Death of Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who marked an epochal achievement in exploration with “one small step” from the Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, 1969, becoming the first person to walk on the moon, died overnight at 82.  In an interview, Hansen, author of First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, cited another “special sensitivity” that made the first man on the moon a stranger on Earth. “I think Neil knew that this glorious thing he helped achieve for the country back in the summer of 1969 — glorious for the entire planet, really — would inexorably be diminished by the blatant commercialism of the modern world,” Hansen said.

“Looking back, we were really very privileged to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself, and what he might become, and where he might go,” Mr. Armstrong said in a 2001 NASA oral history project. “So I’m very thankful.”  For full story click here.