I wasn't quite 3 when Apollo 11 landed. I remember watching later missions, as it was almost compulsory viewing in our house. I watched Skylab (Apollo Applications) and later the Shuttle programmes with awe.
Let's put this in some kind of perspective:
Thirty-two astronauts were assigned to fly in the Apollo manned lunar landing program. Twenty-four of these left Earth’s orbit and flew around the Moon (Apollo 1 never launched and Apollo 7 and Apollo 9 were low Earth orbit spacecraft testing missions). In addition, nine astronauts flew Apollo spacecraft in the Apollo Applications Programs Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
Twelve of these astronauts walked on the Moon’s surface, and six of those drove a lunar rover on the Moon. While three astronauts flew to the Moon twice, none of them landed on the Moon more than once. The nine Apollo missions to the Moon occurred between December of 1968 and December of 1972.
Apart from these twenty-four people who visited the Moon, no human being has gone beyond low Earth orbit. They have, therefore, been farther from the Earth than anyone else. They are also the only people to have directly viewed the far side of the Moon. The twelve who walked on the Moon are the only people ever to have set foot on an astronomical object other than the Earth.
So, of all the people in the world ever:
24 people have been that distance, and 12 walked on the moon. He was the first. At today's date, nobody under the age of 76 has been there. We have benefited from their audacity, their capability and their engineering expertise. Some of us have also benefited from their teaching since they returned.
Contracts during that and other programmes, which led to advances in communications, computing, medicine, and many other aspects of engineering (from integrated circuits through to CNC machining), directly benefited the rest of us.
And people waste time dribbling on about footballers, royals, inept and semi-ept politicians, Simon-fucking-Cowell and his bands of talentless wannabees, berating people for what kind of sex they enjoy, and cyclists who may or may not have used chemical assistance to get to the top of a big hill. Woo Hoo.
One day the human race might actually grow up, but I doubt I'll ever see it do anything like that again.
RIP Mr Armstrong.
