




He had an engineer’s reserve, mixed with a natural shyness. Even among the other astronauts, not renowned for their excitability, Armstrong was known as the “Ice Commander”. Mike Collins, one of Armstrong’s crew-mates on the historic moon mission, liked his commander but mused that “Neil never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly.” In one famous incident, Armstrong lost control of an unwieldy contraption nicknamed the “Flying Bedstead” that was designed to help astronauts train for the lunar landing. Ejecting only seconds before his craft hit the ground and exploded, Armstrong dusted himself off and coolly went back to his office for the rest of the day, presumably to finish up some paperwork.

That unflappability served him well during the lunar landing. The original landing area turned out to be full of large boulders, and so Armstrong had to take control from his spacecraft’s primitive computer and skim across the lunar surface by hand, looking for somewhere suitable to set down. By the time he found his spot, there was only 25 seconds of fuel left in the tanks.

It served him well back on Earth, too. The astronauts knew from the experiences of their predecessors on the Mercury and Gemini flights that their trip would transform them into celebrities. But theirs was the biggest achievement yet, and none were prepared for the adulation that awaited them. Puzzlingly for the pragmatic spacemen, their trip to the moon seemed to have elevated them to the status of oracles, and people pressed them for their thoughts on everything from religion to the future of the human species and the chances for world peace.

Unlike some of his fellow astronauts (two of whom became senators), Armstrong chose a comparatively quiet retirement, teaching engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He returned to NASA twice, both times to serve on boards of enquiry, the first into the near-disaster of Apollo 13, and the second into the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. He spent his final years on his farm in rural Ohio, flying gliders in his spare time (it was, said the supposedly emotionless engineer, the closest humans could come to being birds).

For all mankind
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.

Nevertheless, it is one of the few events of the 20th century that stands any chance of being widely remembered in the 30th. Despite its origins in Cold War paranoia and nationalist rivalry, Mike Collins recalls in interviews a brief moment of global unity: “People, instead of saying ‘you Americans did it’, they said ‘we—people—did it’. I thought that was a wonderful thing. Ephemeral, but wonderful.”


As for the man himself, his reserve was not limitless. One of the most famous photos of Armstrong shows the Ice Commander in the Lunar Module after he and Buzz Aldrin had completed their historic walk on the moon’s surface. He is dressed in his space-suit, sports a three-day beard and is clearly exhausted. And on his face is plastered a grin of purest exhilaration.

(Picture credit: NASA)