John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times who covered America’s first moon landing a half-century ago with the zeal of a fellow space traveler stepping onto the powdery lunar surface alongside Neil Armstrong, 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 an awe-inspiring and 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.
“It was man’s first landing on another world,” he wrote, “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.”
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.”
Fifty years later, Mr. Wilford, in a Times video, recalled that night at NASA’s mission control center in Houston when he realized that he would perhaps never again experience such a moment. “I thought to myself, yes, this is the biggest story I will probably ever write in my career,” he said. “Unless of course, I am still around reporting when people discover other life in the universe.”
A Kentucky-born journalist who worked at The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine before joining The Times in late 1965, Mr. Wilford combined a passion for scholarship with a detective’s eye for detail and the literary skills of a master storyteller. His six-decade journalism career coincided with milestone discoveries in the mysteries of dinosaurs and early human life, and in space exploration.
In his first major assignment, on Dec. 15, 1965, Mr. Wilford won a Times in-house publisher’s award for coverage of a maneuver by four astronauts on two spacecraft, Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 — what he called “man’s first rendezvous in the vastness of outer space.” Crucial to any prospective moon landing, the mission demonstrated that two orbiting spacecraft could find each other, meet and probably link up.
“In a spectacular performance of space navigation, the astronauts brought their craft within six to 10 feet of each other about 185 miles above the Earth,” Mr. Wilford wrote. He added, “The crews came close enough to see into each other’s cabins, trade gibes and inspect details on the exteriors of their funnel-shaped spacecraft.” The Gemini 6 crew, peering into Gemini 7, could see Cmdr. James A. Lovell Jr.’s beard and could tell that Lt. Col. Frank Borman was chewing gum.
Mr. Wilford traveled widely as a correspondent. He flew through the eye of a hurricane for a story on cloud seeding, plunged into ocean depths in a research submersible, rode an astronaut-training centrifuge, operated lunar-landing and space shuttle simulators, joined a mapping party in the Grand Canyon, flew ice patrols over Greenland and Newfoundland, and ran rapids on the Colorado River.
In 1976, he covered an expedition to Scotland to explore the longstanding mystery of the Loch Ness monster. With sonar probes and underwater television cameras, the expedition, partly funded by The Times, scanned the murky depths of the 23-mile-long lake for a month, but turned up no trace of the creature, said in legend and in many unverified accounts of sightings to be an undulating serpent.
Mr. Wilford’s assignments led to several books, starting with “We Reach the Moon,” about America’s space program, from President John F. Kennedy’s commitment in 1961 to the success of Apollo 11. It was published 76 hours after the Pacific Ocean splashdown of Mr. Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, who had also walked on the moon, and Lt. Col. Michael Collins, who had remained in the orbital command ship.
Mr. Wilford’s other books include “The Mapmakers” (1981), about the history of surveying the Earth’s surface and ocean floors; “The Riddle of the Dinosaur” (1985); “Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space” (1990); and “The Mysterious History of Columbus: an Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy” (1991).
In 1984, Mr. Wilford won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles “conveying both the wonder and the reality of science,” including the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop weapons of war for outer space. He was also a member of a Times team that won a Pulitzer for national reporting in 1987 for coverage of the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
John Noble Wilford Jr. was born in Murray, Ky., on Oct. 4, 1933, one of two children of John Noble and Pauline (Hendricks) Wilford, who lived in Camden, Tenn. His father was a Methodist minister in Kentucky and Tennessee.
As a boy, John was interested in journalism, covering sports and writing a weekly column of high school news for The Parisian, a newspaper in Paris, Tenn.
After graduating from E.W. Grove High School in Paris in 1951, he attended Lambuth College in Jackson, Tenn., for a year before transferring to the University of Tennessee, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1955. He received a master’s degree in political science from Syracuse University in 1956 and joined The Wall Street Journal. But he soon took a leave for Army service, from 1957 to 1959, serving for a time in the Counter Intelligence Corps in West Germany.
Returning to The Journal, he covered medical research and the drug industry until 1962. After a year of political science studies at Columbia University on a Ford fellowship, Mr. Wilford joined Time as a contributing editor. In early 1965, he began writing for Time’s science section, producing cover stories on space exploration. He was soon hired by The Times for its own newly expanded science section.
In 1966, Mr. Wilford married Nancy Watts Paschall, a stage actress. She died in 2015. He had adopted her daughter from a previous marriage, Nona Paschall. Nona Paschall Wilford died in 2019.
In 2018, Mr. Wilford married Janet St. Amant, a former television actress. She survives him, in addition to his niece.
Mr. Wilford took a break from science writing at The Times from 1973 to 1974 to be an assistant national editor. In that role, he helped direct coverage of the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon that led to his resignation.
As the editor of the science news staff in 1978, Mr. Wilford was instrumental in creating the weekly section called Science Times.
In later years with The Times, he continued to write about breakthroughs in science, including the 2009 discovery in Africa of Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old fossil skeleton that predated “Lucy,” another crucial human ancestor, by more than a million years. Later, he reported on a 2013 finding that a rat-size creature with a long tail was most likely humankind’s common ancestor with other mammals.
A year after reaching the milestone of 50 years with The Times in 2015, Mr. Wilford saw his last front-page article published. It was the obituary, on Dec. 8, 2016, about John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, who went on to become a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate.
“In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962,” Mr. Wilford wrote of the former astronaut’s three-orbit adventure, “Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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