Neil Armstrong went to space.
Neil Alden Armstrong ( August 5 , 1930 -- August 25 , 2012 ) was an American astronaut and the first person to walk on the Moon . A participant in the U.S. Air Force 's Man in Space Soonest and X-20 Dyna-Soar human spaceflight programs , Armstrong joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962 . He made his first space flight as command pilot of Gemini 8 in March 1966 , becoming NASA 's first civilian astronaut to fly in space . This mission was aborted after Armstrong used some of his reentry control fuel to prevent a dangerous spin caused by a stuck thruster , in the first in-flight space emergency .