Neil Armstrong

Neil Alden Armstrong (1930–2012) was a U.S. naval aviator, test pilot and NASA astronaut who, as commander of Apollo 11, became the first person to walk on the Moon on 20 July 1969. A famously reticent engineer, he spent decades gently correcting the record about his most famous sentence — insisting he had said ‘one small step for a man’ and asking that history ‘grant me leeway for dropping the syllable.’