This reminds me of the Bible verse, Matthew 22:14 “For many are invited, but few are chosen.” What an honor.

The New York Times described him as a “ … quiet, private man, at heart an engineer and crack test pilot …”

I was very moved on hearing of his final journey, and I don’t know why. I was 11 years old when I watched him walk on the moon, on black & white TV, in a small town in what was then considered the backwaters of Peninsula Malaysia.

Malaysia had just gone through the trauma of race riots of May 13^th between the native born peoples of Chinese and Malay descent.

And here was America on the other side of the world, the other side of race relations, and the other side of the technological spectrum. They had put together a small band of engineers, called NASA, on a promise and a prayer that these engineers would do good with our tax payers’ money. Neil Armstrong was one of them.

They did.

When he set foot on lunar soil he did not say “… that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for America … ” instead he said “ … that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind …”

The Lord be with you, Neil.

It was said he was the perfect man to be the first to step foot on another world. He never embarrassed his country and was quiet and reserved. One of his least known yet most famous statements among pilots was in answer to a reporters query at a press conference; when asked if there was anything that was personally very important to him that NASA would not let him take to the moon, he answered, “more fuel.”

As it turned out he landed on the moon with a few seconds of fuel to spare after maneuvering clear of  a boulder field. His co-pilot, Dr. Rendezvous, had already crashed the computer by turning a radar on early in the descent. He had shown the same nerves of steel during the Gemini program when his capsule continued to accelerate in a  spin after a thruster fired and would not shut down. Nearing unconsciousness he worked the problem almost to the bitter end and finally regained control.

Sadly, the same resolve and crystal clear focus was never to be found in America’s space program after Apollo. With no vehicle capable of carrying astronauts into orbit and nothing but budget cuts on the horizon, the U.S. space program has effectively died with it’s greatest hero. No direction, no goal, nothing is foreseen to be accomplished in the coming decades as the political football that is human spaceflight is kicked from administration to administration. The trillion dollar war and piles of rubble on the other side of the world are the grave of the space age. We have only the past and the people who had a mission to remember.

Good luck Neil.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/25/neil-armstrong-dead…30343.html