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/
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Dan In California
Thanks for details of the knuckle sandwich incident. I didn’t know the loon subsequently tried to sue. I’ve since found a couple of vids of it. The guy calls him a coward & a liar. Djeez. Its a wonder everybody else didnt punch him too. Buzz is a ‘lefty’ it seems.
Dan Kurt
Maybe I’m having a bad brain day but your post reads to me as if you actually DO doubt that we ever went to the moon? I’m having a John McEnroe moment here.
Some 350 years before Neil Armstrong made the giant leap, Johannes Kepler wrote a short story (with lots of footnotes) about a voyage to the moon. So as not to offend the thought police of the times, the moon voyage was disguised as a dream, and the novel’s title was “Somnium”. Kepler is better known for his science, including his fundamental discovery of mathematical rules that govern the universe (specifically, planetary motion), which led to Newton’s universal laws of gravity, which in turn allowed us to plot Armstrong’s path to the moon. Although presented as a dream, Kepler’s footnotes in the Somnium described much of the science behind the voyage, including details such as the cross-over from Earth’s gravity to the moon’s. Remember Apollo 11 crossing that point and beginning its fall towards the moon? That’s when Apollo had truly left its home planet.
Carl Sagan nicely wove together the stories of Kepler and Apollo in the third episode of Cosmos, titled “The Harmony of the Worlds”. The entire episode is posted at:
http://www.discovery-enterprise.com/2010/07/carl-sagans-cosmos-harmony-of-worlds.html
If you’re short on time, the part about the Somnium starts at 52:50.
At 54:37, Kepler looks down at his feet and sees Armstrong’s footprint on the moon.
Kepler had the dream, and Neil made it come true.
where is the flag’s shadow?
A coworker sent this to me, I don’t think I’ve seen it before. I won’t post the whole letter, just the introduction. Please follow the link to read the full letter, what Dr. Stuhlinger wrote 40 years ago still applies today.
http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/
Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. At the time Dr. Stuhlinger was Associate Director for Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. Touched by Sister Mary’s concern and sincerity, his beliefs about the value of space exploration were expressed in his reply to Sister Mary. It remains, more than four decades later, an eloquent statement of the value of the space exploration endeavor. Born in Germany in 1913, Dr. Stuhlinger received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tuebingen in 1936. He was a member of the German rocket development team at Peenemünde, and came to the United States in 1946 to work for the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. He moved to Huntsville in 1950 and continued working for the Army at Redstone Arsenal until the Marshall Space Flight Center was formed in 1960. Dr. Stuhlinger received numerous awards and widespread recognition for his research in propulsion. He received the Exceptional Civilian Service Award for his part in launching of Explorer 1, America’s first Earth satellite.
crucilandia, the whole thing about shadows has been explained many times
if you go here
http://www.clavius.org
with an open mind,
you’ll get your answers
For a site of scientific scepticism, your blind faith in veracity of the Apollo program is surprising. To believe that Armstrong & Co landed the untested lunar module safely, blasted off in the same untested module, docked safely, made the quarter million mile journey back to Earth, splashed down perfectly – it’s like an unending series of Mannian hockey sticks! Not to mention the flawless photos, including shadows at 90 degree angles to each other, not a single shot of stars, an Earth that’s too small, secondary lights, and so on. There are so many anomalies that you need to believe in space fairies to swallow this tale. For an amusing but insightful survey of the saga, read the Wagging the Moondoggie series here: http://davesweb.cnchost.com/Apollo3.html.
Humanist,
The ability of more than one person to keep a secret falls off with the cube of the number of people privy to the secret.
I just made that up, but how would you explain the literally thousands of people involved with the Apollo program, who would have had to keep it a secret that Apollo 11 never went to the moon? And those thousands of people would have had to keep it a secret for the past 44 years.
Believing the moon landing was a hoax is the mother of all conspiracy theories.
And what about all the subsequent moon missions, with tens of thousands of NASA employees, subcontractors, and the military involved? Were they a hoax, too? ☺
I respect the right of people to think it was faked, regardless of how wrong I think they are, but lets not get off topic here.
This thread is about the passing of Neil Armstrong. Claiming the moon missions were faked in here means you are effectively calling Neil Armstrong a charlatan in a book of rememberance.
Sorry to butt in, but in this thread there was a question by some person (I can’t remember his name) who asked if anyone here doubted the Apollo landings were real, and I sent a reply starting with ‘Nope, not me anyway’ or something similar. But I can’t find it on the thread as presented now. What happened?
Was it because I used the word ‘crap’ to refer to the ideas of the people who deny the Moon landings happened?