Posted on 08/26/2012 10:36:50 AM PDT by moonshot925
A great American hero has died. RIP.
God Bless you Neil and rest in peace
To paraphrase Nixon's undelivered speech:
"He will be mourned by his family and friends; he will be mourned by his nation; he will be mourned by the people of the world; he will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send her sons into the unknown.
In his exploration, he stirred the people of the world to feel as one; to bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others followed him, and will surely find their way home, too. But this man was the first, and he will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."
I still have my Apollo 11 flight poster, that I won in a cub scout candy drive.
Who would have thought all these years later, we are still a one planet civilization. Robots are cool, but nothing like being there - as Neil and Buzz showed us all on July 20, 1969. They may have made the 1st “small step” but we failed to make the “great leap” to capitalize on their great accomplishment.
He was in my fraternity at Purdue a few years ahead of me.
RIP fellow Phi Delt.
Space ping
NBC “News” yesterday called him “Neil Young”.
I’m not kidding. Levels and levels of factcheckers, you know.
Yes I saw that and it confused me because John Young was the 9th man the walk on the moon. So at first I thought he died.
Thank you for some great pictures. But be warned. Your newbieness may come into question.
The Apollo astronauts are passing away from old age and we STILL don’t have a moon base. But we have wasted Trillions on useless Welfare programs.
Space is the future of Mankind but our leaders are blind to that fact.
I agree. It’s unfortunate we have to think like this.
Nice tribute.
Robots and unmanned space craft are more than cool.
They have made thousands of discoveries and in fact we will be going over the data revealed by unmanned spacecraft and remote controlled rovers for many, many years into the future. In fact, unmanned missions are going to where man is not even able to go at this point. They are invaluable.
Some of the rovers and unmanned spacecraft are basically reconnaissance missions for men. Others go and will go where man cannot.
Buzz Aldrin was selected for the first Apollo landing because he was far and away the most technically astute of all Apollo astronauts, with his advanced degrees in fields that a handful of human beings even had experience in -- namely his Doctorate of Astronautics from MIT, not to mention being third in his class at West Point graduating with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Plus, he had a war record in Korea and was a USAF aerial gunnery instructor. Honestly, top that.
Neil Armstrong was chosen because of all the Apollo astronauts, he was far and away the best pilot and had proven himself to be cool and steady in a crisis: In Korea serving with the Navy, his carrier-based jet was hit by anti-aircraft fire but he flew it back to friendly territory with three feet of one wingtip entirely missing. In civilian programs, he'd survived numerous near disasters by skillfully piloting his aircraft out of great danger.
Armstrong became a test pilot for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and had several close calls that by all rights could and probably should have killed him -- Once when part of a B-29 launch vehicle's wing was partially destroyed along with a catastrophic engine loss because of a misfired parasitical research aircraft attached to the B-29's wing. Other close calls were in the Bell X-1B and the frightening X-15 rocket plane, where in one mission it lost control at over 200,000 feet altitude while traveling at Mach 5.75. Armstrong piloted it back to base safely after going far off course, returning from the edge of space as an unpowered glider. Try to imagine.
His Gemini 8 mission with the Agena docking module was the first critical in-space system failure of a U.S. spacecraft which threatened the lives of the astronauts. Armstrong manually piloted his Gemini capsule out of a wildly uncontrolled spin that nearly caused the astronauts aboard to lose consciousness, then guided the spacecraft out of orbit into re-entry. In the Apollo program, he'd managed to eject from a 'Flying Bedstead' VTOL Lunar Landing Research Vehicle ('LRRV') before it crashed and exploded in an enormous fireball, the only injury to Armstrong was his bitten tongue.
The choice for Apollo 11 surface crew was settled by Aldrin's technical savvy where he was second to none in spaceflight academics, and Armstrong as the man who had skillfully demonstrated he was certainly the superior pilot in a field of America's finest lineup of pilots for his record of recovering splendidly from near catastrophic air and space disasters. Cool, calm, and professional in all cases where he very nearly lost his life. Many other astronauts and pilots who served with Neil Armstrong wrote personal accounts of him certainly being the best pilot they ever knew or flew with.
They were all heroes long before they ever landed on the Moon.
Nicely spelled out.
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