However the Soviet programme suffered numerous technical problems and days before Apollo 11 lifted off disaster struck as the Russians readied their
However, the Soviet programme suffered numerous technical problems, and, days before Apollo 11 lifted off, disaster struck as the Russians readied their equivalent of a Saturn V at the Baikonur cosmodrome for an unmanned mission around the Moon. The rocket fell back and exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb, destroying the launch facility. It was to prove a terminal failure.So it was an American flag that was placed on the Moon, though here American technology did briefly falter. The top section of the collapsible pole failed to go up properly, and neither Aldrin nor Armstrong could force it into the ground, so they left the flag lop-sided and folded. With it they left a placard that made grand claims for both America and Apollo. “Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD,” it read.
“We came in peace for all mankind.”But, by then, Nasa was already running into deep budgetary trouble as the US economy sagged. There would be only a few more men on the Moon; just three years later, Apollo 17 was to be the last mission. Armstrong came home to work for Nasa, leaving to go first into academia and then into business. He returned in 1984 to the National Commission on Space, when the Cold War was once more raging fiercely and a new administration, that of Ronald Reagan, was again reaching for the stars. However, the commission reported in 1986, just months after the Challenger disaster when the race for space was fading and the nation was still in mourning.Armstrong was always the quietest of the astronauts, intense and shy, and he remained so after his return. Unlike the others, he was never to seek public office, he rarely spoke of his adventures, he never gave interviews and he never appeared on television.He lived for decades as a gentleman farmer on a 200-acre ranch in Lebanon, Ohio, not far from where he had lived as a child, serving as a director on the boards of a few hi-tech companies.
Today, after a divorce from Janet, to whom he had been married for 35 years, he lives with his second wife, Carol, not far away in Mariemont, 10 miles outside Cincinnati. Janet cited “irreconcilable differences” with Armstrong in the divorce papers.A friend who introduced Armstrong to Carol explains that “Neil was lonely, and Carol had just lost her husband in a terrible car crash. Neil’s two grown-up sons are now living in California, and Carol has two grown daughters at university there, so they decided to take a road trip When they returned they told me they’d got married. Quietly with no fuss, just the way Neil always does things”.Even his neighbours do not see much of him. In his locale these days he is most remarkable for piloting one of the larger types of motorised lawn-mower rather than spacecraft.
He kept a low profile before the mission and he did so afterwards, though this does not mean that he, like the others, like all of us, was not deeply affected by what he saw and did and said that day.”It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth,” he said after the Moon mission. “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”Life StoryBorn: Neil Alden Armstrong, 25 August 1930, on his grandparents’ farm in Wapakoneta, Ohio.Family: Father, Stephen, was an auditor for the State of Ohio, mother, Viola, a housewife; sister, June, and brother, Dean; married Janet, his childhood sweetheart, in 1956 (two sons, Eric and Mark); divorced and remarried Carol.Education: Blume High School, Wapakoneta; Purdue University, Indiana, BSc in aeronautical engineering; MSc from the University of Southern California.Career: Navy pilot 1949-52, flew 78 combat missions during the Korean war.Space career: Joined Nasa in 1955; accepted as an astronaut in 1962; flew first mission in 1966, commanding Gemini 8 and performing first successful space docking operation; commander of Apollo 11 and first man on the moon, 1969; resigned from Nasa, 1971.Since the Moon: Professor of aerospace engineering, University of Cincinnati, 1971-79; chairman of AIL Systems since 1989.He said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind…” “Houston Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”He says now: “I don’t want to be a living memorial.
Those days are long gone.”They say: “He’s a recluse’s recluse” (former Nasa official who worked with him); “Neil thanks everyone for their interest but has never given interviews and is not about to start” (second wife).. WHEN JACK Straw, the Home Secretary, unveiled the Macpherson report last February he remarked that the inquiry into the Lawrence affair had uncovered some uncomfortable truths about our society that had to be confronted. Just how uncomfortable some people find those truths, we are beginning to learn. Some Conservative MPs, much of the right-wing press and parts of the police service are so uncomfortable that they are squirming Their response has been to shoot the messenger. Thus, for example, Gerald Howarth MP, Tory member of the Commons home affairs committee, routinely refers to the “flawed Macpherson report”.
To support this view, myths have been created over the past five months that, by dint of constant repetition, risk a general acceptance as fact. The hearings, we are told, were a bear pit where no reasonable voice could be heard above the clamour from agitators in the public gallery. The chairman was a cat’s-paw for the Lawrence family, who in turn were manipulated by left-wing activists.