Biographie

Astronauts Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted a plaque on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. It reads: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.".

NASA realized after the Apollo 11 mission had returned to Earth that they had no good pictures of the First Man on the Moon to show to the world. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said later: "As the sequence of lunar operations evolved, Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of pictures taken on the Moon that include an astronaut are of me. It wasn't until we were back on Earth and in the lunar receiving laboratory, looking over the pictures, that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault, perhaps, but we had never simulated this in our training.".

In 1979, while working on his farm in Lebanon, Ohio, he jumped off a grain tractor and his wedding ring was caught in the wheel, severing his ring finger. He managed to calmly collect the finger, pack it in ice and had it reattached by micro surgeons at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

A crater on the moon is named Armstrong after him.

He stopped signing autographs in 1994 after finding that many of his signatures were selling for significant amounts of money, and that there were several forgeries in circulation. Since then any requests that were sent to him were answered with a form letter stating that he had stopped signing autographs.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. [First words spoken on the moon. The speech as written by his wife read, "That's one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind". Unfortunately, he forgot the a in the between for and man, thus changing the meaning.]

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed. [First message to the Earth from the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle after landing on the Moon, 20 July 1969]

Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.