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Thank you, Mr. Armstrong
By Congressman Randy Forbes
August 31, 2012
Mr. Armstrong, it was July 20, 1969. I was a 17-year-old driving past the golden corn fields that lined Mount Pleasant Road in the quiet rural community of Chesapeake, Virginia. You were commanding Apollo 11.
I remember the rich, smoky voice of the announcer coming through the speakers, the rush of frigid air blasting out of the vents of my father’s Ford on that hot, heavy Sunday afternoon.
With only minutes of fuel remaining, you were piloting a tiny fleck of a spaceship nearly a quarter of a million miles away. Humanity drew in its breath to listen as you took the controls to manually redirect the craft on course to collide with bulky craters jutting out of the charcoal landscape.
My heart hammered in my chest. My mind raced. Around the world, a half a billion hearts pumped with me. You were unflappably calm. Precise. You held the anticipation of all of humanity in that moment.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here,” you radioed. “The Eagle has landed.”
“Roger, Tranquility,” mission control replied. “We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”
It was a day I will carry with me forever. You were a main character in a national narrative of hope – hope based not in words but in deeds, hope measured by not by soundbites but by skill. You lived at a time when the word ‘communism’ wasn’t a theory but a threat - ripe and fresh and mingling in the minds of morning commuters and Sunday shoppers. And when you walked on the surface of moon that day, the world felt the power of your nation’s pride -- pride that would ripple far beyond the decisive victory of a decade long Soviet-American space race.
Mr. Armstrong, you were the first to do what man had never done. And, it was nothing short of astonishing, marvelous, and ecstatic. When my grandchildren Hannah and Sawyer sit at my feet, I’ll tell them of you. Not only the man that walked on the moon, but also the man you were when you walked the earth. Quiet. Private. Reserved. I’ll tell them that you were a hero once for your bravery, but twice for your humility. You were never at ease with your own fame, never celebrated your celebrity, never cashed in on book deals or speaking tours, never commercialized what could have been so successfully mass-produced on cheap t-shirts and gift-shop memorabilia.
You reached into an unfathomable black abyss, not for the glory, or the fame, or the conquest, or the riches, but because it was your job and because your country asked. Perhaps it was reward enough to behold the artistry of the rich glaring blue of our planet captured against the lifeless gray landscape of the moon’s celestial body. Perhaps it was reward enough to place your nation’s stars and stripes in a soil never before touched by man. I’ll never know. But I doubt it. I’d like to think you never claimed your worldly fame because you knew what a precious treasure you held. You knew it was a priceless gem – best left pure and undefiled. Best not to twitter, and tweak, and airbrush that which on its own is so magnificent, so genuine.
America’s coming generation knows of the day you walked on the moon only in grainy flickering video, in static-filled radio transmissions, and in sepia-tinted textbook photos, but even to them your legacy is vivid. Decades later you remain an antidote for a weary nation, jostled and numb by an onslaught of mediocrity and dizzy from a national lens out-of-focus. You, Mr. Armstrong, are like wind in our faces. Your name will forever invoke a cool breeze of anticipation and expectancy. You awaken in us that freshness of vision that we remember of our younger selves- in the words of Lewis Carroll - the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”
When you descended the ladder of Apollo 11 you left not just a permanent impression of your boot in the sandy soil of a celestial body orbiting 240,000 miles from Earth, you left a permanent impression on the hearts of our nation that there is not anything that America cannot do, there is not any challenge we cannot overcome. From that 17-year-old boy, who still stares into the night's sky, beholds our limitless possibilities, and ponders the destinations that this great nation will set foot upon, thank you, Mr. Armstrong, thank you.
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