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Neil Armstrong 1930-2012: modesty on the moon

Neil Armstrong never milked his historic step for personal or chauvinistic applause and never became a celebrity




Neil Armstrong

Shortly before Neil Armstrong stepped out of obscurity and on to the Sea of Tranquillity to become one of the most famous people of all time, he was asked why humans were planning to go to the moon. "I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges," Armstrong replied, in arguably the second most famous words he ever uttered. "It's in the nature of his deep inner soul. We're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream."

It was a fine answer, and it was characteristic of the fine man who died this weekend, 43 summers after he became the first man ever to set foot on the moon. But it was not the full story. Neil Armstrong owed his fame not merely to the dauntless human spirit which he himself hymned and which President Kennedy also invoked in September 1962 when he promised that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of that decade.

He also owed it to Kennedy's stark and more private comment after Yuri Gagarin made the first successful manned space flight in 1961 that if America did not respond quickly, "the first man on the moon will be called Ivan".

Armstrong's voyage to the moon in 1969 was a staggering technological achievement, and involved unimaginable levels of trust. His conduct of the Apollo 11 mission was also as cool as it was brave. But it was at least as much the product of superpower political rivalry as of the absolute quest for adventure and knowledge. And it was one of Armstrong's greatest attractions that he never seemed particularly at ease with the non-scientific aspects of what he did. He never milked his historic step for personal or chauvinistic applause either.

Armstrong never became a celebrity, though he was infinitely more famous and more worthy of that status than most of those who traded on their own lesser fame in later decades. He grasped from first to last that he was part of a huge team, that it was his strange destiny to be the one whose name went down in history, and he was content with that.

If the first man on the moon had, after all, been called Ivan, but had possessed Armstrong's character, some would have dismissed him as a cypher. The interesting thing about Armstrong was that, in the American context, this modesty seemed to speak of something deeper in his character.

He belonged to a generation of Americans who, in spite of the space race, were willing to sign the 1967 outer space treaty which declared the moon is 'the province of all mankind' and to be used 'exclusively for peaceful purposes'. Many American neoconservatives regret that commitment now. But, when Armstrong placed a plaque on the moon saying the astronauts came in peace, he meant it. It was in the nature of the kind of human being that Armstrong was.

Courtesy: The guardian

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