The Pillar of Fire
August 25th, 2012 - 3:54 pm
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012). Rest in Peace.
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“Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many Knots unravel’d by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate”
The Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam
May he rest in peace,
and with great honor.
I spent several days with him last year. A more gracious, self-effacing man you could not imagine. A real hero.
The Day Neil Armstrong Died
The Moon shone on the ocean like before:
Unmoved, a model of tranquility.
But you could tell the old girl was upset
From her behavior. Even in New Jersey,
You could make out one line of footprints high
Along the beach not swept out to sea.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
–Robert A Heinlein
We are made in the image of God.
Why do we crawl on a mudball with the ambitions and desires of rats?
Matthew, thank you for remembering, posting that. I wish you had posted all of it.
For our hero departed , Neil Armstrong, and all the men (and women) who have followed, to go where no man had gone before.
The Green Hills of Earth
Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.
We’ve tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet —
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
Robert A. Heinlein
Contrast his achievements and courage with that of Teddy Kennedy’s memorable late night drive at Chappaquidick on the same dates. It would have been a lot more memorable had the Apollo 11 coverage not been dominating the global news during those days.
So historic was the moment that my wife and I woke up the kids and sat them down with us on the living room sofa, to watch, in grainy black and white, the first man on the moon.
We Earthbound mortals, safe on shore
Watched signals from afar
Of men the world’s not seen before
Neil Armstrong raised the bar
The god Apollo had to smile
He knows what heroes are
And knowing, looked on all the while
Neil Armstrong raised the bar
eric/3
Very nice. Let’s here more from you.
Some events are so powerful you always remember where you were.
I was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a transistor radio.
Everyone knows of the first words spoken on the Lunar surface, but does anyone know of the last words Neil Armstrong spoke there, before he got back in the LEM?
It seems that as a child he was playing in his backyard one night and heard his next door neighbor’s wife say loudly, “Oral sex! That’ll happen when man walks on the Moon!”
So his last words were “And good luck, Mr. (next door neighbor’s name) wherever you are.”
A man who has the presence of mind and sense of humor to think of something like that under those circumstances is truly exceptional!
Only he and God could know what was felt. The rest of us can only wonder.
It only makes our objectives tiny by comparison. Truly, a man for the ages.
What a heroic figure.
““Oral sex! That’ll happen when man walks on the Moon!””
And it may come as a surprise to the young’uns, but in ’69, 69s and such weren’t much more common than men on the Moon, even with hippy chicks. That sort of stuff was almost the exclusive province of “professional talent.”
11. RWE
13. Art Chance
Youse guys beat me to it. Getting old and slow sucks.
Art, you have to convince them it’s birth control. Use the Alternative advance. Explain to them about the bucket method and offer them the choice. It does work better with blondes, which is not a bad thing. Had a redhead once choose both. I knew I was in trouble.
Armstrong was one ‘ell of a man. I hope a century from now he is remember for his accomplishments and not a joke.
Communion on the moon:
http://www.ericmetaxas.com/tag/aldrin/
I was working in a mineral exploration camp in the Brooks Range of Alaska, north of the arctic circle in 1969. We took the day off to listen to the moon landing on Voice of America on the shortwave radio. It was a remarkable day! We were all full of awe, pride, and relief when the crew safely landed on the moon. Will never forget that day for the rest of my life. And for a long time, looking at the moon was different than before. Rest in Peace, Neil Armstrong, a true American hero.
The descent of Curiosity recently to the Martian surface is recorded. What you’ll see in the Utube is not a simulation;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZX5GRPnd4U&feature=player_embedded
11. RWE
The “Mr Gorsky” urban legend is an amusing one, but not true. That, or NASA edited their transcripts. Neil Armstrong said he first heard the anecdote from a comedian.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.asp
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step.html
15. MMC
Thanks for the link to that story; I’d never heard it before.
David and Matthew.
Thank you for posting those verses. Tonight my wife and I were looking at a bright half moon. Somewhere on its surface Armstrong walked. Wonderful!
Was in Infantry OCS at Ft. Benning. As jr. candidates, we did not have tv privileges, or many other privileges either. But the cadre let us watch the landing.
Damn, we thought. Those guys are something.
Thanks for posting Heinlein’s anthem to Terra. Long time since I’ve seen that in its entirety. Mist-up time.
If you didn’t know what a man was supposed to do, you could read Heinlein’s juvies and watch the astronauts.
See, for example, “The Long Watch”, and who showed up in the bomb room.
Reposting the comment I left at Rand Simberg’s excellent tribute article:
I was 11 years old at the time of Apollo 11, and I was a space buff from early childhood. I remember playing hooky from school to watch Gemini launches, and I remember my mom waking me up late at night when Gemini 8 had to abort its mission and return home early. Armstrong also commanded that flight.
Neil Armstrong will be remembered centuries from now, after humanity has colonized the solar system. We are indeed fortunate to have lived during the same time he did.
I also feel fortunate to have lived during the dawn of the Space Age and to have witnessed so many momentous events. Today I’m very excited to see the next generation of space vehicles starting to take shape. When Dragon made its first flight to the ISS in May, I woke up at 3:00 AM on a work night to watch the launch, then took a vacation day to watch the grappling and berthing. I haven’t been so positively giddy over a space flight in a long, long time. It made me feel like a kid again. As I’m fond of saying, the Space Age is just starting to get interesting.
Godspeed, Neil Armstrong, and rest in peace. Thank you for everything.
Here’s a YouTube video of live TV coverage of the Apollo 11 launch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGNryrsT7OI
Even today that countdown has me on the edge of my seat.
I watched the landing in the unit Dayroom at Fort Hood. Shortly thereafter
I concluded that my inuries had healed enough for me to walk somewhat normally. That is when I put in for that thrid VN tour. Cuase and effect?
Just maybe.
Then at Christmas time that year, I was in the audience at Chu Lai for the Bob Hope Christmas show, the first of those I actually managed to see. When Neil Armostrong walked out on the stage the standing applause did not even begin to abate for almost 30 minutes. The most enthusiastic of all? The wounded in wheelchairs and on litters in the front row.
We know our heroes without having to be told.
An inspiration for untold millions.
Armstrong spurred my interest in Science and Space and I was ultimately able to work for NASA under a fellowship for many years and met a few of those that followed him into Space. I left the agency to pursue my career in the AF, but a twist of fate allowed me to command a TAL site in Istres before the end of the Shuttle Program. Neither would have happened without his influence from afar.
Thanks Richard and to all for posting their memories.
I was an E-4 at Camp Saint Barbara, Korea, HQ of I Corps Artillery, about seven miles from the DMZ, watching in the glorified quonset hut that was the EM rec center. I teach ESL at an American university. In one of my classes, ten Saudis and one Iraqi (actually a Kurd, and proud of it), I brought up the topic of man walking on the moon. One student said,”If it really happened.” I was surprised. I asked the class collectively, how many of you think that maybe it didn’t happen, that it was staged in Hollywood as the student suggested. They were polite and respectful to me, an older man and a teacher. Only one, the Kurd, said he is absolutely sure it happened. The others seemed not to believe that it happened. Disinformation works well and it’s too bad for those young Saudis, here in the US to attend graduate school.
I didn’t get to see the blast-off live – was in downtown Houston that morning taking my draft physical. Which I passed with flying colors.
Avid,
That anecdote in itself is, in microcosm, why Muslims are doomed to backwardness, ignorance and decline. There was a war waged long ago in Islam between science and theology. Science lost, conclusively. The same war was waged in Christendom. Science won, though it was a tough fight with a lot of retrograde movement. The ridiculous, provably wrong, things that supposedly modern people still believe in the 21st Century are just mind-boggling.
Google “fan death.” From personal experience, I absolutely guarantee you that most Koreans believe in it.
Godspeed, Mr. Armstrong. Say hello for us to Audie and Rick Rescorla.
mac @ 27:
It ain’t just the Muslims. I have otherwise competent Christian American friends who think it was faked. They also generally are Truthers and chem trailers. No accounting for tastes,as the old lady said as she kissed the cow.
I watched it at my college buddy’s house. He was going through AIT at Fort Ord and I was in cadre there. (Post Maintenance.)
I was picking him up to take him back North and we watched it with his family. Talked about it all the way back to Ord, going up 101. (No Interstate 5 back then.) We never expected that we’d stop at the Moon.
Re: fan death…We ran the big pedestal fans all night many nights in the barracks at Fort Benning back in the ‘Sixties. I suspect this was common practice in many places. Of course, we also had all the windows and doors open. / erc
Neil Armstrong an exceptional American Hero. The Definition of Hero; combat fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut , first man on the moon. The flag of his country and his boot prints in the lunar dust may outlast mankind; as it should. Go with God Neil Armstrong!
I recall one Saturday night in the mid-80′s in a Vandenberg launch pad blockhouse, working late, waiting for the spacecraft people to tell me they were ready to run a simulated terminal countdown, where I would play all of the speaking parts of the launch crew.
There was a row of monitors across the front of the control room, showing different TV views around the pad. The last monitor on the left was a color TV set, which was hooked up so that during slow periods they could plug regular TV in. That night they had a ballgame at Candlestick Park showing.
I looked up from the console and at each monitor and all looked normal until I got to the last one. The ballgame was over and the sportscasters there were just chatting, killing time. The guy at Candlestick Park with the video camera, having nothing to show but an empty field, zoomed in on the full Moon, so that it filled the screen, a beautiful shot.
And when my scan of the monitors reached that TV I was stunned. Finally I thought, “The Moon? Why do we have the Moon up on the monitor? This launch isn’t going to the Moon!”
But just for a second there, it looked so right.
By the way, I have not looked at these myself yet but they have been recommended to me
http://thebottomline.cpaaustralia.com.au/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-armstrong-talks-about-the-first-moon-walk
I guess I saw this on the black and white TV in my parent’s house that summer.
Five years earlier I believe I’d been gathered into the school auditorium to watch a Mercury astronaut launching and/or returning.
And I think that circa 1958 or 1959, my first-grade class was dragged into an auditorium to watch some launch or other.
So actually my memory of the moon landing was that it was somehow less of a societal landmark because the previous ones had been group observations and I sort of wondered at that at the time, and perhaps even today.
Did anyone dream that we would succeed at these for a year or two and then 40 years would go by with no repeats and no progress? Absolutely not, it was inconceivable.
28 @ erc rodson: What’s a ‘chem trailer’?
erc rodson, What about the theory that NASA didn’t stop with Apollo 17? It seems strange that a body smaller than our planet – also having no atmosphere to contend with and no privacy issues – hasn’t been mapped in greater detail than Google Earth. I say the lack of good moon maps proves that something is there.
I was one of the youngest engineers at Grumman (at age 20, likely THE youngest) when the Eagle landed and then began a perfect record of “returning them safely to the Earth”. Even the crew of Apollo 13 was “towed” safely home by a Grumman LEM!
Godspeed,Neil Armstrong!
Josh @ 31 Did anyone dream that we would succeed at these for a year or two and then 40 years would go by with no repeats and no progress? Absolutely not, it was inconceivable..
Of course, we did lead the development of the International Space Station in the meantime. The follow-on Orion capsule, whatever it is called under the present lackluster regime, has been moved to KSC to prepare for test launches.
Still, the organization that had so many past successes in human space flight seems hamstrung at snail pace.
You may recall that old saw about Lions being lead by a Lamb. We must do nothing to make certain fundamentalists groups realize their technical incompetence. Seems that group’s greatest contribution to aerospace is piloting planes into buildings.
I (we) missed it. While Neil and Buzz were exploring another world, my fiance (wife of 42 years) and I were exploring each other’s parts for the first time. I’m sure the moon’s stark beauty is lovely to behold, especially at Earthrise, but nothing before or since has surpassed the beauty I beheld in that quiet apartment while the rest of the world watched the broadcast of those heroic men.
jW @ 32:
Chem trailers are folks that believe that the contrails behind the wings of aircraft are not ice crystals formed by the low pressure area behind the trailing edge, but rather are chemicals being sprayed on the unsuspecting populace by unidentified persons of ill intent. Sometimes they speculate on who the responsible parties are.
Having seen contrails being formed many times on commercial and military flights going back to the ‘fifties, I ain’t buying it. I don’t doubt that commercial aircraft could be modified to act like giant crop dusters, but I don’t think this could happen without public knowledge.
I could have lumped in “Birthers”, but I think there is probably a grain of inconvenient truth in the birth certificate controversy and other undisclosed historical Obama documents.
I don’t think there is any doubt about the mechanism that brought down the Twin Towers, so I lump “Truthers” in with “chem trailers” as folks who are engaging in paranoid fantasies.
But, you pick the conspiracies you want to believe in and so will I and we can, hopefully, all just get along.
F @ 2 said:
“I spent several days with him last year. A more gracious, self-effacing man you could not imagine. A real hero.”
Neil Armstrong was another example of the god-like human beings who were part of the astronaut corp. A million years ago, I had the privilege as a teacher’s assistant of working with Neil Armstrong’s son, Mark Armstrong. Mark was almost a clone of his father, a really nice guy and one my brightest students. It disturbs me that god-like people like Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride are capable of growing old and dying. To be consistent they should be immortal and remain forever young.
ras743 @ 36,
For 15 minutes, you could have come up for air, watched the landing and then resumed.
I had the opportunity to watch the first launch of the Space Shuttle and also saw a Shuttle landing (STS-5). One of my life’s regrets is that I never saw the launch of a Saturn-V. People say the Saturn-V beat the pants off of the Shuttle in terms of launch spectacle.
Armstrong was a hell of a pilot. Not only did he land on the moon manually, he also saved an earlier Gemini mission. Iirc, the capsule he was in got into the space (RWE correct me here) equivalent of a flat spin but in three dimensions. Basically the thing was tumbling out of control. If they couldn’t get the capsule oriented so that the heat shield entered the atmosphere first, they would probably burn up. Armstrong used the very limited amount of fuel in the thrusters to stabilize the capsule. I remember this vividly since the network broke into a Batman episode to report this, and thousands of people called the network to complain.
This was just one of several instances where the flying experience of the astronauts, not to mention their titianium cojones, saved the mission. Von Braun wanted the astronauts to have NO control over the mission; the astronauts protested that this would make them ‘Spam in a can’ and not allow them to help when things go wrong. Von Braun was a smart guy, but he was wrong on this.
JWarrior #39:
From what I recall – my mission summary info is at the office – one of the usual thrusters on the Gemini started firing continually, putting the spacecraft into a high rpm spin. I believe that Armstrong’s pulse rate when this occurred was nice and normal while the other guy’s was over 150. That alone probably bought him the Moon landing.
The Gemini had finally done something very useful, plugged into an Agena and used its engine to increase the apogee. Prior attempts to do so failed when the Agena failed to reach orbit or the fairing did not come off of the Agena.
They had to detach from the Agena, shut off the normal RCS and then activate the re-entry RCS. Once they had done that, they had to re-enter before they ran out of propellant.
The mission featured an EVA. Imagine if it had spun up while the astronaut was floating out there.
They came down around the South China Sea. I recall yelling at the TV because the newspeople were saying that the rescue aircraft, an HU-16, was a helicopter. Actually it is a Grumman Albatross amphib.
By the way, a Gemini plugged into an Agena had considerably more apogee capability than the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle was the first manned spaccraft that could only boldly go only where men had been before. But the Gemini-Agena required flying backwards relative to the way the pilots faced and they ended up outfitting an airplane to do that just to see how weird it was. And this knowledge came in handy on Apollo 13 when they had to do much the same thing.
Yes, there was an ongoing argument to the effect that you needed to send people like geologists to the Moon rather than train test pilot/engineers to be geologists. And that was repeatedly proved to be a bad idea. As the Columbia accident investigation board said, each flight of a manned spacecraft is more like an X-15 test flight than a normal airplane flight.
The insistence of the Astronauts to be in control gave the US capabilities the Soviets did not have. But it also did the reverse; the USSR developed automated docking capabilities decades before we did, and that is more useful in the long run. And for Venturestar NASA was trying to figure out how to deal with a vehicle that was designed to be autonomous on a most missions but still have to respond to Astronaut pilots during manned missions. They figured there was no way that the astronauts were going to sit in the back and watch the inflight movie; they would want something to drive.
I was four years old at the time but remember the launch quite vividly. It is still the most incredible thing I have ever seen. I think it quite fitting that the video clip had no audio track. I have always thought that recorded audio did no justice to the actual experience of a Saturn V launch, even from the viewing stands 3 1/2 miles away.
Regarding Gemini 8, Dave Scott was in the right seat and to my undertstanding was a very cool customer himself. (On one occasion riding in an F-104B that lost power in a high L/D approach…had he attempted ejection once his vertical motion stopped at the moment of impact, he would have died due to twisted ejection seat rails. Mike Adams was in the rear seat and successfully ejected a split second before the J79 engine tore loose from its mountings and slammed forward into the rear cockpit.) This should only further highlight Armstrong’s almost superhuman abilities under pressure.
As long as humanity exists in the eons to come, through the solar system and perhaps to the stars beyond, you will never be forgotten.
Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.
RWE @ 40 said:
“I believe that Armstrong’s pulse rate when this occurred was nice and normal while the other guy’s was over 150.”
Neil Armstrong was well known for keeping his cool. Another example where Armstrong demonstrated this was with the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) or “flying bedstead”. The flying bedstead was intended to train astronauts to fly the lunar module and was incredibly dangerous to pilot. The LLTV that Neil Armstrong was training on, malfunctioned and he had to eject. A weaker pilot would have stuck with the vehicle too long and killed himself. Armstrong knew when it was time to leave. Oddly enough, Neil Armstrong did not have a stellar reputation amongst the other astronauts as a “stick and rudder” man. Michael Collins in his book “Carrying the Fire” repeated some of the negative comments that other astronauts made about Armstrong’s ability as a pilot. Keep in mind that these guys were all red-hot pilots with their abilities ranging from 99.999% perfect down to 99.99% perfect.
RWE also said:
“Yes, there was an ongoing argument to the effect that you needed to send people like geologists to the Moon rather than train test pilot/engineers to be geologists. And that was repeatedly proved to be a bad idea. As the Columbia accident investigation board said, each flight of a manned spacecraft is more like an X-15 test flight than a normal airplane flight.”
I’m glad they sent Harrison Schmitt to the Moon with Apollo 17. They needed to send at least one scientist to the Moon to maintain the fig leaf that the Apollo Program was about scientific exploration and not simply about waving the flag and proving that our private parts were bigger than the Soviets. I believe Dr. Schmitt did bring significant insight towards understanding lunar geology. Rumor has it that Gene Cernan was quite insistent that Harrison Schmitt keep his hands off the LM’s controls while Cernan landed the LM on the Moon. It’s a cute story and probably a myth.
RWE also said:
“The insistence of the Astronauts to be in control gave the US capabilities the Soviets did not have. But it also did the reverse; the USSR developed automated docking capabilities decades before we did, and that is more useful in the long run. And for Venturestar NASA was trying to figure out how to deal with a vehicle that was designed to be autonomous on a most missions but still have to respond to Astronaut pilots during manned missions. They figured there was no way that the astronauts were going to sit in the back and watch the inflight movie; they would want something to drive.”
IMHO, it’s a mistake not to allow an astronaut (or skilled pilot) the option of manual override. I’ve been poking around the software of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC). The LVDC controlled the Saturn-V stack from the S-IVb down to the S-Ic. Normally the LVDC controlled the entire ascent of the Saturn-V with the astronauts acting as passive passengers. However there was a sequence of commands that could be keyed into the AGC that enabled bypass of the LVDC and give manual control of the Saturn-V stack to the mission commander (presumably he could fly the entire stack with his control stick). Successful control through the stick would have been humanly impossible to achieve since the vehicle was very flexible and had fuel sloshing around in its tanks. Also in over-ride mode, the astronaut had no means of staging the lower stages. They only had manual control of staging the service module from the S-IVb. However it says something about the LVDC designer’s mind set, i.e. if the astronaut thinks he can fly the thing then he should be enabled to do so. Also, the astronauts had considerable latitude for manual over-ride during reentry. The Apollo Command Module (CM) pilot was presented with this real time plot of deceleration versus relative velocity. If the CM pilot chose to, he could assume manual control and fly the vehicle within pre-drawn contour lines on the real time plot through bank modulation via reaction control thruster burns. Imagine trying to do this: The pilot would be pulling about 6g inside a vehicle with a 10,000 deg.K plasma wrapped around it while trying to play this primitive video game. If the pilot screwed up, he would either be crushed like a bug due to over deceleration or skip out of the atmosphere to certain slow death. Those guys had amazing courage and skill.
I never met Armstrong. I did meet and chat with Buzz ALdrin, I also had dinner with the last man on the Moon, Harrison Schmitt. I also met the Moon’s only golfer, Alan Shepard, a wiry little man in a Navy white tux (I was wearing the standard “civilian” black one), at a Congressional affair honoring the Apollo astronauts.
I watched the launch of ’11 in my university’s student union, and watched the landing in my parents’ rec room. The highly ghosted images of Armstrong and Aldrin herky-jerking on the Lunar surface was surreal.
27. mac
What are those things that keep holding some of us back in the 21st century?
Is it this, as erc thinks:
28. erc rodson
It ain’t just the Muslims. I have otherwise competent Christian American friends who think it was faked. They also generally are Truthers and chem trailers.
I watched the landing in Caracas, Venezuela. For this historic event Venezuelan television broadcast the American television satellite feed directly. So, instead of Spanish-language commentary, we got the American broadcast version in English. That was the only time that ever happened that I know of. Everyone knew that we were watching history, and acted accordingly. I read newspaper reports later that the Soviets and the Chinese broadcast the moonwalk to their populations. Some things are even bigger than politics.