Neil Armstrong is 78 today.
Armstrong was first. How many others have walked on the moon? (See below).
All you current and former civil servants out there should find Armstrong to be your particular hero. The first man on the moon was a federal employee, a GS-14.
Jill provided the answer to how many two years ago:
Ooh, an Apollo question. You’ve come to the right place.
Well, 12 men have walked on the moon. Six lunar missions successfully landed on the moon, each with two crew members aboard the lunar module.
But NASA would say that 24 men have gone to the moon. They consider a moon trip to be achieving orbit around the moon, and do not recognize a distinction between orbiting the moon and walking on it. There were nine Apollo missions that orbited the moon, including two test runs, the six succesful landings, and Apollo 13. That’s 27 men, but three men did it twice (Jim Lovell, Eugene Cernan and John Young).
Did you know that within NASA, “astronaut” is a job description for those individuals selected to be members of the Astronaut Corps at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Once an astronaut candidate completes training, he or she becomes a career astronaut, without ever going into space. Within the U.S. military, however, the term astronaut is reserved for those individuals that have actually flown above an altitude of 50 miles.