As they say in the South, and you should have used as the title of this thread...

"He hung the moon."

Afterward, people walked out of their homes and gazed at the moon, in awe of what they had just seen.

A personal memory I had completely lost.  This sentence hit me with a smack, and brought a couple of tears.

RIP to a man who never in his long life did anything to tarnish his reputation or my childhood memories.

ah297900 wrote:

I keep trying to come up with something wildly inappropriate, but I can't.

He was one of those persons who makes you proud to be a human. It's one thing to look at the moon landing and say "holy shit, we did that," and another to say "holy shit, we did that." Us bunch of violent, petty, bald monkeys might just be OK.

There's only one thing that Buzz Aldrin has over Neil Armstrong.

Shit, I was born 9 years after and it's still amazing.

I find myself going outside tonight again and again, looking at the moon, amazed at what we can do.

NBC News originally reported these moon shaking platitudes as the death of Astronaut Neil Young.

The Greatest Man In The World. James Thurber, New Yorker, February 21, 1931.

He did have to partly fly the thing, you know. It wasn't all guided from earth like the Mars Curiosity. Also, sitting in a tiny closet in the black void of space for weeks at a time, with no hope of rescue if so much as a pinhole pierces the hull--that's pretty heroic. Especially so considering I would be loathe to drive across the state in a car made in 1969, much less go to the goddamn moon for the first time with the only assurance being "we're pretty sure this'll work."

tojo2000 wrote:

The LEM was way off course, so Armstrong had to manually pilot it to the surface.  He managed to land with about 20 seconds of fuel left.  I'm sure both he, Buzz, and everyone in Houston was shitting bricks.

Indeed.  He was a ONE HELL of a pilot.  Their auto-nav landing system was misdirecting them to an area in which they were sure to crash land, so he had to very quickly grab the controls and manually land that bugger in conditions (gravity/dust/visuals/etc.) that he'd never experienced before....and he had only mere seconds to do so, as there was no fuel remaining.... and he did it all, looking out a window that was about half the size of a postcard.

It took a very cool-headed and ballsy pilot.

Yeah, the guy deserves serious cred.

Its depressing that this came as a surprise to some

Armstrong was so humble and hid from the public eye the rest of his life because he knew he never set foot on the moon.

Scotty wrote:

Armstrong was so humble and hid from the public eye the rest of his life because he knew he never set foot on the moon.

That's what I'm sayin'

whosasailorthen wrote:

Bigcat wrote:

Scotty wrote:

Armstrong was so humble and hid from the public eye the rest of his life because he knew he never set foot on the moon.

That's what I'm sayin'

Well, then if we never landed there, explain how we are still using the reflectors which we saw them deploy there?  And how is it that both the Russian and the Indian satellites have both found tracks showing where the men walked and where the lunar rover drove.

None of that can be faked.

choad wrote:

NBC News originally reported these moon shaking platitudes as the death of Astronaut Neil Young.

But I thought Neil Gaiman was the first hit on Google when you type "Neil". Maybe not after recent events...

I think Neil Armstrong says it best in his own words
From NASA'S Johnson Space Center Oral History Project

I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. . . .

Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures.

In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have. I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. . . .

One of the things that always impressed me about Armstrong was his acknowledgement that he was just another team member.

Armstrong: "Moonwalk was just my job"


 




Mike Jackson: "Fucking right bro"

nfidelbastard wrote:

If one cares not to listen to Olbermann, nor subscribe to the NewYorker, a PDF version resides HERE

Thank you. Watching that guy isn't easy and listening is a stretch, too.

I'll just leave this here, mainly because it was the brightest spot in my dull Monday.  The comments are also pretty fun.