Community Corner

Starwatch: Remembering Neil Armstrong

Celebrating a 'reluctant hero.'

By Gary A. Becker

StarWatch 882 for the week of July 14, 2013

I think everybody has a hero or someone they admire or aspire to emulate.  One of mine was Neil A. Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon.  

Neil unfortunately passed away last Aug. 25 at the age of 82.  I just finished James R. Hansen’s authorized biography of Armstrong, "First Man," which filled in a number of gaps and some misinformation I had about the reluctant hero, whose first small step onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969 forever changed his life and people’s perspective of the cosmos.  

“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”  This soft spoken and controlled human being, who paused to consider almost everything he said, forgot to say the “a” in that sentence.  Without it, the words are redundant and make no sense, and although Armstrong insisted that the “a” was voiced, detailed audio analysis of that communication failed to reveal it.    

When were those words conceived in Armstrong’s mind? Hansen gives a credible argument that it probably didn’t happen until Armstrong had actually brought the Eagle safely down onto the lunar surface. There was no need to give it any serious consideration, according to Armstrong, until the landing had actually occurred, because Neil thought in his mind that the chances of accomplishing this feat were about 50/50.  

He gave the mission an overall 90 percent probability of successfully returning to Earth. Neil wasn’t even concerned about whether he or his partner, Buzz Aldrin, would be the first to walk. 

It was all about successfully landing the Eagle

Buzz, on the other hand, lobbied hard for that first step, but in the end NASA administrators unanimously chose Armstrong as the better person to represent humanity’s first explorer to set foot on another world.  For Neil’s sake, kindly remember the “a” in “…one small step…”  That was something he really wanted the world to know.

© Gary A. Becker—www.astronomy.org

Moravian College Astronomy


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