“Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” That line heard 43 years ago on a fuzzy black-and-white television set, the voice a lot clearer than the picture.
We are supposed to remember Neil Armstrong and the American achievement of that July with the line “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I prefer the less illuminated and simple phrase of “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.”
Neil Armstrong dead at 82 comes as a surprise because Right Stuff pilots aren’t supposed to die. Despite all the right stuff and being that exact individual whose destiny was to be the first of the species to gain another terrestry, Neil Armstrong was a quiet man, more the pilot, engineer and scientist than media animal.
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