Summary: Neil Armstrong’s death reminds us of the importance of never giving up on our urge to explore. In slipping the surly bonds of earth, and casting off the narrow shackles of homeworld, Neil Armstrong excited and transfixed an entire planet. With his “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” he enlarged the frontiers of the human mind and walked the firmament of heaven.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Neil Armstrong died today.
Unbidden, my mind flashed back to the words of John Gillespie Magee’s haunting sonnet High Flight:
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth....
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
Few indeed are those who have traveled so far, seen and done so much as those who ---like the Apollo astronauts--- have gone where most of us can barely imagine. We must hope that the spirit of exploration that united a country and sent Neil Armstrong and his companions to the Moon and brought them safely back to Earth has not died with him.
Of all the possible generational divides in this country, perhaps one of the most significant is that which distinguishes those for whom lunar exploration is essentially an historical curiosity from us who can remember watching Neil Armstrong take his “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” on the lunar surface. No human being had ever gone so far from home as the three astronauts of Apollo 11, and to hear their voices and see their images from a quarter million miles away is an experience many of us who were alive at the time will never forget.
To a child in his sixth year, as I was in that summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon were amazing things. To my parents and grandparents who had lived through depression, world war, and Cold War, and who had even more of a basis for comparison than did I, that all too brief lunar ramble was nothing less than a reaffirmation of all those things which have made America special. A man from the nation Abraham Lincoln so famously described as “the last, best hope of Earth,” had taken our Star-Spangled Banner to the Moon.
Since then, it has become fashionable in many circles to pooh-pooh and denigrate the amazing work of America’s space program. On one side of the debate are those who demand that we should turn our back on our space program because “we have too much to do here on earth.” On the other are those who believe that spending on space is frivolous, that the money we spend on NASA could be better spent building bigger, better bombs, or increasing tax cuts for fat cats.
Such views ought to frighten us worse than bombs. A society that turns in upon itself, that abandons the fundamentally human urge to explore, ultimately dooms itself and its posterity. If René Descartes could proclaim cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) we may equally proclaim “we explore, therefore we are.” As we expand the frontiers of human exploration, we expand the frontiers of the human mind. Those who would close down our exploration of space would be happy to close our minds as well, shutting down not only the Curiosity rover on Mars, but also the endless curiosity in our own souls.
Yet, I remain hopeful that most of us still look to the skies with wonder, fascination, and a desire to follow once again in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong and all of those who, for a brief shining moment, cast off the narrow shackles of homeworld and walked the firmament of heaven.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He remembers vividly the grainy, crackly, staticky images from the Moon that transfixed him and the world on that long-ago July day in 1969, and those words on touchdown: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The views expressed herein are Mr. Marchand’s own, and not those of any organization, entity, agency, or body with which he is affiliated.
