{"id":27329,"date":"2018-10-11T19:03:38","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T19:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2018\/10\/11\/op-ed-what-neil-armstrongs-america-couldve-been\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T14:11:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T14:11:05","slug":"op-ed-what-neil-armstrongs-america-couldve-been","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/news\/your-navy\/2018\/10\/11\/op-ed-what-neil-armstrongs-america-couldve-been\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-ed: What Neil Armstrong\u2019s America could\u2019ve been"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

According to a Gallup Poll from 1999<\/a>, only 50 percent of those surveyed could even name Neil Armstrong as the first man to land on the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How might the moon walker fare 19 years later?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film \u201cFirst Man<\/a>,\u201d starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, may boost public recognition of Armstrong\u2019s name and career. But his fate after his \u201cgiant leap for all mankind\u201d mirrored that of public interest in the moon landings and, broader still, trust in government<\/a>, which has steadily eroded since the early 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may be hard to imagine today, but from the early 1960s until Apollo 11, Congress essentially gave the space agency blank checks to fulfill the Kennedy administration\u2019s goal of a man on the moon by 1970. In the mid-1960s, NASA received over 4 percent of the federal budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, it\u2019s funded with less than 0.5 percent of the budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This view from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the Moon’s horizon. The lunar terrain pictured is in the area of Smyth’s Sea on the nearside. Coordinates of the center of the terrain are 86 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees north latitude. While astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, commander, and Edwin E. Adrin, Jr., lunar module pilot, descended in the Lunar Module (LM) “Eagle” to explore the Sea of Tranquility region of the Moon, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained with the Command and Service Modules (CSM) “Columbia” in lunar orbit. (NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While the research ostensibly went to figuring out how to safely transport men to and from the moon, many technologies spun off from this program<\/a>: high-temperature coatings, new fabrics and microelectronics, all of which we use in our day-to-day lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, for a few ephemeral years, a factious nation thought of itself as a space-faring people. With a populace hurting from the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots of 1968, the moon landing managed to make us stop arguing \u2013 albeit briefly \u2013 and look up at the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet less than a year later, no television network bothered to carry the Apollo 13 astronauts\u2019 live broadcast on their way to the moon. That sudden public disinterest after the first landing \u2013 and the erosion of any sense of national purpose \u2013 still puzzles students in my first-year seminar \u201cThe Space Race.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America quickly turned its back on Apollo and began its long, painful slide into Watergate and Vietnam. By the end of the 20th century, conspiracy theories<\/a> about the moon landing abounded \u2013 that the astronauts had never left Earth\u2019s orbit; that Stanley Kubrick had played a role in faking the Apollo landings on a sound stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon enough, Apollo\u2019s triumph became little more than a slogan for our growing cynicism about government: \u201cIf they can put a man on the moon, why can\u2019t they fill the potholes?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Neil Armstrong took this photo of Edwin “Buzz” Armstrong walking on the moon. (NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As for Armstrong, he went on to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Though he did some advertising campaigns for Chrysler and a few other firms, he mostly kept a low profile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those once mesmerized by NASA\u2019s stillborn plans for lunar base<\/a>s and manned flybys of Venus wanted more \u2013 so much more \u2013 out of Armstrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was chosen for Apollo 11, Armstrong was already one of the most talented test pilots in history. As Andrew Chaikin notes in his book \u201cA Man on the Moon<\/a>,\u201d Armstrong \u201cgot his pilot\u2019s license before he learned to drive,\u201d then in the 1950s and \u201860s actually flew the X-15 rocket planes, supersonic fighter aircraft and Gemini capsules that my NASA-obsessed peers glued together in 1:48 scale, following Sputnik in 1957.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is a close-up view of an astronaut’s footprint in the lunar soil during the Apollo 11 mission. (NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After walking on the moon and right into the afterglow of fulfilling JFK\u2019s promise, what more could America\u2019s \u201cfirst man\u201d have done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if he had run for Senate? President? Could he have convinced an increasingly cynical and weary nation that Apollo was indeed a giant leap to something in space even greater?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Wolfe, author of the epic account of the U.S. space program, \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d argued<\/a> that \u201cNASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wolfe hoped that wordsmiths with the ability to excite and inspire might be the ones flying into space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wolfe liked the vision and ambition of Wernher von Braun, architect of the Saturn V moon rocket, who famously said, \u201cI have learned to use the word ‘impossible\u2019 with the greatest caution.\u201d Unfortunately, the engineer had a bit of an image problem related to his Nazi past<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armstrong, for his part, wasn\u2019t the best with words. Even as he made his initial small step off the ladder, he seemed to wrestle with his tongue<\/a>. Or the radio link to Earth garbled his sentence. We\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I saw Armstrong in 1996 at the University of Richmond, he let Spaceship One designer Burt Rutan and Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan do most of the talking. When Armstrong did speak, in the precise and succinct way one expects from a careful engineer, the crowd seemed to lean forward. It was him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our era of incessant self-promotion and celebrity billionaires, I wonder if there\u2019s a place for a humble yet insanely focused national hero like Armstrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\t