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December 9, 2025 
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Remembering John Noble Wilford, 1933-2025
John Noble Wilford, who died on Monday, wrote arguably the most memorable story on the most famous New York Times front page of all time. It started, “Men have landed and walked on the moon.”
That was his succinct summary of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping on the lunar surface. I did not read that newspaper article at the time — I was not quite 4 years old — but I remember the Science Times section, which started in 1978. John was the science editor then. He didn’t really like that job, he once told me, and he went back to writing.
I read his articles about NASA’s Voyager spacecraft on their grand tour of the solar system. I read his stories about ancient fossils and long-ago civilizations. I remember an article he wrote about how radar flown on a space shuttle helped discover the lost city of Ubar in the Arabian desert.
John was still writing when I joined The Times in 2000. About a year later, Cory Dean, then the science editor, took me out to lunch to check in. “What would make things better?” she asked. “I want John Noble Wilford’s beats when he retires,” I told her.
Dinosaurs, planets, archaeology. What could be better? He described his beat as “long ago and far away.”
In 2011, for the landing of the last space shuttle mission, we both went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He got together with an old competitor — I believe it was George Alexander of The Los Angeles Times. It was like hanging out with the William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson of science reporters, listening to them reminisce about the good old days. (John was Shakespeare, of course.)
I wish I could have tapped his thoughts about NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to lift off in a couple of months. That mission will take astronauts around the moon, similar to Apollo 8, which he covered in 1968.
He retired a decade ago, and at the farewell party, Cory told a story about when Voyager 2 was about to reach Neptune in 1989. The flyby would occur before the print deadline, but none of the data would have reached Earth yet. Cory struggled to figure out how the story could be told in the past tense without knowing what had happened.
“John, no surprise, did not need any help from me,” she said on Monday. “A thing of real beauty that only John could have created.”
That article began, “Out in the twilight of the solar system, far from the warmth of the Sun and the vitality of Earth, Voyager 2 cruised over the cold blue clouds of Neptune tonight …”
The last time I saw John was in 2019. It was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
The Times had commissioned J.T. Rogers, best known as the playwright of “Oslo,” for a play about the moon landing. John was not only there in the audience for a dramatic reading of that play, “One Giant Leap.” He was also a character.
It’s a pinnacle few journalists reach.
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