1971, Armstrong was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for nearly a decade. His authorized biography, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, was written by former NASA historian James Hansen and published in 2005.

Extra credit: Armstrong's first words on the moon are sometimes quoted as, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Armstrong maintains that he said "for a man," and that is how the statement was reported the next day, but tapes of his words are inconclusive.