There are a lot of people that can remember where they were when man first landed on the moon, and especially when they first heard the words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These were the words from NASA Astronaut Neil Armstrong as he set foot as the first man on the moon. An event that took the world by storm.

Neil Armstrong, a Purdue and University of Southern California graduate, began his flight career as a test pilot at Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1958, Armstrong was selected for the U.S. Air Force’s “Man In Space Soonest program,” which was the Air Force’s program to put a man on the moon prior to the Soviet Union.

In July 1969, Armstrong (as Commander), along with lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins headed off to the moon on Apollo 11. As Armstrong touched down on the “Sea of Tranquility” location on the moon, Armstrong communicated back to Houston “Houston, Tranquility Base here — the Eagle has landed,” and seven hours later, his famous words of “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

After Armstrong’s career at NASA, and his first and only trip to the moon, he resigned from NASA in 1971 and accepted a teaching position at the University of Cincinnati in the Department of Aerospace Engineering; however, Armstrong resigned from UC in 1979 without publicly stating a reason.

On August 25th, 2012, Neil Armstrong died from complications due to surgery to relieve his blocked coronary arteries, and was 82 years old. The public has been paying their respects to this history maker via Twitter: