Enter the words Neil Armstrong into a Google search and you’ll turn up 37 million results, including countless tributes on his 2012 passing and to the feature movie, where Ryan Gosling played the First Man stepping onto the lunar surface.

But Armstrong and his module pilot Buzz Aldrin weren’t the first to fly to the moon.

Seven months before, a U.S. crew carried that off in a Christmas space spectacular led by astronaut Frank Borman, who died Tuesday to remarkably little notice for what was perhaps the bigger achievement.

When Armstrong, Aldrin and command pilot Michael Collins left Earth in July 1969, their Apollo moonship design had already made two manned trips out and back to the lonely satellite. That wasn’t the case when Borman and his crewmates, Jim Lovell and William Anders, fired their engine from low earth orbit on Dec. 21, 1968, starting a 239,000-mile journey that had never been made before.

The first moon mission, which climaxed Christmas Eve when Apollo 8 slowed into lunar orbit, was a deciding moment in the contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land and return an astronaut. The world had followed the U.S. effort in detail, including the tragic launchpad fire aboard Apollo One that set the program back by more than a year. But the Russian endeavor was mired in secrecy – and there was widespread fear they might pull it off first.

When a redesigned Apollo craft was tested in October 1968, the logical next step was a flight into low earth orbit to bring along the Lunar Module landing craft, so it could be tested in space. But NASA engineers decided not to take a chance on a Russian surprise, and opted instead for a trans-lunar flight that would test the most dangerous moments of a moon trip – burning the engines to leave earth, slowing into lunar orbit, and firing the rocket for a return home.

That happened Christmas Day, 1969, when Borman and his crew rounded from the backside of the moon to announce, “There is a Santa Claus” — that the engine had fired and they were on their way home. They returned with the most famous of all space photos showing a tiny earth rising over the moon’s barren surface, and then stepped onto the cover of Time Magazine as 1968 “Men of the Year.”

None of this achieved enough recognition last week, when wire services and even NASA itself offered scaled-down notices of Borman’s passing, spending almost as much time talking about his years guiding Eastern Airlines as on the moment when America proved that its technologies would win the race to the moon.