One of the Good Guys

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) - NASA photo

Too many of our heroes turn out to have feet of clay, but not Neil Armstrong, who died Saturday at the age of 82. Mr. Armstrong's feet, of course, went where no one's had gone before.

The first human being to walk on the moon shunned publicity:

After leaving the space program, Mr. Armstrong was careful to do nothing to tarnish that image or achievement. Though he traveled and gave speeches — as he did in October 2007, when he dedicated the new Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering at Purdue — he rarely gave interviews and avoided the spotlight.

In 1968, the year before Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, I saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, by consensus one of the best films of all time. The movie envisioned lunar cities and commercial space travel by 1999 and the scientific and economic wherewithal for a manned flight to Jupiter in 2001. And why not?

Only ten years earlier it had been deemed a monumental achievement to put a monkey in orbit. Now men were going to the moon and returning safely. 30 years hence, Stanley Kubrick's future (except for the black monolith) seemed very plausible.

The 1969 moon landing was a big deal, and I watched it on TV like millions of others. But we expected to see many more such big deals in the decades ahead. Neil Armstrong was going to be the first of many.

It turned out that only twelve men visited the moon, and no one has been back for nearly 40 years. The accomplishments of Neal Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts grow more astonishing as their deeds fade in time, and sometimes I wonder what happened to the civilization that produced them. R.I.P.