President Barack Obama, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and two French led astronauts led tributes to the famed Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, lauding him as a reluctant but true American hero.
“When he and his fellow crew members lifted off aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, they carried with them the aspirations of an entire nation,” said Obama, who was two weeks short of his eighth birthday when the historic mission succeeded.
“They set out to show the world that the American spirit can see beyond what seems unimaginable – that with enough drive and ingenuity, anything is possible,” he added in a statement.
The two French astronauts paid tribute to Neil Armstrong on Sunday, calling the first man on the moon a legend a day after he died aged 82.
“He was a living legend … a great man, someone full of self-restraint, extremely discreet,” Jean-Loup Chretien, the first Frenchman in space, said of the famed Apollo 11 commander in an interview with the weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.
Chretien, who met Armstrong on several occasions, also praised his “great professionalism”.
Jean-Francois Clervoy, one of France’s two serving European Space Agency astronauts, also tipped his hat to Armstrong, lauding him as an “absolute legend.”
“Armstrong remains and will remain the first, he’s the one who made history, an absolute legend,” Clervoy told AFP Sunday.
“Besides the moon, Armstrong must have had a lucky star over his head!” he added, recalling that Armstrong escaped death several times on previous missions and even while training for the Apollo 11 flight.
French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also offered a tribute Sunday, saying Armstrong had paved the way for a new era of space exploration.
“His famous ‘small step’ on the lunar surface realised the dream of generations of inventors, scientists, artists, poets or simply amateurs of the beauties of space,” Ayrault said in a statement.
Armstrong, who died from complications following cardiac bypass surgery, inspired a generation to reach for the stars when he gingerly bounced on the moon’s surface in his chunky spacesuit in 1969 under the watch of an estimated 500 million television viewers.
After retiring from NASA in 1971, he taught aerospace engineering, served on the boards of several companies and worked at NASA headquarters.
