Neil Armstrong: A Great American, One of Many
When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, I was minus-19 years old. But even though I caught Space Race fever decades too late, I caught it hard. I used to moonwalk during playtime, the non-Michael Jackson variety. I stockpiled enough LEGO space sets until I could cobble together a halfway-decent Apollo command module. It goes without saying that he was a hero of mine. But in my old(er) age, and especially on the occasion of the man’s passing, it feels reasonable to wonder: While Neil Armstrong was one of the most recognizable names of the 20th century, it is harder to explain what, exactly, it is he did to deserve that fame. And you know what? Maybe he doesn’t. Neil Armstrong was only one of many players in the greatest, most beautifully aspirational enterprise mankind has ever attempted. And, as I like to imagine he’d be the first to tell you, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Neil Armstrong was famous for, in ascending order, a eight-day spaceflight, a ten-minute landing, one sentence, and a single boot print. The degree of difficulty, however, was more likely the other way around. Only the layout of the lunar module, with Neil closest to the hatch, dictated that he go first. Nor was the crew of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins the NASA A-team, preordained to take the immortal mission; in the rotating pool of program astronauts, they could have easily gone on Apollo 8, or 12. Armstrong was certainly a immensely talented test pilot-turned-astronaut, but so were the dozens of other elite individuals who participated in all the perilous spaceflights before and after his historic one.* And let us not forget that the mission’s success did not owe itself to him, any more than it did to the thousands upon thousands of brilliant men and women, from civilian engineers to Mission Control, charged with sending an American to the moon. Thus, you could call him a lucky son of a gun, the beneficiary of an impossibly small window of historical opportunity…but who among the renowned isn’t? Neil Armstrong was the right man, in the right place at the right time. He didn’t ask for fame, all he did was his job; humanity’s eternal love affair with individual will and heroism did the rest. His really was one small step for [a] man—but when you dig deep into the details, aren’t they all?
Mr. Armstrong the earthbound citizen was very private and avoided celebrity in his post-Apollo years, never hawking Omegas or doing cameos in Transformers like his lunar module colleague. Surely, the rest of the Internet is springing to action as we speak, preparing all manner of obituaries and tributes (and photo slideshows and Tumblr posts), to be published before the man’s body is lowered into the earth he from which he so bravely ventured. Many of these will surely lean on hyperbole, and, cynically, feign some sudden personal affection for a man who for most of us has only ever existed on the staid pages of history books. I, for one, am content to celebrate a man whose life’s accomplishments, however sliced, loom larger than most of us could ever dream for ourselves. Given his privacy it is hard to know, but I hope he led a good, quiet life, in the many years since the Cold War raged, and space a was battlefield, and the mass of human machinations conspired to turn a self-described “nerdy engineer” into a bona-fide, ticker-tape American hero. Most selfishly, I’m glad he saw the future he helped build, at least enough for this late-coming astro-nut to humbly write of his everlasting adulation. Thank you, Mr. Armstrong, for doing your part. It was a doozie.
* This includes Armstrong himself, who had his most frightening moment during Gemini 8, when his capsule spun wildly out of control during the first-ever docking between two spacecraft.
