John Noble Wilford, New York Times Science Reporter Who Covered Apollo 11, Dies at 92

John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter for The New York Times who chronicled America’s first moon landing, died on Monday at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 92. His niece, Susan Tremblay, said the cause was prostate cancer. Under the front-page banner headline “MEN WALK ON MOON,” with a Houston dateline of July 21, 1969, Mr.

Wilford gave readers a comprehensive account of Apollo 11’s gentle touchdown and exploratory mission on the moon’s arid Sea of Tranquillity after a 230,000-mile voyage from Earth. In that article he wrote, “The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach,” and later recalled in a Times video, “I thought to myself, yes, this is the biggest story I will probably ever write in my career.” Born on Oct.

4, 1933, in Murray, Ky., Mr. Wilford worked at The Wall Street Journal and Time before joining The Times in late 1965. His first major assignment for The Times — coverage of the Dec. 15, 1965, Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 rendezvous — won a Times in-house publisher’s award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1984 for articles “conveying both the wonder and the reality of science,” and was part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer in 1987 for coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion.

Mr.

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Science, John Noble Wilford, Nasa, Pulitzer Prize, Charlottesville