I never met Neil Armstrong. Honestly, I’d have a hard time recognizing him without his spacesuit on.
And when he died Saturday at the age of 82, I couldn’t remember what he looked like for a while, not until I went online to get a little refresher: After all, most of my memories of the guy are culled from grainy television footage of him in his bulky, balloon-like suit, setting foot on the moon, his face shielded by a visor of gold.
It’s weird to think how faceless Armstrong is for many of us, given how much we’ve heard his name.
I can’t remember when I first heard his name, in fact. I was about two months old when Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. I might’ve even seen it, catching the newscast between diaper changings. And for me, the moon landing was always a part of my history; my own personal history, as weird as that sounds. For years, I was strangely proud of the fact I was born the same year that man first walked on the moon (even though I had nothing to do with it and most of my friends could say the same thing). I felt a little sorry for the kids I knew who were born in tragic 1968 (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated that year) or ho-hum 1970. And there would be nights I’d look at the moon and marvel that someone had actually strolled across it—and most amazingly, the footprints were still there etched in the ever-still dust as if in stone.
Growing up, I was fascinated with the idea of space travel, and I don’t think I was alone. Lots of us who grew up back in the glow of the moon landings hoped one day to be astronauts, until less-than-perfect eyesight or less-than-perfect grades or just changing priorities took us away from our dreams of riding rocketships. And that’s just as well, I suppose. After all, there were very, very few slots open for aspiring astronauts. You stood a better chance of pitching in the World Series than hitching a ride to the moon.
They were considered real heroes, these moonwalkers—perhaps some of the last true national heroes that the entire country could embrace. And to this day, the most famous of them all is still Neil Armstrong.
Not that he had any use for all that fame.
Armstrong never liked the spotlight. Frankly, he didn’t like anyone to make a big deal of anything he did. This is the guy who, after his Lunar Landing Training Vehicle crashed in the desert in 1968, calmly dusted himself off and went back to the office to finish some paperwork. Oh, he made some public appearances now and then and he notably criticized the government when it decided to hack away NASA’s exploration plans. But for the most part, he lived a very quiet life in Ohio, shunning attention and staying away from any number of lucrative opportunities. I heard him give an interview where his achievement (being the first man to walk on the moon) was more dumb luck than a real achievement. Any number of men could’ve done it, he said.
Yeah, right.
We don’t go to the moon at all anymore. We haven’t for years. The United States mothballed its space shuttle program and sent the surviving craft to museums across the country. When we launch astronauts into space these days, we rely on other countries to get us there.
But if we were still sending people on audacious missions into the cosmos—if we were still prone to make heroes of our astronauts—you wonder whether the pull of celebrity for them would be greater these days. Would they be splashed across the pages of Us magazine, alongside Jennifer Aniston and Snooki? Would they appear on Dancing With the Stars?
Or is that, perhaps, why we don’t embrace our astronauts (and we still have many) like we used to? Does their reserve, their “just doing my job” ethos—an attitude stemming back to Armstrong himself—rub wrong with our sense of who and what makes a hero these days?
One of my favorite lines from The Iron Lady, last year’s biopic based on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, goes like this: “It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.”
Neil Armstrong never tried to be someone. He never tried to be anyone but himself. But he indeed did do something—something remarkable. And his name, like his footprint on the moon, will be with us forever because of it.
Maybe it’s fitting that we know his name but can’t quite remember the face. Maybe it’s the way we should remember him: forever the man behind the gold visor, the man who helped us all look at the moon and stars in a different way. I have a feeling that Armstrong would want our focus to not be on him, but on what he did—and his insistence that any number of us could’ve done it, too.
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