Neil Armstrong

Hero from my childhod passed away … always makes you feel sadder, older. Though I was only two during the first lunar landing, I’m told I watched it while down the Jersey shore with my parents and grandparents. Didn’t get into the whole astronaut thing until a few years later, obviously, in the late-Seventies when we were no longer going where no man has gone before, though the whole NASA-Apollo thing had thoroughly saturated the intersection of our culture with my universe by then.

One of the saddest things I’ve been thinking about last night and this morning is how the Apollo veterans are slowly dying off, with no one to replace them. Of the dozen men to walk the moon, four have now passed on (Jim Irwin in 1991 of a heart attack; Alan Shepard in 1998 of leukemia; Pete Conrad in 1999 in a motorcycle accident are the others). The remaining are aged 76 to 82. Pretty soon, for the first time in nearly half a century, there will be no men alive who have ever walked on the surface of another world beyond earth.

Armstrong was a very good man from all the stuff I read during my recovery from surgery a few years back. All the classic qualities of a hero: courageous, intelligent, passionate yet taciturn, principled. We need more men like him out there, unleashed, unfettered, to simply explore and move mankind a little futher down the road.