Some twenty years after the one small step of 1969, NASA flight director Chris Kraft revealed that his agency had wanted one particular astronaut for the honor because “The first man on the moon would be a legend, an American hero beyond Lucky Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor. It should be Neil Armstrong.”
As a figure in aviation history, only Lindbergh and the Wright brothers share the stature of Armstrong. He was a test pilot’s test pilot, an aeronautical engineer’s aeronautical engineer, and a loner’s loner, who baffled writers and journalists—not to mention his own colleagues—for over four decades. Described variously as intense, aloof, enigmatic, impassive, and unknowable even by the people who know him, he was, all at the same time, cool and aggressive, egg-headed and hard-nosed, both a fighter pilot and a physics professor. His Apollo 11 colleague Michael Collins said that Neil “never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly. I like him, but I don’t know what to make of him, or how to get to know him better. He doesn’t seem willing to meet anyone halfway.”
In a February 22, 2000 speech to the National Press Club, Neil Armstrong tried to explain himself: “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. . . . [Arthur C. Clarke’s] third law seems particularly apt today: Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic. Truly, it has been a magical century.” And Armstrong himself was a key figure in engineering that magic. Along with John Glenn, he showed the world a new style of American hero, combining the grace under pressure of test pilots with the bravery of explorers in a new frontier.
If NASA wanted a Lindbergh in the role, however, they may have gotten too much of one; for after his legendary achievement, Armstrong seemed to vanish from the world, struggling with the question: What do you do after you’ve been to the Moon? Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell: “Sometimes I chastise Neil for being too Lindbergh-like. … And Neil’s answer to that is, ‘I’d be harassed all the time if I weren’t reclusive.’ And he’s probably right.” Others, however, have a different opinion; astronaut Gene Cernan: “I’d just like to say, it could have been anyone who walked [first] on the moon: it could have been Neil, it could have been Buzz, it could have been Wally [Schirra], it could have been any one of our colleagues. But I don’t think any one of us—any one of us—who would have had that opportunity, could have handled it with as great and as honorable dignity as Neil Armstrong has handled the responsibility of being the first human being to step foot on the surface of the moon.”
Grace. Bravery. Honor. Dignity. All in a man who took a slide rule with him when he went to the Moon. Could there be a better hero for our time?
(Credit: Craig Nelson, Wall Street Journal)
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