First man to set foot on the moon: Who is Neil Armstrong?

US astronaut. As the commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, he was the first human to set foot on the Moon's surface. Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He became interested in aviation at a young age; He received his flight badge at the age of 16 and entered Purdue University's Aeronautical Engineering Department the following year.

He completed his education in 1955, which was interrupted in 1950 due to the Korean War. Armstrong, who was appointed as a professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati between 1971 and 1979, and won many awards for his achievements as a test pilot and astronaut, is also an honorary member of many organizations related to aviation and space studies in the USA. Armstrong, who started working at the Levris Flight Research Laboratory in 1955, transferred to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) the following year for the F-100, F-101, F-102, F-5D, B- He participated in test flights of 47 jet planes and X-15 rocket planes. When he was called up for the "Gemini Manned Space Flight Project" in 1962, he left the military and started training at the Houston Space Center in Texas.

Launched into space on March 16, 1966, Gemini 8 was carrying Neil Armstrong and David Scott. When the vehicle, which was docked with an Agena thruster in space, got out of control after a while, the astronauts had to leave the thruster and orbited Earth 7 times in 10 hours 41 minutes, returning to Earth earlier than the predicted time. Armstrong was then selected for "Project Apollo", and after five or six months of training, he was appointed head of the Apollo 11 crew consisting of Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin.

Launched at 13:32 Greenwich Mean time on July 16, 1969, the vehicle entered orbit around the Moon two days later. Armstrong and Aldrin, who moved to the lunar module called Eagle, landed in the Sea of Silence at 20:17 on July 20, where they would stay for approximately 22 hours. Armstrong took the first step to the Moon at 2:56 am on July 21, followed by Aldrin 18 minutes later.

During the 2 hours and 20 minutes, they spent outside Kartal collecting rock samples weighing approximately 21 kg from the lunar surface, Apollo 11 began its return journey with the landing module docked with the command module under Collins' direction. The astronauts who landed in the Pacific on July 24 were quarantined for eighteen days on the grounds that they might have been carrying harmful organisms from space. Eight years after the first manned space flight, which began with Vostok 1 in 1961, the landing of the human foot on the Moon was a new milestone in space exploration.

Between December 21, 1968, and December 19, 1972, 24 astronauts traveled to the Moon in 9 missions organized by NASA to the Moon. These 24 astronauts are also the 24 who have traveled beyond Earth's low orbit to date. Of these six missions to land humans on the Moon, one astronaut stayed in the spacecraft, while the other two astronauts landed on the Moon with modules and walked on the Moon. When the first man set foot on the moon, the calendars on Earth were showing July 20, 1969. The last time a human stood on the Moon was December 13, 1972.

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Who Has Walked on the Moon?