When I was first starting up with this blogging thing, I started off talking about NASA in the wake of the Columbia shuttle disaster. You can go look it up. Partly because back then, it seemed NASA had failed on it s promises much more than they had fulfilled them. So as we sit here today and ponder the 40 years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I can't help but get a little nostalgic about all this stuff.
"The touchstone for excellence in exploration and discovery is always going to be represented by the men of Apollo 11," Obama said. He said their work sparked "innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity back here on Earth".
The president said he recalled watching Apollo astronauts return to Hawaii after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. He said he'd sit on his grandfather's shoulders and "we'd pretend like they could see us as we were waving at folks coming home".
Obama praised Armstrong, Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins for their "calm under pressure, the grace with which these three gentlemen operated".
Obama did not talk about future NASA missions. Aldrin, Collins and six other Apollo astronauts used the anniversary to make a pitch for a mission to Mars.
Here is an interesting profile about Neil Armstrong and how uninteresting he's tried to be in the wake of his historic fame.
In his limited public utterances, Armstrong has always turned the subject away from himself. He usually deflects credit to the 400,000 people who built and maintained the vehicles and managed the bureaucracy that enabled him and Aldrin to reach the moon.
In his own book, Men From Earth, Aldrin wrote that he thought the man who preceded him onto the lunar surface had worked his way through his career "carefully watching everything he did and said".
Talkative and opinionated, Aldrin may be the antithesis of Armstrong. In his post-Apollo career, Aldrin has done what Armstrong would find inconceivable. He once did a guest voice on The Simpsons, sat for a hilarious interview with Ali G, made a rap video with Snoop Dogg and Quincy Jones, and lent his name to a computer game, Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space. Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, there's Aldrin in a US ad for - what? - Louis Vuitton luggage. Aldrin once punched a guy who accused him of "lying" about the moon landing.
Someone once described Aldrin and Armstrong as "amiable strangers", but Hansen says that's inaccurate. "I'm not even sure 'amiable' is the right word. Neil did not appreciate how [Aldrin] went off in such strong, aggressive ways with his ideas. They worked well together, but I'm not sure there was much personal rapport. Buzz never figured Neil out." From time to time, Hansen says, Aldrin would contact him and ask for help to persuade Armstrong to attend some event - a reflection, Hansen says, of the astronauts' uneasy relationship.
Hansen says Armstrong's reticence may have been reinforced by the example of Charles Lindbergh, another 20th century pioneer who knew much about the soul-twisting powers of fame. The two men met in 1968, and Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were Armstrong's guests for the Apollo 11 launch. They corresponded until Lindbergh's death in 1974.
And that was the fascination with the man. Perhaps our own perception that he was like Columbus or Lindbergh or Amundsen - when in reality, he was the very last chain in a finely calculated system project - was such a mismatch that he knew he could not live up to it. It's not as if he created a rocket in the backyard and flew to the moon himself. And yet here we are, we still remember their names - Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.
It's really unclear what promises NASA can fulfill. The forecast is a return to the moon and perhaps a Mars mission. It seemed like we would be there by no had we not been diverted by the Space Shuttle project which has busily (and haphazardly) gone into low Earth Orbit over and over and over again. Thus it becomes important to look at the achievements as they are.
I hope to see a Mars project in my lifetime, yet we may not even get to the starting line.
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