RIP Neil Armstrong

And all along I thought William Shatner was the first Canuckistani in space!

 

Damn. RIP. one small step and all that. I remember he punched a guy out a couple years back for insinuating the moon landing was faked. (of course it wasn't, we just realized there was no cheese).

 

My friend posted a link to that on FB, not ironically or pointing out the error, but the link said "Neil Young."When I clicked on it, they had fixed the headline.

 

who's been higher? young or armstrong?

 

RIP. Until today, there was probably not a human alive who had achieved such a monumental distinction.

 

Too bad Nick Van Exel and Corey Blount probably did not take full advantage of having Armstrong as a resource in engineering school.

 

That was Buzz Aldrin, who has had his moments in the stratosphere (without a vehicle) who deep-sixed the imbecile conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel.

 

Pretty sure every NW Ohio schoolboy and schoolgirl made a trip here:

 

I remember that night vividly. I was 20, came home from a date, went down to our family rec room and watched the landing with my parents. None of us said anything. We were, as the Brits say, gobsmacked.

Nice piece in the Economist today. Armstrong was to the end a classy guy who never wanted to exploit his achievement

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/08/obituary?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/neilarmstrong

And given the United States present political climate, this is an apt observation:

Half a century after the event, with the deaths of many of its participants, the Apollo project is beginning to fade from living memory and pass into the history books. It was one of the mightiest achievements of the potent combination of big government and big science; in many ways the apotheosis of the post-war American political consensus. Viewed from an age in which America’s government aspires to smallness and in which grand projects are regarded with suspicion, it seems more alien with every passing year.

 

So true. I was born seven years after this happened, but what a huge deal this was. My parents ate this stuff up then (probably because my father had just completed his tour in the Air Force). They saved a bunch of newspapers from this time period, a ton of magazines and my parents wrote a letter to Walter Cronkite thanking him for his coverage (to which he responded with a letter in kind and signed his name, which I love). I only wish I could have been alive for this period because to have it be so new, so fresh, really must have been a proud moment.

 

Incredible drama, especially with Apollo 11 and then later with Apollo 13.