Astronaut Neil Armstrong Has Died 480
dsinc writes "Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, has died. NBC News broke the news, without giving other details. Neil was recovering from a heart-bypass surgery he had had a couple of weeks ago. Sad news, marking the end of a glorious and more optimistic era... RIP, Neil." Also at Reuters.
Oblig xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
http://xkcd.com/893/
RIP Neil.
oblig xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
http://xkcd.com/893/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Thank you, Neil Armstrong (Score:2, Interesting)
I was a wide-eyed seven-year-old in Germany - and you mirror my feelings one hundred percent.
*bows*
Pilot, Engineer, Professor .. A Real Role Model (Score:5, Interesting)
A class act. And a great pilot. You will be missed.
Navy pilot - combat veteran, test/research pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor. Of course he was most famous for being an astronaut, commander of the Apollo 11 mission and the first to walk on the moon.
He inspired generations of scientists and engineers. Because of Armstrong and his fellow astronauts my friends and I in elementary school knew math and science were important and were highly motivated to pay attention. We had real heroes are role models.
People who don't believe in heroes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An ambassador of humanity (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my first memories (Score:5, Interesting)
I was 4 and remember being rushed inside by my parents and grandparents. Many people were crowded around our TV, as not everyone had one yet.
That blurry, slow, staticy picture would forever inspire me to love space and science.
We need more of this for our future. Money better spent on building and science as opposed to destruction....
A rat done bit my sister Nell... (Score:3, Interesting)
...and whitey's on the moon. [youtube.com]
Re:A class act (Score:5, Interesting)
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow." - Neil Armstrong
Re:One of my first memories (Score:5, Interesting)
I was 6. My grandmother was watching with me. She told me that when she was my age, they hadn't yet flown the first aircraft. I think she was born in 1892. I extrapolated from this that by the time I grew up, there would be colonies on the moon, and I'd be living the life of George Jetson. I'm disappointed. But if it hadn't been for the Apollo program, I might not have become an engineer.
I gotta say it.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Good Luck Mr. Armstrong.....RIP
Re:Arguably the most important American ever (Score:5, Interesting)
Jonas Salk, who eliminated polio. Louis Pasteur, who discovered germs. John Snow who proved that cholera spread via contaminated water and thus strengthened the case for public sanitation immeasurably... And just missing your 200 year deadline, Edward Jenner who introduced and championed vaccination.
In just one field of human endeavor (medical science), these are people who caused change.
As important as the moon landing is historically, Neil Armstrong was just a cog - the guy standing in the right place at the right time to be picked to pilot the mission.
Re:Be as nasty as you want to the Baby Boomers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, and they gave birth to some of the worst brats ever - Us. (I'm a late boomer, so I'm part of that generation, but I try to do better.)
Study the Bible a bit, and you'll see that the Hebrew nation survived every adversity thrown against it, except one. Prosperity - got them every time. Seems to me that has something to do with our current situation.
Re:A class act (Score:5, Interesting)
Curious what his thoughts were on what has become of the agency.
From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
In an open public letter also signed by Apollo veterans Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan, he [=Armstrong] noted, "For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature".
On November 18, 2010, at age eighty, Armstrong said in a speech during the Science & Technology Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, that he would offer his services as commander on a mission to Mars if he were asked.
Re:Oblig xkcd (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A class act (Score:4, Interesting)
I will say that he was a class act until recently. Over the course of the last couple of years, he allowed his politics to take hold. For example, he blasted SpaceX and stated that they would not be capable of launching humans, but spoke of private enterprise being required to take hold in space. Likewise, he blasted Obama for backing SpaceX, while ignoring the fact that the plan started in the mid-90s under NASA, killed by republicans, and then was restarted by Griffin and pushed by W.
Up until he put his loyalty to his political party, he WAS a class act. One that cared for America. Just in the last couple of years, did he seem to lose that. But I do not think that should taint what he accomplished.
Re:A class act (Score:5, Interesting)
When I saw the Apollo 16 (in Huntsville AL), I thought of that scene in star wars where they rescue the princess from the death star and she sees the millennium falcon and says "You came here in that? You're braver than I thought!".
Re:A class act (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:America, the Eagle has left. (Score:4, Interesting)
By far and away, at least to me, the greatest accomplishment that Neil Armstrong ever made for the manned spaceflight program of America was not the landing on the Moon, but rather his survival after flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle [wikipedia.org], designed to test astronauts on a real flying vehicle that was supposed to behave like the Lunar Lander would do on the Moon.
It was also the closest that any astronaut got to dying but somehow survived, and it was amazing the Mr. Armstrong didn't die on the day his vehicle crashed and forced him into using the seat ejection mechanism.
Anybody who flew in that vehicle was simply nuts, but it did provide the engineers working for Grumman enough information to be able to safely get those folks to the Moon and back. I also don't think anybody else in the NASA astronaut corps could have been successful at landing the Eagle in the Sea of Traquility during the month of July, 1969.
Re:America, the Eagle has left. (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting read though I'd consider Gemini 8 spinning out of control to have been pretty close to killing astronauts, couple of years earlier too. Of course it was Neil who saved that mission as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency [wikipedia.org]