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

John Noble Wilford, the long-serving science reporter for The New York Times who covered humanity's first moon landing in 1969 and later won a Pulitzer Prize, has died at the age of 92. His niece, Susan Tremblay, told The Times that Wilford died of prostate cancer at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Reporting the Moon Landing

Wilford's byline appeared in The New York Times the day after Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon in July 1969 as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Filed from NASA's mission control center in Houston, his dispatch captured the magnitude of the event and the atmosphere among those who watched history unfold.

"It was man's first landing on another world, the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination," Wilford wrote.

He added: "The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man's reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring."

The New York Times' next-day headline — "MEN WALK ON MOON" — and the dek, "ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN: COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG," reflected the enormity of the achievement that Wilford described so vividly.

A Storied Career

Wilford joined The New York Times in 1965 after beginning his journalism career at The Wall Street Journal. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee and a master's degree in political science from Syracuse University.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1984; the committee praised his work for "conveying both the wonder and the reality of science." He was also part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer in 1987 for coverage of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

After five decades with the paper, his final front-page byline came in 2016 with the obituary of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

Curiosity Beyond Space

Wilford's curiosity extended beyond traditional science reporting. In 1976 he traveled to Scotland as part of a month-long expedition to search Loch Ness with sonar probes and underwater television cameras. The search found no evidence of unknown creatures, and Wilford reported on the expedition's cautious, skeptical approach.

"Expedition leaders concede that the search for bones of any creature is a long shot. No one has ever seen or heard of any in the loch," he observed, noting the limits of evidence and the challenges of recovery even if traces were found.

Reflections

Fifty years after Apollo 11, Wilford told The Times he considered that assignment "the biggest story I will probably ever write in my career," adding with a characteristic mixture of wonder and wry optimism, "Unless, of course, I am still around reporting when people discover other life in the universe."

This obituary draws on reporting by The New York Times and originally appeared in Men's Journal on Dec. 9, 2025.