By Himanshu Guru: Neil Armstrong, the US astronaut, who passed away in Cincinnati of complications from cardiovascular procedures, was the first person, who dared to set foot on the moon.
Armstrong might have left the world but the footprints he left on the moon created an unmatched place in history. He was the great personality in the field of space science and research. Recently he had undergone a heart surgery, but he breathed his last at the age of 82 on last Saturday.
He was also an aerospace engineer, U.S. Navy pilot, test pilot, and university professor.Armstrong had joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962. His first space voyage was the NASA Gemini 8 mission in 1966, for which he was the command pilot.
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He was also the first U.S. civilian to be in the space. He had performed the first manned docking of two spacecraft in the space during his first space voyage.
When the world was considering the moon mission as impossible, he had set his foot on the Earth’s planet in 1969. Along with another astronaut in the mission, Buzz Aldrin, he made the impsossible mission as possible. Both of them spent approximately 2 and half hour there for exploration of the moon, while Michael Collins, another astronaut of the mission remained in orbit in the Command Module in July 1969. It was his second and last spaceflight, the famous Apollo 11 moon landing.
Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon along with Collins and Aldrin, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009 during the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.