I remember watching the landing on that July night in 1969. And if you're old enough, you do too. We all watched it. We all were enthralled. And we were all so amazingly proud. Really, we would have never believed that we could actually put a man on the moon. Yet there we were.
But for many years, I wondered what the fuss was over him. After all, couldn’t any of the astronauts have done what he did? Didn’t he just happen to be in the right place at the right time?
In a word, no.
You see, Armstrong was in the second class of astronauts, chosen a few years after the original Mercury astronauts. And he was a different breed. He was a self-proclaimed engineer geek from the very beginning. Of course he was fearless, as all the astronauts were. But he was more than that. He was the quiet guy who knew how to do the proofs in high school math. He was the one student who could answer all the “why” questions in science. And he was the type of man who could calculate odds in his head when faced with an emergency. He didn’t just react, he thought through it all, analyzing all the choices, then picking the right one. And by all accounts, he did it better than anyone.
So when the lunar module was descending to the moon’s surface, it turns out they had overshot their landing site. And Armstrong realized that. Aldrin didn’t. The guys at mission control didn’t. But he did. As he was looking for a safe site to land, the communication officer at mission control was counting down the seconds till they ran out of fuel. When he got to zero, the lunar module would have to abort, even if it was 10 feet from the lunar surface. If not, they could land, but would not have enough fuel to get off the surface.
So what did Armstrong do? He hit the throttle. Hard. Like nobody had ever seen, in any simulation. Moving forward as fast as the spacecraft could go, burning up precious fuel, all the time listening to that countdown. Nobody knew what he was doing, or why. Yet, without hesitation, without consultation, and without panic, he maneuvered the lunar module forward to a safe landing, with almost no time remaining. Could other astronauts have done that? Maybe. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that, when it came to crunch time in the biggest flight in the history of aviation, with literally all the world watching, Neil Armstrong got it done.
Good-bye Neil. The world will miss you.
