Birthday Wishes!

But not for me. I have another day before I hit 60, so let's not be moving too fast here. No, these birthday wishes are for one of my heroes and a relative as well. Born August 5, 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio, about 10 miles from where I grew up, Neil Armstrong parlayed his Korean War Navy piloting  experience (78 missions over Korea, including 20 combat missions) into a job with the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, which, by the way, is where my college roommate Guy Conger's father worked in the late 60's.  After several test flights with the rocket plane (Bell X-1B), he moved on to the space program with NASA, joining the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962. His first spaceflight was the NASA Gemini 8 mission in 1966, for which he was the command pilot, becoming one of the first U.S. civilians to fly in space. On this mission, he performed the first manned docking of two spacecraft with pilot David Scott. Armstrong's second and last spaceflight was as mission commander of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission on July 20, 1969.The video here is of the first moonwalk:    

            

If you are looking for a road trip, the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum is located in Wapakoneta, Ohio. I have been through the museum and it is an interesting place. It has the Gemini 8 capsule, along with artifacts from other space missions (including a moon rock). If you are a pilot yourself, you can fly into the Neil Armstrong Airport in New Knoxville, Ohio, where Neil took his first flying lessons. If you want a longer road trip, you could visit the lunar crater Armstrong, which is about 31 miles from the Apollo 11 landing site. Let me know if you are going. I'd like to come along.