Neil Armstrong and the America That Could Have Been

Neil Armstrong and the America That Could Have Been

Neil Armstrong and the America That Could Have Been









	This article was originally published in The conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's. Voices of experts: Op-Ed & Insights.

		According to a Gallup survey since 1999Only 50 percent of respondents could even name Neil Armstrong as the first man to land on the moon.

		How could the moon walker walk 19 years later?

		The movie "First man", starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, may increase public recognition of Armstrong's name and career, but his fate after his" giant leap for all mankind "reflected public interest in lunar landings and, even wider , trust the government, which has been eroding since the early seventies.

		It may be hard to imagine today, but from the early 1960s until Apollo 11, Congress essentially gave the space agency blank checks to meet the goal of a man on the moon of the Kennedy administration in 1970. A In the mid-1960s, NASA received more than 4 percent of the federal budget. Today, it is financed with less than 0.5 percent of the budget.

		While the research was apparently aimed at discovering how to transport men safely to and from the Moon, many technologies it split off from this program: high temperature coatings, new fabrics and microelectronics, everything we use in our daily lives.

		Furthermore, for a few ephemeral years, an objective nation considered itself as a people traveling through space. With a population wounded by the Tet offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots of 1968, the moon landing made us stop arguing, albeit briefly, and look at the sky.

		However, less than a year later, no television network bothered to take the live broadcast of the Apollo 13 astronauts on the way to the Moon. That sudden public disinterest after the first landing, and the erosion of any sense of national purpose, still baffles students at my first-year seminar "The Space Race."

		America quickly turned its back on Apollo and began its long and painful slide in Watergate and Vietnam. At the end of the 20th century, Conspiracy theories about the landing of the moon abounded - that the astronauts had never left the orbit of the Earth; that Stanley Kubrick had played a role in the counterfeiting of Apollo landings in a sound stage.

		Very soon, Apollo's triumph became little more than a slogan for our growing cynicism about government: "If you can put a man on the moon, why can not you fill in the potholes?"

		As for Armstrong, he went on to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Although he did some advertising campaigns for Chrysler and some other firms, he mostly kept a low profile.

		Those who were once hypnotized by NASA Dead plans of lunar bases and manned overflights of Venus. I wanted more, much more, outside of Armstrong.

		When he was elected to Apollo 11, Armstrong was already one of the most talented test drivers in history. As Andrew Chaikin points out in his book "A man on the moon"Armstrong" got his pilot's license before he learned how to drive ", in the 50's and 60's actually flew the X-15 rocket planes, supersonic fighter jets and Gemini capsules that my NASA obsessed comrades stuck together in scale 1:48, following Sputnik in 1957.





						


Neil Armstrong photographed by Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11.

            						    Credit: NASA 


		After walking on the moon and just after fulfilling JFK's promise, what else could the "first man" of the United States have done?

		What if he had run for senator? President? Could he have convinced an increasingly cynical and tired nation that Apollo was really a giant leap into something in even greater space?

		Tom Wolfe, author of the epic account of the US space program, "The right thing" argument that "NASA had neglected to recruit a body of philosophers." Wolfe hoped that the forgers of words with the ability to thrill and inspire could be the ones that fly into space.

		Wolfe liked the vision and ambition of Wernher von Braun, architect of the lunar rocket Saturn V, who said famous, "I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the utmost caution." Unfortunately, the engineer had an image problem related to his Nazi past.

		Armstrong, on the other hand, was not the best with words. Even though he made his little initial step up the ladder, He seemed to fight with his tongue.. Or the radio link to Earth distorted his sentence. We will never know.

		When I saw Armstrong in 1996 at the University of Richmond, he let Spaceship Designer One Burt Rutan and Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan do most of the talking. When Armstrong spoke, in the precise and succinct manner one expects from a careful engineer, the crowd seemed to lean forward. Was the.

		In our incessant era of self-promotion and famous billionaires, I wonder if there is a place for a humble but incredibly focused national hero like Armstrong.

		The portrait of Ryan Gosling can offer a glimpse of the Neil Armstrong we never knew. Perhaps the film will inspire viewers with the kind of ambitious visions that NASA had in the mid-sixties.

		At a minimum, it will remind us of a time when the government worked well enough to achieve something momentous. Could the same be done to reverse the effects of climate change? Or the humblest job of rebuilding our nation's infrastructure?

		For now, fixing bumps seems to be a job that remains for Dominos Pizza.



	Joe EssidDirector of the Writing Center, University of Richmond



	This article has been published again. The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article. Follow all the topics and debates of Expert Voices, and be part of the discussion, in Facebook, Twitter Y Google +. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor. This version of the article was originally published in Space.com.



	



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