Neil Armstrong has spent his whole life within Earth's atmosphere.
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 . 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 . Armstrong 's second and last spaceflight was as commander of Apollo 11 , the first manned Moon landing mission in July 1969 .