Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon, thinks humanity should stop neglecting the space environment much closer to Earth. The United States dropped most of its test flights in the stratosphere and suborbital space after figuring out how to send humans to low Earth orbit and the Moon, said Armstrong, who stepped onto the lunar surface during NASA's Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. He thinks it is time for that to change. "In the suborbital area, there are a lot of things to be done," Armstrong said Feb. 27 during a presentation at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, Calif. "This is an area that has been essentially absent for about four decades, since the X-15 finished its job."
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