He would always maintain that he had planned to say “a man.” Whether the “a” was lost in transmission or Mr. Armstrong misspoke has never been fully resolved. Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon July 20, 1969, capping the most daring of the 20th century's scientific expeditions. "It was special and memorable, but it was only instantaneous because there was work to do," Armstrong told an Australian television interviewer this year. When he and his fellow crew members lifted off aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, they carried with them the aspirations of an entire nation. Armstrong and pilot David Scott did the first orbital docking of two spacecraft, joining their Gemini 8 spacecraft to an uncrewed Agena target vehicle. As his boots touched the lunar surface at 10:56:15 p.m. Eastern, the world heard: 
 
 “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” 
 
 Ever the precise engineer, Mr. Armstrong later said that if it were up to him, history would record his immortal words with an “a” inserted in parentheses. The ultimate mission 
 
 Neil Alden Armstrong was born Aug. 5, 1930, outside the little farming town of Wapakoneta in western Ohio. After a few semesters at Purdue University, he left for Navy flight training in 1949, eventually becoming the youngest pilot in his fighter squadron on the aircraft carrier USS Essex. Although he had been a Navy fighter pilot, a test pilot for NASA's forerunner and an astronaut, Armstrong never allowed himself to be caught up in the celebrity and glamour of the space program. Credit: NASA 
 
 In 1962, Armstrong was selected with NASA's second group of astronauts, who flew on the two-seat Gemini missions to test out space technology, and the three-seat Apollo missions that ultimately took 12 people to the surface of the moon. Missions before Apollo 11 included the first crewed trip around the moon (Apollo 8, December 1968), the first test of the lunar module in space (Apollo 9, March 1969) and the first simulated lunar landing (Apollo 10, May 1969). In those first few moments on the moon, during the climax of a heated space race with the then-Soviet Union, Armstrong stopped in what he called "a tender moment" and left a patch to commemorate NASA astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts who had died in action. In 1970, Armstrong was appointed deputy associate administrator for aeronautics at NASA but left the following year to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.
– A sample of the early coverage/reaction in the wake of Neil Armstrong's death today at age 82: Huffington Post: Its page-leading banner reads, "One Giant Loss for Mankind." Armstrong family: "The next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.” Associated Press: He was a "quiet, self-described 'nerdy' engineer who became a global hero when as a steely-nerved US pilot he made 'one giant leap for mankind' with the first step on the moon." President Obama: "Neil was among the greatest of American heroes—not just of his time, but of all time." Space.com: "A figure so large in American and world history that you can bet many generations from now people will still be talking about him, as well as his moon landing." Houston Chronicle: "Armstrong was the face of what is arguably America's top technological triumph, but for those who knew him in the spaceflight community, he quietly led by setting a good example." Washington Post: He "marked an epochal achievement in exploration with 'one small step'" and thus became one of "the most heroized Americans of the 1960s Cold War space race." The Guardian: Those famous words—"That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind"—still "endure as one of the best known quotes in the English language."