Happy 81st, Neil Armstrong!

Neil Armstrong hasn't signed an autograph since 1994 – he found out people were just selling his name and profiting off him. When speaking to a room full of students at the Naval Academy, the young men present were asked not to bring up his Apollo lunar landing. He was there as a living legend of Naval aviation, not an astronaut. It's got to be hard being the first man to walk on the moon. No matter what else you've done or what else you're passionate about, you will always be known for this monumental accomplishment of human engineering and ingenuity. In the case of Neil Armstrong, who turned 81 on August 5, he is quick to point out that he is first and foremost an aeronautical engineer.

Neil Armstrong's discovery of flying is one of the most common classic love stories of boys growing up in the 1930s. The fighter pilots of the First World War were lauded as heros nationwide. Barnstormer and aerial performers captured imaginations while simultaneously opening the sky for non-military pilots to take on and break records. Charles Lindbergh was a US Air Mail pilot before he shot to fame overnight for flying solo across the Atlantic in 1927. Amelia Earhart was a private aviator off to circumnavigate the globe when she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937.

An avid reader, Armstrong immersed himself in flight-related books and magazines. Early on, however, he had the opportunity to experience aircraft first hand: first when his father took a two-year-old Armstrong to see the Cleveland Air Races, and again when his father took him for a ride in a Ford Trimotor at six years old. That first ride in an airplane was on a Sunday morning. Neil's mother thought his father had dutifully taken their son to Sunday school. Supplementing his interest in flying was his hobby of building model airplanes and the subsequent launching of old models out of his bedroom window, often on fire.

As early as eight or nine years old, Armstrong recognized his inclination towards engineering; he was much more interested in how individual characteristics made an airplane fly a certain way than the airplane's actual flight. Aircraft design, he decided, was his calling. Piloting was a secondary interest that supported the primary. He felt that any engineer worth his salt should know how the airplane feels to fly.

When he was 14, the Armstrong family moved to Wapakoneta, Ohio, where Armstrong began taking the steps towards his dream career. At 16 he successfully completed his first solo flight and earned his pilot's license – he learned to fly before he learned to drive. After graduating from high school in 1947, he joined Purdue University's Aeronautical Engineering program through the US Navy – the military branch paid for a students books and tuition in exchange for three years of military service. When Armstrong graduated from Purdue in 1955, he did so as a Naval aviator with a bachelor's in engineering.

But the field of aviation had changed. In October 1947, less than a month after Armstrong started at Purdue, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the rocket powered X-1. Jet aircraft effectively killed the airplanes Armstrong had grown up making models of and memorizing. But there was still a chance for him to be a pioneer in aviation as an engineer and pilot: as an experimental test pilot.

In 1955, Armstrong joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Founded in 1913 to bring together all efforts in the emerging arena of aviation, the NACA was dissolved in 1958 as spaceflight took centre stage. The people and pieces of the NACA became the basic structure of NASA.

Towards the end of 1955, Armstrong joined the NACA as a test pilot. For five years he did mostly engineering work – developing flight simulations, finding and solving problems associated with radical new flight plans, as well as learning the flight style of NACA research pilots. When NACA became NASA, the organization began flying the high-altitude high-speed research aircraft the X-15. This was the precursor to the X-20 orbital space plane planned by the US Air Force. In all, Armstrong flew the X-15 seven times reaching a peak altitude of 207,500 feet and a top speed of Mach 5.74.

In 1962, he was poised to go into space with the US Air Force when NASA came knocking. The space organization was looking to fill out the ranks of its astronauts and Armstrong's superior skills as a pilot had not escaped notice. The real dilemma was whether or not Armstrong was willing to sacrifice the engineering-heavy work for spaceflight. In the end he decided it was and joined NASA with the second group of astronauts in 1962. Good thing too; the X-20 was cancelled a year later as was its replacement program the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. The filed program produced the nation's first unemployed astronauts, but Armstrong was well into training for his first Gemini mission by this time.

Armstrong flew in space twice – once in the Gemini program and once with Apollo. In both cases, the flights stand out as noteworthy in NASA's history.

Gemini 8 sent Armstrong and Dave Scott into orbit to dock with a target vehicle – a necessary hurdle to overcome in the race to the moon. The Gemini spacecraft caught up to and docked with the Agena target vehicle when the spacecraft began to roll. Assuming the problem was with the Agena, Armstrong and Scott separated from their target only to find their roll rate increased. As they tried to regain control, the spacecraft was rotating close to once per second. The g-forces in the spacecraft built up to 9gs – nine times the pull of gravity – before Armstrong was able to cancel to roll and regain control of the spacecraft. He had, however, used most of his fuel for the manoeuvre and Gemini 8 made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Armstrong's second spaceflight was also marked with a low fuel situation. As he and Buzz Aldren approached the lunar surface in the Lunar Module Eagle, the surface turned out to be more varied and rocky than NASA's reconnaissance pictures had led the organization to believe. Armstrong took manual control of the Eagle to find a suitable place to land when the computer started sounding its alarm. The LM's computer was overloading and Armstrong was running out of fuel. Aldren silences the alarm and called out fuel levels to Armstrong. With less than ten seconds of fuel remaining, the Eagle's contact light illuminated and Armstrong landed safely and somewhat smoothly on the surface of the moon.

Following Apollo 11's return and the conclusion of subsequent post-mission reports and debriefing, Armstrong announced that he had no intentions of flying in space again. He stayed with NASA for just under two years, serving as Deputy Associate Administrator for Aeronautics at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The position put him in charge of coordinating and managing all NASA research and development related to aeronautics.

After leaving NASA, Armstrong returned to academia. He completed a Master's degree in engineering from the University of South California in 1970, and in 1971 took up a position teaching Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He was drawn to the school's smaller department and stayed for eight years, finally retiring from teaching in 1979.

Being the first man on the moon has Armstrong fought against his fame. His fame has garnered him numerous offers to act as spokesperson for companies and products. He's turned such offers down with the exception of Chrysler. Armstrong felt they had a solid engineering department and could use the financial benefit that would come with an astronaut spokesperson. Political parties, too, approached him from both ends of the spectrum with pleas to run for office, another outlet Armstrong never wanted to seriously pursue.

In the last thirty years, Armstrong has found outlets that have kept him close to his roots as an engineer, serving on the board of directors of a number of engineering and aviation companies. As for Apollo 11, he is fast to point out that the first man to walk on the moon was an engineer. A fitting tribute to a program that was more a feat of engineering than anything else.

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