What Neil Armstrong Knew, We Never Will

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

27 August 12

omewhere in my house, most likely in the drawer containing all the stuff I can't find, there's an old three-by-five card containing the only autograph I have ever sought. It belongs to Sir Edmund Hillary, credited with being the first man to climb Mount Everest. I saved the card for more than forty years because there was only one other autograph I wanted on it. It was the only autograph worthy of sharing space on that card. But that other person was shy and didn't talk very much and, on Sunday, in a quiet moment in a very noisy time, a period of its history in which his country's ambition is a small and withered thing, Neil Armstrong died at the age of 82.

My god, we almost lost him twice even before he made Cronkite's palms sweat on TV in 1969. In 1966, as commander of Gemini VIII, with his spacecraft docked with a booster rocket, a thruster froze in the ON position, and the whole jerryrigged assemblage started to spin so wildly that Armstrong and his crewmate, Dave Scott, nearly passed out from the torque. Finally, the two men managed to gain control. Then, during his training for his Apollo XI mission, Armstrong's lunar-landing trainer quit on him a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Armstrong ejected just before the vehicle crashed. That was the great gift that he had - that great icy core of knowing that there was always something else to try, that a man can outthink his fate, on the spot, if he knows what he knows and when to apply it. There was in this guy a terribly fierce opponent for mischance.

After his big moment, he largely withdrew, and that was all right, too. For at least a time, there literally was only one other person in the history of man who knew what Armstrong knew - how that sandy soil feels when you walk on it, the exact places where the shadows fall, the precise geometry of the mountains of the moon. Today, there are only eight of them left, all of them in their 70's. What will happen when the last of them dies? It's very likely that there will not be a living human being who knows what Neil Armstrong knew. It will all be for videotape and digital libraries, for historians and, if we're very lucky, for poets, as well. But there will be nobody alive who actually knows. Not a single one of our fellow humans, anywhere on the Earth. That knowledge will be as dead in the world as Columbus is. One fewer person on the Earth was able to look up at the moon on Sunday night. What he thought when he looked at, night after night, is a perspective lost to all but eight old men. Sooner or later, there will be none of them left. On that day, like today, we should mourn for what we once thought we were. From that day forward, I fear, it is all going to sound like myth and magic, and the tales that the old men told around the ancient fires.

Charlie has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America. He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.