I am sad to learn that Neil Armstrong has passed away; he was 82. I was 9 years old when the moon landing happened, and the memory is indelible. At that age, I was fascinated by science and the space race, and I watched the launch of Apollo 11 and followed its progress day to day. It was late in the evening when the landing happened, and we watched it on an inexpensive Japanese color TV set. The picture quality from the surface of the moon was poor on that first mission, but we were beyond amazed to see the astronauts walking on the moon. We were no less in awe to see an actual moon rock on display at the Smithsonian soon thereafter; it was a fist-sized chunk of concrete grey rock held up on three gold prongs inside a cylindrical glass display case. Guards watched as a long line of visitors walked past the display.
That was an amazing era---on top of the turmoil of the civil rights era and the Vietnam War protests, and the counter-culture, there was the shocking progress of science. I remember in 1970 going to a Smithsonian exhibit on lasers. There were a variety of strange, colored beams of lights reflecting off of mirrors and being guided by optics, and there were holograms that amazed us with their three-dimensional images. Lasers are everywhere now, but this was only 10 years after they had been invented. Another memory: Seeing, and being puzzled by, the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. The images in that movie were, in the slang of the day, far out, but the movie had an immensely optimistic view of the progress of technology in spite of its subplot of the murderous computer HAL 9000. By the way, in the movie, HAL 9000 was brought on line in 1992; a fictional date now 20 years in the past. The movie was much too optimistic about artificial intelligence, having been made in the brief interval of time before the dreams of computer scientists confronted reality. Yet the movie remains to this day stunningly evocative and realistic.
Concerning Neil Armstrong, I suppose I will learn more about his life when detailed obituaries appear. But I recall the story of why he was the one chosen for the honor of being first to walk on the moon. He was an extremely experienced test pilot before entering the space program, and his skill and courage was proven by a near-disaster in the Gemini program. The Gemini program involved two-person capsules, and was intended to give practice in docking and other maneuvers, as well as extra-vehicular activity by the astronauts (space-walking). The near-disaster occurred when a maneuvering thruster stuck open, causing the capsule to start spinning. This would have been fatal unless it were arrested, because it would have been impossible to initiate de-orbit and re-entry. The capsule was spinning at roughly the rate of a phonograph record (as I recall) when Neil determined which thruster to use to arrest the spin.