Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, has died at age 82, NBC News has learned

Twitter | 08/25/12 | Kevin Davis

[KevinDavis]

Saw this on Twitter.. But is true Neil Armstrong has died..

[Army Air Corps]

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong. Another childhood hero meets his maker.

[real saxophonist]

I often think the same thing.

[chimera]

It was Alan Shepard but it was the first Mercury flight, another guy with the Right Stuff.

[DemforBush]

When I was a little kid, all I wanted to be was an astronaut. They were all my heroes, but perhaps none more than Armstrong. To be the first human being to set foot on another planetary body (or moon, to be specific). Wow, just wow.

RIP to an American hero.

[ReformationFan]

RIP to a legendary American hero.

[chimera]

You know what is a bummer, there has been an entire generation of people who were born and grown into adulthood that have never ,ever seen a man walk on the Moon live on TV.

It's worse than that even. A lot of them, maybe even a majority, don't believe it really happened. They've been hoodwinked by "faked moon landing" conspiracy theory wackos. Those people who push that lie are a disgrace, and they dishonor the memory and achievements of not only those who flew those missions, but the thousands who directly worked on the programs that made them a reality.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Copied from the Interwebz Tubes - apologies for the caps.

ARMSTRONG’S SECRET, GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOU SMILE

In case you didn’t already know this little tidbit of trivia, it might make you chuckle when you read it.

ON JULY 20, 1969, AS COMMANDER OF THE APOLLO 11 LUNAR MODULE, NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO SET FOOT ON THE MOON.
HIS FIRST WORDS AFTER STEPPING ON THE MOON, “THAT’S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND,” WERE TELEVISED TO EARTH AND HEARD BY MILLIONS.

BUT JUST BEFORE HE RE-ENTERED THE LANDER, HE MADE THE ENIGMATIC REMARK “GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY”.

MANY PEOPLE AT NASA THOUGH IT WAS A CASUAL REMARK CONCERNING SOME RIVAL SOVIET COSMONAUT.
HOWEVER, UPON CHECKING, THERE WAS NO GORSKY IN EITHER THE RUSSIAN OR AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAMS.

OVER THE YEARS MANY PEOPLE QUESTIONED ARMSTRONG AS TO WHAT THE ‘GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY’ STATEMENT MEANT, BUT ARMSTRONG ALWAYS JUST SMILED.
ON JULY 5, 1995, IN TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA , WHILE ANSWERING QUESTIONS FOLLOWING A SPEECH, A REPORTER BROUGHT UP THE 26- YEAR-OLD QUESTION TO ARMSTRONG. THIS TIME HE FINALLY RESPONDED.

MR. GORSKY HAD DIED, SO NEIL ARMSTRONG FELT HE COULD NOW ANSWER THE QUESTION.

IN 1938, WHEN HE WAS A KID IN A SMALL MID-WESTERN TOWN, HE WAS PLAYING BASEBALL WITH A FRIEND IN THE BACK YARD. HIS FRIEND HIT THE BALL, WHICH LANDED IN HIS NEIGHBOR’S YARD BY THEIR BEDROOM WINDOW.

HIS NEIGHBORS WERE MR. AND MRS. GORSKY. AS HE LEANED DOWN TO PICK UP THE BALL, YOUNG ARMSTRONG HEARD MRS.GORSKY SHOUTING AT MR. GORSKY.
“SEX! YOU WANT SEX?! YOU’LL GET SEX WHEN THE KID NEXT DOOR WALKS ON THE MOON!”

TRUE STORY.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

True? I don’t know. The Interwebz Tubes contain lots of false stuff. If you are interested, find out for us. In the meantime, I like it.

[BradyLS]

Excellent observation.

I remember as a kid folks saying things like “We can send a man to the moon...” and bewail that no money was being spent for X, Y, or Z.

Now we spend money we don’t have for X, Y, and Z by the truckload, have stopped sending men higher than cruising altitude, and I can’t think of a single problem that’s been solved by it.

[chimera]

Mike Collins was originally slated to be the CM pilot on Apollo 9, but had to have back surgery, which bumped him to CM pilot on Apollo 11. He never was to have been a mission commander on either flight and thus would not have been a moonwalker, since the mission commander was tapped to be the first one out of the LM for the lunar EVA.

The initial Apollo flight schedule had Apollo 11 doing essentially what Apollo 10 did, orbit the moon and test out the LM in lunar orbit, do a lunar orbit rendezvous with the CM/SM, and simulate a landing abort by separating the LM landing and ascent stages while in orbit on the "low pass" near the surface. The schedule was bumped up to Apollo 11 making the lunar landing because the LM was not available on schedule to do the original flight plan, which had an additional flight in Earth orbit slated to test the LM at higher altitudes in Earth orbit. That would have made the first landing attempt Apollo 12, and so Pete Conrad might very well have been the First Man. But the schedule was rearranged to cover for the lack of a LM to test earlier on in the schedule. They pushed the Apollo lunar orbit flight back to Apollo 8, which flew without the unavailable LM, and made Apollo 9 the first test of the LM in Earth orbit. That cleared the way for Apollo 10 to be the LM test in lunar orbit, and Apollo 11 as the first landing attempt.

[MacNaughton]

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blgorsky.htm
Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!
Neil Armstrong’s first words upon setting foot on the surface of the moon: ‘Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!’ An apocryphal footnote to the history of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Description: Urban legend
Circulating since: 1995
Status: False, but very funny!!! - If you haven’t read it before, go to the link above.
A related urban legend popular among Muslims claims that Armstrong heard a voice say “Allahu akbar” (”God is great”) the moment he stepped on the moon and was inspired to convert to Islam. Never happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Abernathy
... On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, July 15, 1969, civil rights leader (NAACP, SCLC) Ralph David Abernathy arrived at Cape Canaveral with several hundred members of the poor people to protest spending of government space exploration, while many Americans remained poor. He was met by Thomas O. Paine, the Administrator of NASA, whom he told that in the face of such suffering, space flight represented an inhuman priority and funds should be spent instead to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the homeless.” Paine told Abernathy that the advances in space exploration were child’s play compared to the tremendously difficult human problems of society, and told him that “if we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.” On the day of the launch, Abernathy led a small group of protesters to the restricted guest viewing area of the space center and chanted, “We are not astronauts, but we are people.” ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY&feature=youtu.be
Whitey on the moon - gil scott-heron
uploaded by nublackmusic on Nov 14, 2008
video run length = 00:01:29 minutes
A humorous little poem by the great Gil Scott-Heron. Lets see if president Obama will reorganize and re-prioritize the spending of taxpayers dollars. Will food, Shelter and Other social issues take precedence over the military industrial complex and Moon Rocks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCn10YWsY1Q
New NASA goal = Muslim outreach - Bolden
published on Jun 3, 2012 by markedmanner
video run length = 00:01:31 minutes
In a June 2010 interview with Arab news outlet Al Jazeera, new NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that among his goals for outreach were to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, to expand NASA’s international relationships, and to reach out to and engage the Muslim world, making better known its historic contribution to science.

[GnL]

RIP, Neil Armstrong, from one Boilermaker to another.

[Mad Dawgg]

"I read an article the other day where Neil Armstrong was quoted at the time of the first launch. Houston was worried that a technical problem would delay or prevent the launch, and Armstrong, who was already in the capsule, was quoted as saying: "Why don’t you fix your little problem and then let’s light this candle.” He was a great American, a courageous pioneer, and will truly be missed. Sincere condolences to his family."

No, that was Alan Shepard. First American in space.

[combat_boots]

Yes.

Godspeed.

[BradyLS]

Very true! Let us hope we hares not rest for too much longer! Turtles are slowly coming into view!

[af_vet_rr]

A national treasure and a hero from my childhood ! I cant imagine what it would take to fly an X-15 and then follow it up with walking on the moon!!

I watched him land on the Moon on TV when I was...quite a bit younger, then got to meet him later on when I was in the Air Force. A really nice guy, but you could tell there was something different about him, he just had an air of confidence around him, and a very sharp mind, even though he never seemed arrogant or cocky.

A lot of people remember his piloting skills, and they were incredible, but I knew a guy who worked with him at Edwards who said it was his engineering skills that were more impressive to him.

Everybody remembers his X-15 flights, and his Gemini and Apollo missions, but a lot of people forget that he was in a couple of programs that helped lay the groundwork for future NASA and USAF projects - the USAF's Man in Space Soonest program in the late 50s (he was the only future astronaut out of the program - most others went back into military flight testing). Then the USAF's X-20 DynaSoar, where he contributed to some of the engineering, as well as being one of the astronauts selected. Had he not left in '62 to join NASA's next astronaut group and had the X-20 not been canceled the following year, his career might have been quite different - the X-20 helped lay the groundwork for the Space Shuttle and for the X-37B, which recently landed after over a year in space, and for projects that will never be known to the public.

[Reily]

On July 21 1969 a MAN was on the moon .......and a pig was in a lake in Massachusetts!

Shame on Massachusetts for continuing to send that miscreant anywhere but to jail!

[Leo58]

He did more for America than any 500 politicians.

[kabar]

A great man who never tried to capitalize on his fame. They don’t make them that way any more. A true American hero.

[AFreeBird]

R.I.P. Eagle.

[Berlin_Freeper]

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon...