After successfully landing back on Earth, Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon, could not immediately go home, meet crowds or even hug his family. Instead, just days after returning from the most famous journey in human history, Armstrong spent his 39th birthday in quarantine.
On August 5, 1969, less than two weeks after Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific, Armstrong celebrated his birthday inside NASA's Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston. He, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were still being kept in biological isolation, along with the spacecraft and the lunar samples they had brought home.
