On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step onto the moon. As he did so, he spoke the memorable words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” An estimated 600 million people, which in 1969 was one fifth of the world’s population, watched or listened to the moon landing. Neil Armstrong was the commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, on the most daring space mission of the twentieth century. The early stages of the flight were very stressful and incredibly noisy, and during the launch phase of Apollo 11, Armstrong’s heart reached a top rate of 110 beats per minute. Apollo 11 was larger than any previous spacecraft. It consisted of a command module, which the astronauts travelled in; a service module, which provided power; and a lunar landing module, for landing on the surface of the moon. An advantage of travelling in this spacecraft was that the astronauts could move around more easily. Armstrong was pleased about this because as a child he had suffered from motion sickness, and even during the training for the space flights he had sometimes felt ill after doing aerobatics. During the final descent onto the moon, Armstrong noticed that they were heading towards a landing area which looked dangerous. He took over manual control of the lunar landing module, which enabled him to find a safer area to land. When questioned later about this, he said, in his typically modest way, that he was just doing what his training had taught him. Armstrong and his co-pilot, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, spent nearly three hours on the moon’s surface collecting samples of rock and moon dust. Armstrong said later, “The sights were magnificent, the most incredible that I had ever experienced.” The two astronauts also conducted scientific experiments during their walk. Meanwhile, the third astronaut on the mission, Michael Collins, had an important role to play. He circled the moon in the command module as his two colleagues walked on the surface. Aldrin later said that neither he nor Armstrong were emotional people. He did admit, however, that after the landing there was a brief moment when they looked at each other, slapped each other on the shoulder and said, “We made it!” Aldrin said that Armstrong was one of the most courageous men he had ever known. In total, twelve American astronauts walked on the moon between 1969 and the final moon mission in 1972. Alan Shepard became the oldest man to walk there when, at the age of 47, he commanded the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930 and took his first aeroplane ride at the age of six. He used to build model aeroplanes and conduct experiments in the mechanics of flying. He joined the military as a pilot and then became an astronaut on the space programme before teaching aviation at a university. He finally bought a farm in the 1970s and raised cattle. He preferred to avoid publicity, rarely giving interviews to the media. People who knew him, however, said that he had an enormous sense of pride in the achievements of the space programme.