Childhood heroes are usually pop stars and footballers, but growing up in the late 60s and early 70s we also had the Apollo astronauts to idolize, actual heroes who performed amazing, courageous feats that really mattered — unlike Marc Bolan and Peter Osgood. To us they were real-life versions of Captain Kirk, Scott Tracy, and our Major Matt toys. They looked so cool in those white spacesuits, blasting into space (space! outer space!) aboard the gigantic, beautiful Saturn V rocket (which I had an Airfix model of). When I lived in Florida I visited Kennedy Space Centre and seeing things like the Lunar Module made me feel like a thrilled little kid again. Great though it was, seeing the Space Shuttle never excited me like that.
The death of Neil Armstrong has brought a lot of those memories back and reminded me what a big deal it all was at the time. I watched all the Apollo missions on TV from lift-off to splashdown (with James Burke and Patrick Moore on the BBC), seeing the first moon landing in my pajamas as Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface at four in the morning our time. I think I went to bed for a few hours and my mum set her alarm to wake us up for the big moment.
To us kids the Apollo missions seemed to promise that the future might be like the one we saw in Gerry Anderson TV shows, and that by the time we were adults we’d be living on the moon. Little did we know that when Apollo 17 left the moon in 1972 we wouldn’t go back again, so the moonbase we dreamt about never happened — not to mention the jetpacks and flying cars.
All the obituaries will use the word “immortal” to describe Armstrong’s place in history and I think some part of me thought he literally was, because even though he was getting on a bit his death still shocked me, as if I was surprised that such a legend would just kick the bucket like the rest of us boringly do and not ascend to Valhalla on the back of a giant, flaming bird or something. Seven-year-old me would have expected nothing less.
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Beautifully put.
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Like. I wish I’d been old enough to see the moon landings. It would have blown my mind. It blows my mind even now! Going to the moon using a computer that would now seem underpowered in an average saloon car! Have you seen the Taschen book ‘Moonfire’. Amazing. Worth every penny (cent), even if you have to do a bit of weights practice to get it off the coffee table!
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I suspect a part of all of us died along with Mr Armstrong.
There’s few names from our lifetime who will still be remembered in a hundred/500/1000 years time.
Let’s hope he’s made the giant leap from mere mortal into ethereal immortality. Why don’t they do another trip and scatter his ashes on the Sea Of Tranquility. (Just next to the friggin Starbucks).
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Each time one of them dies I’m momentarily shocked at how old ex-astronauts are, as if they should be especially immune from the process.
Incidentally Sir Patrick Moore is still going strong on “The Sky At Night” once a month.He can now claim to have met the first man on the moon,the first in space and the first to fly and outlived all three.That too disconcerts me in regard to the passage of time, pace of change etc.
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My late grandmother claimed moon landings were all done in a studio somewhere in midwest USA ! Talk about spoil it for a 10 year old.
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Lee, thanks for the thoughtful and somehow more meaningful send-up of Neil Armstrong.
The comedian Robert Klein once did a bit using Armstrong as the gold standard for integrity because of what he didn’t do when stepping on the moon, great for a laugh. About two minutes into the file.
http://archive.org/details/robert_klein_mind_over_matter
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I always liked Eddie Izzard’s bit about Armstrong stepping off the ladder and saying “That’s one small step for a man, one… AAAAAHHH IT’S A MONSTER!!!”
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