Recently the nation mourned the passing of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon. I was ten years old on July 20, 1969 when Neil stepped out of the LEM and stood on the moon. Who cannot feel emotional when we see this, and hear Walter Cronkite say "....Neil Armstrong, 38 year old American, standing on the face of the moon..." Wow. He stood on the moon, looked at his home a quarter of a million miles away, and said something about one small step....
As a kid, I watched this, thought it was cool, and then went back to my comic books, bike, and those things that ten year olds do. It was only later, much later, as an adult, that I began to have a real appreciation for Mr. Armstrong. Not for stepping out on the moon, uttering an historic phrase, planting a flag, gathering some rocks and then blasting off back home. Sure, cool stuff. What made him a hero, a real hero to me, is something else.
Neil Armstrong knew how to hang in there. He could wait until the last second until making a life or death decision. In a training exercise, the LEM trainer went out of control, but he hung in until the last possible second before ejecting out. The trainer crashed, he survived, and flew to the moon. As the mission commander, it was his job to pilot the LEM to the surface of the moon with Buzz Aldrin. As Neil and Buzz were descending, there was a glitch, so the LEM had to be landed manually. Neil guided the spacecraft to a landing spot in the Sea of Tranquility with only a few seconds worth of fuel left. Now we're not talking running around in the Hyundai with the gauge on E. This is serious stuff. Run out of gas on the moon and life gets real pretty quick. The alternative is to abort, fly back into orbit, hook up with the command module and go home. No moon, no historic words, no flag, no rocks. No parade when you get home. No high schools named after you. Well, you get the point. I'm pretty sure Neil was not doing this because he wanted a high school named after him. He was a pilot. Moreover, he was a test pilot. He loved to fly. By some stroke of luck, NASA picked him to be the first on the moon. Probably because someone knew that he could hang in there, not panic, make the call, and do the job.
That's why he was a hero to me. Not for doing the glamorous thing, but for doing something only a very few can do. Stay calm. Process information. Trust your intuition. Make the call. Do your job. He set an example for me. I don't think I will be flying to the moon or testing the latest suborbital space plane, but I do make decisions every day. I try to live by Neil's example and not panic, process the information, trust my intuition, and make the call.
Rest in peace Neil. I hope that I will live to see someone like you step out on the planet Mars one day. Why? Because like you, it will capture the imagination of an entire generation, and because we can.
