When Neil Armstrong was born in August 1930, the Wright Brothers first powered flight had taken place only 27 years previously. Even the internal combustion engine which powered the Wright brothers’ plane had only been developed just 72 years earlier by Etienne Lenoir in France. Three years before Armstrong’s birth, Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo, nonstop crossing of the Atlantic, and a year prior to that, Robert Goddard had launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket – it reached an altitude of 40 feet and travelled 184 feet in distance – in comparison, the Wright brothers had flown a distance of 852 feet at a height of about 10 feet on the final test flight on that historic day in 1903.
When Armstrong, along with fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Canaveral to reach the moon in July 1969, they did so on a liquid-fuelled rocket using many of the principles set out by Goddard. The NASA rocket was a behemoth – a three thousand ton monster that would propel them at speeds of more than 17,000 mph towards the moon, 384,000 kilometres away. Among the audience watching the launch at Cape Canaveral was Charles Lindbergh.
Armstrong’s death, yesterday at the age of 82, comes just 19 days after NASA landed a 1 ton robot explorer onto Mars. Who knows what a child born yesterday, and destined to become an astronaut, will achieve or to where he or she will travel? What is certain is that Neil Armstrong will always be the first human being to have set foot on another object in space. He did so, not as a conqueror or colonizer but instead, in the words of a plaque that was left behind on the moon 45 years ago, as an explorer : “Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.”
Thankyou, I remember watching Neil Armstrong on tv that summer. It was magic.