Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Human Exploration of the Moon

As most people who follow the news know, Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon, died last week. To me, this was a reminder not only of the incredible achievement of landing humans on the Moon but also of how long ago it was that we did it. The six successful Moon landings took place from July 1969 to December 1972, which means that the last time humans walked on the Moon was nearly forty years ago (an anniversary that will be worth commemorating, even if it is not a happy one). Of the twelve men who walked on the Moon, only eight of them are still alive. Of the twelve others who flew to the Moon without landing on it, three have died. Unfortunately, given the current state of the space program in the United States, the country which launched the Apollo program that Armstrong and the others were a part of and the only nation with the resources to have (or rather have had) any chance of repeating the achievement in the relatively near future, it is quite likely that we will reach a point in the next decade or two when there is no one alive who has been to the Moon, or anywhere beyond near Earth orbit for that matter (this was also mentioned by at least one other commentator). I hope I am wrong, not only because I wish long lives to the remaining Apollo astronauts, but because I would love to see people get back to the Moon soon (though I’ll admit to having mixed feelings about the possibility of the Chinese going, due to my strong dislike for their government). However, it is difficult to be optimistic about the odds of this happening.

Another thought Armstrong’s death brings to mind is the imbalance in name recognition among the people who went to the Moon. Neil Armstrong deserved all the accolades he received for his achievements with the space program, as well as his professionalism, his great skill as a pilot, and his coolness in the face of danger (in one famous incident a year before the Moon landing, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle he was flying began having problems, and he ejected less than a second before it would have been too late – yet afterwards he seemed completely unfazed by the experience). But while it is only right that school children all over the world learn his name, the comparative anonymity of almost all the others who went to the Moon is rather unfair. The only one who enjoys anything remotely like the name recognition of Armstrong is Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, who with Armstrong was on the historic Apollo 11 mission and so was the second person to walk on the Moon. Along with the mentions he gets in history books for this reason, Buzz Aldrin is far more of an extrovert than the extremely reserved Armstrong was and has made numerous appearances in television shows and movies. He makes frequent public appearances and the Buzz Lightyear character in the Toy Story movies was named for him. Nevertheless, he remains considerably less well known than Armstrong, and as for the others, few people know who any of them are. I have to admit that I myself would have trouble naming more than half of the twelve who landed on the Moon or more than a few of the other twelve. This is regrettable, since all of them were part of one of the most extraordinary achievements in human history. For those who want to know more about what that unique experience was like, I recommend the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. While the publicity-shy Armstrong didn’t participate, many of his fellow Moon voyagers did, and their tales about the amazing trip they made are fascinating.

Both Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 crew, have remarked that one mistake NASA made was not sending someone to the Moon who would be skilled at describing the experience to the public. While I think they are too modest about their own efforts to convey how they felt, it is true that the emphasis at the time was on just getting the job done, not talking about it either at the time or afterward, which made the whole thing seem much duller than it should have. Certainly Armstrong was never inclined to talk about what he did much, which was somewhat unfortunate. Despite this, he did contribute one of the most memorable and even poetic quotes in human history upon setting foot on the Moon, when he said “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” (even if he did fluff it a bit by dropping the “a”). Like the Apollo missions themselves, that quote is likely to be remembered as long as modern human civilization endures.

As for the future of human exploration of the Moon and other places beyond Earth, I’ve written about it before and I’ll no doubt do so again. But this is also an issue which was mentioned in many of the obituaries of Neil Armstrong, so it is worth touching on here. In the last years of his life, Armstrong made several of his rare public appearances in order to criticize President Barack Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation program that would have sent humans back to the Moon. While I myself had some problems with Obama’s changes to NASA as reflected in the Constellation program constellation, I think some of Armstrong’s criticisms were misplaced. As I noted at the time, when George W. Bush proposed the Constellation program, he failed to put his money where his mouth was. It was seriously underfunded and by the time Obama took office, there was already next to no chance of it succeeding in its stated objectives without a large budget increase. Obama can and should be blamed for not giving NASA more money, but the same criticism applies to all his predecessors, Republican and Democratic, all the way back to Richard Nixon. The cancellation of the Constellation program itself made sense in the context of the stingy funding provided to NASA by both Bush and Obama. Some of the other points made by Armstrong at the time were more valid, such as a lack of clear goals for human space exploration, something I also observed at the time. But the goals Bush had set with Constellation were no more meaningful if he wasn’t going to pay for them. It’s also worth noting that while Armstrong and fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan criticized the new vision for NASA, Buzz Aldrin, despite being supposedly pro-Republican, spoke in favor of it, as he considered the Constellation program to be lacking in vision (he prefers to see a focus on reaching new places, such as Mars). In any event, the political problems NASA has faced and continues to face are bipartisan ones, as both its supporters and those who are indifferent or even hostile to it (with the latter groups being regrettably more numerous) come from both parties. Maybe the Curiosity mission and perhaps even the reflections evoked by Armstrong’s death will help remind more people in and out of government how incredibly inspiring the space program can be, and how much value we can get for what is comparatively a small sum of money.