Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio, to a family with no particular aviation pedigree. He earned his student pilot's license before he could legally drive a car, flew Navy jets in Korea, and in July 1969 became the first person to set foot on the Moon as commander of Apollo 11.
Armstrong's fascination with flight began early—he took his first airplane ride at age six in a Ford Trimotor, and by fifteen he was taking flying lessons at an airport near his hometown, paid for with money earned from odd jobs. He earned his student pilot's certificate on his sixteenth birthday, before he'd even gotten a driver's license, an inversion of the usual teenage priorities that hints at what obsessed him.
He flew 78 combat missions as a Navy pilot during the Korean War, once ejecting safely after his plane clipped a cable strung across a valley by North Korean forces. Afterward he became a test pilot, flying the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 1962.
The quiet, famously reserved engineer would utter the most quoted sentence of the twentieth century on July 20, 1969: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' He rarely capitalized on his fame afterward, retreating to teaching and a farm in Ohio, a private man forever attached to history's most public moment.