Godspeed, Neil Armstrong - Books by Eric Douglas

I’ve always been a space-junkie. I love the very thought of traveling through space and exploring other worlds. I grew up reading science fiction and loved to stare at the stars at night. If I had to think about it, a love of space is probably what led me to scuba diving. It was the closest I could get.

Growing up, a childhood friend of my dad’s sold us a used telescope. He had a much larger one mounted on a base in his backyard so he didn’t need that one anymore. I remember setting it up on our driveway at night to stare at the moon and the stars in the sky. We even had a special filter that would let us look at the sun, although I don’t remember seeing much of anything there. The moon seemed so close, I could almost touch it through that tiny lens. I grew up dreaming of space and space flight and the exploits of atronauts like Neil Armstrong.

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to visit the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Mission Control Center in Korolev, Russia. I actually watched a launch once in Russia at the Mission Control Center. I expected to see the long camera shot of the launch. Instead, I was treated to a view inside the capsule as the three cosmonauts left Baikonur in Kazakhstan and headed to the Mir Space Station. I remember thinking of the sheer exhilaration that must be going through their minds.

I wasn’t quite two years old when Neil Armstrong hopped off the lunar module ladder and into history, becoming the first man to step foot on the moon. I wish I could say I met him, or shook his hand, or was even in the same room with him, but I can’t. I don’t have any personal connection with him at all, aside from being a member of an entire generation he, and a select few others, inspired with their courage and bravery.

A few minutes ago, I learned that Armstrong has died from complications from heart surgery. He was 82. HIs family described him as a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend, and also as “a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job.”

That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.

In an interview, he said he hadn’t settled on what to say until just a minute before he spoke those immortal words.

When President John Kennedy challenged the country to go to the moon, he said

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

In an age when all the wrong people are made out to be heroes: athletes, musicians, movie actors, I hope the news coverage about Neil Armstrong’s passing will help us to remember, at least for a little while, what true courage, true humility and true honor mean.

I am hopeful, whoever the next president of the United States is, he will have the same courage as Kennedy and Armstrong to challenge us as Americans to exceed our grasp and push ourselves to reach for the stars, bother literally and metaphorically. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong. Rest in Peace.

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