Neil Armstrong: First man to walk on the Moon

Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut, who has died aged 82, cemented a unique place in the history of mankind by becoming the first person to walk on the Moon; though his personal achievement was a product of the Cold War's bitter technological and political rivalry, the success of his mission proved a transcendent moment that captured the imagination of the entire planet.

It was a success that owed much to Armstrong's clarity of thought and split-second ability to make life-saving decisions. During Apollo 11's final, hazardous descent to the surface of the Moon on July 20 1969, the mission was dogged by computer failures that would have justified aborting the attempt. Having decided to press on, Armstrong discovered that automatic systems were steering his lunar module on to the steep banks of a large, boulder-filled crater. Sitting next to Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, he seized manual control and guided the craft to a graceful touchdown with just 20 seconds of fuel remaining. Moments later he announced to the world: "Houston. Tranquillity Base here. Eagle has landed." The two astronauts, driven and relentless in their pursuit of an objective set out eight years and two months earlier by President Kennedy, paused to shake hands.

The defining images of the mission were still to come. After several hours conducting checks, Armstrong emerged from the landing craft, swaddled in cumbersome helmet and space suit. Stepping off the ladder onto the dusty surface below he uttered the now celebrated words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Whether he had meant to say "a man" would divert pedants for decades to come.

Armstrong did not have the time either to celebrate the safe landing, or to worry that he had fluffed his lines. "We could not luxuriate in those feelings," he said in a rare interview with Alex Malley in Australia last year. Even President Nixon's congratulatory call from the White House was "memorable but instantaneous. There was work to do. The checklists were all over us. We weren't there to meditate." During a moonwalk that lasted two hours and 19 minutes, the two men collected soil and rock samples, took photographs and video images, and planted equipment and the Stars and Stripes in the lunar soil, all the while bounding easily across the landscape, unhindered by the Moon's minimal gravitational pull. Some 240,000 miles away, back on Earth, hundreds of millions watched on agog, following their progress on live television broadcasts.

In all, 12 men walked on the Moon, all of them American. The last mission there was Apollo 17, in 1972. The fact that Armstrong was the first to set foot on our planet's lifeless satellite was pure chance. The Apollo programme was, in his own words, "very fluid". He had been the back-up captain for Apollo 8, but when its first choice crew blasted off, "I found myself out of a job. A few days later the boss called and asked if I would take three flights down the road - Apollo 11." What that mission might entail he did not know; no one did, not even the meticulous planners at Nasa. "There was no way we could predict what each of the flights was going to do," Armstrong said last year. "It [Apollo 11] was going to depend on the accomplishments of the flight before. But [Apollo] 8 worked well. [Apollo] 9 worked well. 10 did far better than expected - it took a lunar module around the Moon. A month before the launch of Apollo 11 we decided that we were confident enough to try an attempt on a descent to the surface."

The pressure to do so, with only months remaining to fulfil Kennedy's promise to land a man on the Moon before decade's end, was intense. "I was asked: 'Are you and your guys ready?' It would have been nice to have another month, but we were in a race here. I had to say: 'We're ready. We're ready to go.'" Quite apart from bearing the hopes of his nation in the sprint to the finish of a space race that the United States had long seemed destined to lose, Armstrong also had to deal with the ever-present physical dangers of the Apollo missions themselves. Then there was the alarming philosophical novelty of watching Earth recede into the infinite vastness on his three day journey to the Moon.

But it was clear to all that Armstrong's character was perfectly suited to coping with the extraordinary challenges that accompanied the task that fate had allotted him. Driven yet understated, he possessed courage and inner strength of mind. And above all he was able to draw on technical ability so supreme that it was once said of him: "He flies an airplane like he's wearing it." Such talent was born of a passion for flying that had burned within him from his very earliest days.

Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio, the eldest of three children of Stephen Armstrong, a local government accountant who frequently moved his family as he followed work, and his wife Viola, a farmer's daughter who prayed that her son would "grow up to be a good and useful person". Though both of his parents were extremely devout, Neil Armstrong later professed no explicit religious beliefs. "They allowed me to pursue my own interests," he said later. "They didn't try to dictate to me what I should do or where I should go."

His first experience of aircraft came at the Cleveland Air Race, to which he was taken when he was two. Four years later he was aloft for the first time, after his father paid for the two of them to be taken up in a Ford TriMotor. Thereafter flying gradually became an all-consuming hobby, expressed first through the construction of model aircraft, and then, in Neil's early teens, by the pursuit of flying lessons. Despite this adventurousness, he was a fearful youngster, and recoiled when forced to confront the death of, for example, a much loved pet. "I think many younger people are uncomfortable with the thought of death. I shared that uneasiness. It took me some years to circumvent it."

By his early teens the Armstrong family had returned to settle at Wapakoneta, and it was at the airport there (now known as Neil Armstrong airport) that Neil trained as a pilot, paying $9 an hour for instruction with money earned from a casual job at a local chemist. Presented with his licence on his 16th birthday, he had qualified to fly before he knew how to drive.

After leaving high school Armstrong went up to Purdue University, Indiana, to study Aeronautical Engineering as a naval air cadet. For all his prowess at the controls in various aircraft, and the undoubted enjoyment and thrill he derived from flying, Armstrong always regarded himself primarily as an engineer, with its focus on what he called "problem solving". For this reason his later years as a test pilot, which combined excitement and academic process, were among his happiest. "The test pilot is looking for inadequacies," he once said. "His job is to identify those problems and find a solution. I found that fascinating. I really enjoyed the opportunity to contribute to in some way to the solution of problems. The history of humanity has been slowly increasing the boundaries of knowledge - at the edges it is always a challenge."

After two years at college, in 1949 Armstrong was called up to active duty, undergoing flight training in Florida before being sent to Korea, where he flew 78 combat mission over the next three years. Not quite 19 when he arrived in theatre, he became a naval aviator with the rank of ensign aboard the carrier Essex. Many of his fellow pilots were killed, but his own brilliant airmanship enabled him to survive when a six feet section of the right wing of his Panther jet was sliced off by a cable booby-trap deployed against low-flying fighters; he nursed the plane back to allied-controlled airspace before ejecting and landing unhurt in a rice paddy. It would be by no means his last brush with death.

The fighting, he later estimated, contained "higher risks than I faced in my test pilot work or my astronaut work". Certainly any residual discomposure in the face of death was quickly effaced: "There's a good side and a bad side [to combat]. The bad side is you lose people. The good side is you create very strong bonds with your colleagues that survive. Those bonds exist throughout your lifetime. You are a better person for having learned to endure."

After the war he returned to Purdue, teaching Mathematics while completing his BSc. He graduated in 1955 and, preferring civilian life to a Service career, successfully applied to be a test pilot with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (Naca), soon to be renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). Based at Edwards Air Force base in California, Armstrong was quickly deployed on space-related programmes, and for seven years he piloted launch planes which dropped the X-series of rocket-powered research aircraft, piloted the X-craft themselves, and test flew many of America's future supersonic fighters.

It was while at the controls of a B-29, ferrying a rocket plane up to its launch altitude that, for the second time in his life, Armstrong was nearly killed. Just after releasing the rocket plane, the outer starboard engine on his B29 exploded, spraying shrapnel through the aircraft that cut his co-pilot's control cables and disabled three of the four engines. "That's an uncomfortable position - one [engine] out of four," Armstrong said later, in typically phlegmatic style. He managed to coax the aircraft to the ground in wide, gentle arcs, and on inspecting it found that just one or two threads of his own control cables remained intact.

His seven flights in the X-15 aircraft took him, at speeds of up to 4,000mph, to the edge of space. As a result the heads of Nasa's embryonic manned space flight programme were aware that he was well-qualified to be an astronaut. But by the time Armstrong himself had decided to submit his name for consideration, the official deadline for applications, June 1 1962, had passed. Technically his candidacy should not have been accepted, but he was added to the list of applicants just before the final selection panel met.

By then John Glenn had become the first American to make an orbital flight of Earth, and an initial group of seven astronauts were halfway through Project Mercury, the first of the three projects leading to the moonlandings (the other, before Apollo, was Project Gemini). When, in September 1962, Armstrong and eight others (including one other civilian, Elliot See, who was killed in 1966) were accepted to form a second cohort of astronauts, they were billed "The New Nine".

They were an average age of 32.5 years old, and while five of the group were to command moonlanding missions, the Washington Evening Star was already busy forecasting that it would be Armstrong who would take control of America's first attempt to land men on the Moon.

Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, was in charge of deciding which of the fiercely competitive "New Nine" should be assigned to which mission. He gave Armstrong two principal tasks. The first was to work out how many more astronauts Nasa needed to complete the 10 two-man Gemini flights and 14 three-man Apollo flights then thought necessary to land on the Moon and explore it. Armstrong's second task, which nearly proved fatal, was to develop the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), a simulator on which astronauts could practise landings in something approaching the gravitational conditions they would face at the Moon.

This work was interrupted, however, by preparations for Armstrong's own first space flight - the eighth of the Gemini flights - for which he was paired with David Scott. The two were due to make the first docking of two vehicles in orbit and follow it with what would have been the second ever spacewalk. The target for the docking was an unmanned Agena rocket, sent up in advance.

In March 1966 Armstrong and Scott made history by linking the two craft, in a moment that finally saw America overtake the Soviet Union in the long battle for space supremacy. Time for celebration was short, however, because within minutes of the docking the vehicles started tumbling end over end, out of control. Armstrong decoupled the two vehicles, only for the astronauts' capsule to continue rotating wildly. Realising that their control thrusters were malfunctioning, and with both he and Scott in danger of blacking out, Armstrong made an emergency switch to the re-entry control system. Stability was restored, but the flight, and its spacewalk, was abandoned.

The episode had an effect on more than just space technology. While Armstrong and Scott had been fighting for their lives, with exchanges with Mission Control in Houston becoming increasingly desperate, it had been decided to switch off the live audio link to the astronauts' wives. Armstrong's wife, the former Janet Shearon, a college sweetheart whom he had married during his time as a test pilot, promptly drove to Mission Control, only to be turned away. Her threat to go public with the details of her treatment ensured that spouses were treated more thoughtfully in future crises.

Two years later, with just over 12 months before Apollo 11, Armstrong once more survived in a situation where many would have panicked and died. He was training on the LLTV when it suddenly spiralled out of control. According to the Nasa flight director Chris Kraft, Armstrong had two-fifths of a second in which to eject safely before the LLTV crashed and exploded. In the event, Armstrong survived with no more than a badly-bitten tongue, and even his fellow astronauts were astonished to see him back in his office an hour later. "Well," Armstrong said, "there was work to be done."

It was at Christmas 1968, as Apollo 8 circled the Moon, that Slayton selected Armstrong to command Apollo 11. Michael Collins, a US Air Force test pilot, was to be the man who would stay in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin - another veteran of Korea - attempted the landing. The three did not know one another well, and Collins said later that they transferred only essential information to one another, "rather than thoughts or feelings".

The media-fuelled controversy over whether Armstrong or Aldrin should be first to step on the lunar surface began almost at once - with Armstrong resolutely refusing to become involved. Aldrin expected to be first, in accordance with the tradition that the captain is always last to leave his ship, and newspaper correspondents were briefed on those lines. When the proposed flight plan revealed that this had been changed, Aldrin lobbied hard against it. But he professed to be satisfied when it was finally announced that the change was for technical and not for personal or political reasons.

The success of the eight-day mission, including a faultless lift-off from the lunar surface to rejoin Michael Collins, captivated the rest of humanity left behind on Earth. But the competition of the Cold War was not forgotten. Even as Apollo 11 was in lunar orbit, the Soviets were making a bold but unsuccessful bid to make an unmanned landing in the Sea of Crises. Their aim was to gather a small lunar sample and return it to earth a few hours before Apollo 11 splashed down. But their spacecraft, Luna 15, crashed, and the Apollo crew were never told of Mission Control's brief concern about a possible conflict of radio frequencies.

On their return Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were quarantined for three weeks, for fear that they might have been contaminated by unknown moonbugs, but this proved to be unfounded. In the event, their confinement would prove an all-too brief moment of calm before the storm of publicity that was to break over them. "We were not naive," Armstrong said later, "but we could never have guessed what the volume and intensity of public interest would turn out to be."

His diffident nature made him appear ill at ease at news conferences, and the brevity and occasional evasiveness of his answers led to some unfavourable comment; but he was an effective and diplomatic representative of his country on an exhausting world tour. Even before the launch he had been expressing anxiety on a topic that would not become fashionable for another 50 years - the thinness and fragility of the Earth's atmosphere - and warning of the need to conserve it and use it wisely.

For a year after Apollo 11 he took a Nasa job in Washington promoting aeronautical research, but he did not enjoy the public scrutiny that attended his every remark, and he left the organisation entirely in 1971, returning with some relief to a teaching post at the University of Cincinnati. There he remained, as University Professor of Aerospace Engineering, until 1979.

He was on the boards of several major companies, and, although notably reticent to exploit his past for financial gain, appeared in advertisements for Chrysler, on the grounds that the company invested in engineering. Twice he was called to panels investigating space accidents: the first in 1970 after Apollo 13, the second in 1986 after the Challenger explosion.

Neil Armstrong remained healthy and active into old age. He suffered a minor heart attack in 1991, during his divorce from his wife of 38 years, but recovered well. He married, secondly, in 1994 Carol Knight, who survives him with two sons of his first marriage. A daughter predeceased him.

Neil Armstrong, born August 5 1930, died August 25 2012