UPDATE: As a boy of 11 years old, I watched much of this in utter awe as many of you did on that Sunday in July, 1969. It is well worth watching again. I get choked up just watching.
America has just lost its most heroic son. I’m sad. It is doubly sad that America’s manned space program is also dead.
This poem, a favorite of pilots worldwide, seems the most appropriate:
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
– Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, No 412 squadron, RCAF, Killed 11 December 1941
Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who became first to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 11, has died. He was 82 years old.
He was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, on Aug. 5, 1930.
On July 20, 1969, half a billion people — a sixth of the world’s population at the time — watched a ghostly black-and-white television image as Armstrong backed down the ladder of the lunar landing ship Eagle, planted his left foot on the moon’s surface, and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Twenty minutes later his crewmate, Buzz Aldrin, joined him, and the world watched as the men spent the next two hours bounding around in the moon’s light gravity, taking rock samples, setting up experiments, and taking now-iconic photographs.
more; here: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/neil-armstrong-man-moon-dead/story?id=12325140#.UDkpQqAnBio
UPDATE: Andrew Revkin has an interesting backstory on the space race that I think is worth reading here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/the-cold-war-push-behind-neil-armstrongs-one-small-step/
Thanks to all for the lovely tributes, I’ve enjoyed reading how so many of you, like my family, stayed up to watch that iconic image unfold live (more or less) on TV. As I said on FB yesterday, we tend to picture our heros as everlastingly young and always at the peak of their great deeds, so it’s always a bit of a surprise when we are forced to accept that they age and die just as the rest of us do. It seems so wrong, but Neil Armstrong can rest easy knowing that the entire planet is where everyone knows his name.
(But I’ll bet he’s not resting, he’s exploring. :))
I stayed up, with my dad, to watch Neil and the team land on the Moon. We watched it on a small black-and-white TV, hearing every Houston command, with those iconic ‘beeps’! We were spellbound then, and I am still spellbound now.
Excellent choice of the poem “High Flight” by Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee to celebrate Neil Armstrong’s bravery, skill and dedication; and the >400,000 people who helped him and the crew do it.
Somehow there’s a simple and correct, straight-line connection between the Spitfire Pilot losing his life fighting Nazi tyranny, and the vision of human possibility that was the Moon landing, during the height of the Cold War fight with Soviet, and Communist tyrannies.
Neil, and the >400, 000 gave us hope, and showed what we could do in the free-market West. He is a hero, a humble and grounded one, who always acknowledged that he was the first man to land on the Moon, because of the devotion of a huge team of people who, with huge skill and drive, put him there.
Since then a number of sciences that functioned properly, when the Moon landing was being planned, have been perverted, hollowed out and stopped working. WUWT is one of the teams that lead the good fight against the perverted ‘sciences’ and cultural pessimism of our times.
I wish Anthony and the team, every power to your elbow, and today I salute Neil Armstrong.
A simple, nerdy (by his own admission) man who made the world hold its breath, and understand, with the right stuff, we could reach for the stars. He may be dead, but that hope can never die. God bless America.
Alexander Feht says:
August 26, 2012 at 12:48 am
Somehow this hits me harder than anything else lately. I don’t know, what to say. It’s like a large part of my life has gone into the abyss with Armstrong.
That is exactly how I feel Alexander.
Ozymandus says: August 26, 2012 at 5:57 am
As regards the conspiracy theorists I heard of an incident (possibly urban myth) where a journalist was handed a knuckle sandwich by one of the astronauts when asked for their opinion of the ‘fake’ theory some years later. Anyone know if it was true? Either way…good answer.
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That was Buzz Aldrin and it happened in Los Angeles in May 2006. He was accosted by a loon who was stalking him. Buzz and his family were exiting a restaurant when the guy stuck a microphone in Buzz’s face and called him a liar and a coward.The conspiracy theorist tried to sue but the judge threw the case out. I have talked to Buzz since then but that subject never came up.
A requium for a great ma, a great event and the apogee of the United States.
Watched the landing in the early hours on a black-and-white TV ‘over here’ in the UK.
For me then and now and forever, the most moving words were ‘The Eagle has landed’. Hard to describe the immense achievement to get the men there and back.
And then the famous words …
Yes, Neil Armstrong was a true hero, one of the very few.
Rest in peace.
Thanks to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins my son became interested in space and astronomy. When he was young we couldn’t drive south on I-75 without making the stop at the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Always worth the stop. Great little museum. My son also read and re-read Michael Collins book, “Carrying the Fire” until the book was worn out.
Today he is a professional astronomer. A professor of astronomy. Apollo 11 made all the difference in my son’s life.
Thanks Neil.
I remember vividly my dad getting us up early to watch the landing…
RIP
My birthday is early July in 1964. In ’69, I was given a very nice telescope that I didn’t really think much of until I watched the landing 3 weeks later. My mom said I was utterly fascinated. I went outside and for the first time and looked up because I wanted to see, not because I was told to. I have never stopped looking up since.
Thank you Neil.
Not just first on the Moon but the first human, ever and forever, to walk on another world, no matter what else the human race does in space, for the rest of its existence.
“My own conclusion from this study was that Neil Armstrong wasn’t selected for the first moon landing by accident. He was likely selected because he was the best at dealing with the unknown in the specialized environment of the lunar landings.”
It certainly does take the right kind of person to pull off such a mission. Firstly, he understood how the machine worked. These machines evolved on the backs of a team of hundreds of engineers, and he had to keep up with all the changes even up until shortly before launch, and understand how it all worked. That knowledge surely helps one remain cool in the face of 1201 alarms coming at a very critical time. But knowing the machine is not enough, and surely there was something really cool, and confident in the man’s character.
As for the 1201 alarms, it is my understanding that they were computer overloads caused by Buzz Aldrin’s failure to properly configure the landing radar system. That’s not talked about much though.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html
Dan in California says:
August 25, 2012 at 3:56 pm
“It is doubly sad that America’s manned space program is also dead.”
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I respectfully disagree.There may be no current US manned launchers, but to say the program is dead is misleading. NASA is spending a total of about 5% of its budget on three manned launch systems that plan to fly in the next few years. They are being built by Space-X, who have already docked a habitable module to the Space Station, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada. Boeing and SNC will use launch vehicles provided by United Launch Alliance. ULA currently launches all US military payloads to space, and many of NASA’s payloads. The Delta and Atlas launchers are owned and operated by ULA.
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SpaceX is really the only game in town with man-rating of Atlas a distant and darkhorse second. Let’s hope they get it right. Suborbital flights are irrelevant. That’s equivalent to jumping up in the air and claiming you’re eight feet tall.
Anthony’s quite right that our manned space program is dead or at least in a coma. What’s even more infuriating is that we wasted $90B on green energy. Just think of what we could have done with that money. And now we’ve lost Armstrong who was a quiet and noble champion of manned space exploration. A very sad day indeed.
Has anybody ever wondered what they monitored on those rows of ‘computer’ consoles at Mission Control in the late sixties?
Anyone wonder what the function was for the plethora of racks of equipment did at the remote transceive sites or at the KSC or Goldstone ‘dishes’?
What was the communications gear, what were the protocols used, and could the Space Flight center in Houston actually send remote commands, data or even programs to the Apollo Command/Guidance computer?
Well, this document has the answer and the ‘details’ on how this was accomplished:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-NASA-SP-87.html
It won’t be easy reading, unless you’ve got a wide, diverse background in communications and some familiarity with RF hardware (let alone ‘of the day’ ca. mid 60’s) … but if you have any curiosity at all how NASA handled comms, control, telemetry as well as distance measurement AKA ‘ranging’ the above document should give one a good idea how those things were achieved …
.
A child hood hero of mine, may you rest in peace Neil Armstrong.
Good night moon.
A sad day indeed. I’m with you Ric, our space program seems doomed. Another hero to me was John Parenti who worked for grumann and got Apollo 13 back safely.
This is my personal favorite….a video of the entire powered descent with communications between eagle and houston. There is no idiot media commentary to interrupt.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11Landing.mov
There is also a transcript, with some explanation of terminology and many other great materials at this link:
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11j.html
Are their any out there that, as I, doubt if men ever went to the moon?
Dan Kurt
Vale Neil Armstrong. Gentleman and scholar; adventurer.
Conscripted into the army at the time: while we were dressing for breakfast at Recruit Training Camp I alerted those in surrounding rooms to a radio across the hall telling us that the Eagle was about to land.
A few hours later they walked on a second celestial body, left their marks, and departed forever. Buzz Aldrin was, incidentally, the first man off the moon, but it was Neil’s stage.
We will not see the first of his kind again. History in a moment.
Love to see that flag, blowing in the lunar wind.
The poem High Flight is certainly appropriate. I offer as a complement this:
It’s the First World War (1914 – 1918) and aeroplanes are being used for the first time on a large scale, offering the opportunity to fly. Britain was involved in the war against Germany, but Ireland was not.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
W. B. Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
From: ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, 1919
‘A lonely impulse of delight’: perhaps an apt phrase for what Neil might have felt on stepping for the first time on the Moon (though he was a great team member).
While I’m at it, it’s worth remembering those astronauts / cosmonauts who died in this great enterprise:
“They are most rightly reputed valiant who perfectly understand what is dangerous and what is easy, but are not thereby diverted from adventuring”.
Pericles, Funeral Oration, in History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon.
Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev,
Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka.
These names will be written under other skies.
Ken McLeod
I got this in 2003 from http://www.edge.org, but can’t find the link now. And they have been: at least, a series of hills explored by the Mars rover Spirit have been named after the seven Columbia crew members.
Obama and Putin should rename The International Space Station ,The Gagurin Armstrong Space Station in their honour
( imagine the presige ,the idea came from a Climate Skeptic weblog site )
“It is doubly sad that America’s manned space program is also dead.”
I think reports of the death of America’s manned space program are greatly exaggerated.
Steve Tabor says:
August 26, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Love to see that flag, blowing in the lunar wind.
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I’m afraid not. Buzz Aldrin reported that it was blown over by the exhaust gases from the ascent stage of Eagle during the takeoff. It is also not visible from its shadow in the recent high resolution photos of the Apollo landing sites from the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter.
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-flags-apollo-sites-moon.html
There is also a brief comm in there with Columbia (the Command Module) at the 2:58 point when the steerable S-band antenna on Eagle ‘slews’ off of earth and the channel gets very noisy (there was no ‘squelch control’ on the FM voice channel on the Unified S-Band system … one can also hear ‘picket-fencing’ and several fades as any ham who has operated VHF/UHF FM can testify to …) when Houston/CapCom asks Columbia (CM) to pass a message to Eagle (LM):
“Columbia – Houston we’ve lost em .. tell’em to to go aft-omni will ya?” (a reference to switch to the ‘aft’ omni-directional antenna on the LM from the high-gain directional antenna)
Note also remarks by CapCom about “data dropouts” during those noisy audio segments, since the Unified S-Band system carries *both* the voice signals and Telemetry signals from the LM (and the CM as well, but on a different frequency of course).
Thanks for that link BTW.
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