Neil Armstrong Dies at 82

[IainC]

NBC managed to report it as Neil Young however

A sad day.

[Merusk]

I wondered how long before we started seeing these guys die off.  Sad day indeed.  He's lived around here as a recluse for a few decades now and I worked for his architect in school.  I always felt kind of bad he was so famous but just wanted to be left alone.   I'm going to guess his final resting place will be kept quiet, too.

[MuffinMan]

NBC managed to report it as Neil Young however

[Arthur_Parker]

 

[Sjofn]

Fake moon landing conspiracy theorists everywhere breathe a sigh of relief.

I am sad, though. 

[Kail]

Fake moon landing conspiracy theorists...

Few things piss me off like that crowd.

Sad.  I wish I was better at writing shit so I could communicate this better, but this is pretty heavy news, to me.  I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.  

[Hutch]

They should bury him on the moon 

[ghost]

Neil Young probably was the first man to walk on the moon.   

[Numtini]

I was 3 1/2. It's my first memory, so old I don't know if I remember or I remember being told about it, but I grew up on Apollo.

The real tragedy is we let his legacy sit idle.

I think this is the first person I never met who's death left me in tears.

[Shannow]

They should bury him on the moon  

+1

[ghost]

‎12 people have stood on the moon, now only 8 are alive. I'm sure they thought they were the beginning, not the end. All of the remaining guys are in their late 70s or early 80s now. I wonder if we'll do anything that remotely compares to what they did before they are all gone? RIP Neil Armstrong

[Fordel]

We ain't sending people anywhere exciting any time soon. I would love if we did, but it's not happening.


Not unless like China makes a moonbase or something. 

[ghost]

That would be just like Moonraker.  What a great flick.  Okay, not really.

[MahrinSkel]

Imagine how it would feel to be Eugene Cernan or Harrison Scmitt (Apollo 17), and face the prospect of being remembered only as the last men to walk on the moon...ever.

--Dave

[Surlyboi]

Fake moon landing conspiracy theorists...

Few things piss me off like that crowd.

Sad.  I wish I was better at writing shit so I could communicate this better, but this is pretty heavy news, to me.  I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.  

I still want to be an astronaut.

This man and all the others that walked on the moon are legends. We owe it to them to get out shit in gear and start exploring space proper again.

[ghost]

Imagine how it would feel to be Eugene Cernan or Harrison Scmitt (Apollo 17), and face the prospect of being remembered only as the last men to walk on the moon...ever.

--Dave

You're making the assumption that anyone knows who they are now.  

[MahrinSkel]

Imagine how it would feel to be Eugene Cernan or Harrison Scmitt (Apollo 17), and face the prospect of being remembered only as the last men to walk on the moon...ever.

--Dave

You're making the assumption that anyone knows who,they are now.   

I admit I had to look it up in Wikipedia.  But that will be their obituary, almost certainly (they're 77 and 78 now).

--Dave

[Khaldun]

I have tremendous enthusiasm for space exploration, and think we should be spending vastly more than we are on it. But...it might just be as far as human exploration goes, that these moon landings were the equivalent of the Vikings going to Newfoundland. Not the right time for it to be anything more: we don't have the sustaining incentive to endure the expense and difficulty of getting humans out of our gravity well, and we don't really have the technology either. It's going to take have some enormous need--and something that someone makes a profit off of--to sustain a human presence in space or elsewhere in the solar system. For the moment, I'd be content if we vastly accelerated the robotic exploration of our solar system and maybe even the extrasolar environment.

[Segoris]

Wow what a crappy year this has been for deaths.

[Kail]

I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.  

I still want to be an astronaut.

Well, sure, me too, I guess, I just know it's not happening now.  I'd always believed as a kid that this kind of thing would become easier and more common as the years went on, so people like me could maybe do this stuff, like science was this unstoppable force that could do anything and maybe I could be a part of it... and then a few decades of reality happened and now I'm working a cash register while science is busy trying to make my iPod smaller.

It just seemed like "astronaut" was kind of the pinnacle of mankind, the ideal of what we should be doing, someone who was out there pushing back the boundaries and doing crazy new stuff that we couldn't do yesterday, not to fuck over the next guy, not because it would improve his profit margins for the next shareholder review, but because doing shit that was impossible yesterday is how humanity rolls.  Astronauts aren't doing this stuff alone, there's buildings full of guys helping them, but the astronauts are kind of the iconic figurehead that represents all that, and Armstrong was the icon who represented all astronauts, for me, anyways.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah, I get what you were saying. I feel the same way.

My grandfather was one of those guys in one of those buildings helping the astronauts in the 80s. (I was there for the first shuttle launch, one of the most memorable days of my life.)
But yeah, the desire needs to be there and it's not and that sucks.

Someone on facebook linked this, which I found pretty awesome...

http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/30206152130/well-right-naturally-you-should-hate

America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Sad day, indeed.

I heard about this while waiting in line to get into a concert yesterday and there was some serious WTF-ery going on.  Group of young people in front of us, like early 20-somethings, asked us if we'd heard Armstrong had died.  One of the girls asked if he'd really been on the moon and had anyone else landed there?  I just gave her a somewhat baffled look and said "of course".  It's extra sad that someone even doubted we'd landed on the moon and more than once, at that. 

[01101010]

Sad day, indeed.

I heard about this while waiting in line to get into a concert yesterday and there was some serious WTF-ery going on.  Group of young people in front of us, like early 20-somethings, asked us if we'd heard Armstrong had died.  One of the girls asked if he'd really been on the moon and had anyone else landed there?  I just gave her a somewhat baffled look and said "of course".  It's extra sad that someone even doubted we'd landed on the moon and more than once, at that. 

Well to be fair... Moon landings aside from the first that broke the cherry are basically a footnote to anyone outside that era or the shuttle era. So really it does not surprise me in the least people might not know about the other landings or astronauts involved. They really do a poor job in teaching that stuff...at all.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Oh, I get that not knowing about the other landings and astronauts names isn't uncommon; I'd have to look them up myself, but at least I know they did happen.  Was the movie Apollo 13 so long ago that kids in their early 20s wouldn't have seen it or something?  Even that gives the info that men have walked on the moon, doesn't it?

[Xuri]

But...it might just be as far as human exploration goes, that these moon landings were the equivalent of the Vikings going to Newfoundland. Not the right time for it to be anything more: we don't have the sustaining incentive to endure the expense and difficulty of getting humans out of our gravity well, and we don't really have the technology either. It's going to take have some enormous need--and something that someone makes a profit off of--to sustain a human presence in space or elsewhere in the solar system. For the moment, I'd be content if we vastly accelerated the robotic exploration of our solar system and maybe even the extrasolar environment.

You know... Any day now, Curiousity will discover the remains of a Viking settlement on Mars. I mean, Vikings navigated by the STARS (well, at least one of them). Why wouldn't they go to Mars, right? Unfortunately those pesky Mars natives forced them to abandon their early Mars settlement, and they decided to go to the UK instead - which had more abbeys and stuff to raid.

Also, Neil Armstrong's death makes me a 

[pxib]

... Neil Armstrong always held an important place in my mental landscape...

The planet Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago; for four billion of those years, it has harbored life. Multicellular organisms arose a billion years ago; land animals, 400 million; anatomically modern humans, 200 thousand. In all that time, not one of those countless children of Earth ventured to another world, not until Neil Armstrong set foot upon a dusty alien landscape. Our form of life could now be said to belong to worlds beyond that which had borne us. And I was always awestruck to think that we lived in the 0.02% of human history, in the 0.0000009% of Earth history, when the pioneer of this new era walked amongst us.

And now we don't.

[lamaros]

I was so obsessed with leaving the earth when I was a kid that I made a 'game' out of space trivia (doesn't everyone know how far the different planets are from the sun, what?), but sensational blather like all that shits me. Individualistic rubbish.

I'm sure there is more than enough to be said for Armstrong that they don't have to exclusively focus on the fact he was the first person to walk on the moon. I dunno. Maybe it's just me. I feels wrong when people try to take a man's life and death and make an egotistical point from it. Maybe I'm just sad too.

Group of young people in front of us, like early 20-somethings, asked us if we'd heard Armstrong had died.  One of the girls asked if he'd really been on the moon and had anyone else landed there?  I just gave her a somewhat baffled look and said "of course".  It's extra sad that someone even doubted we'd landed on the moon and more than once, at that.  

Those darn young people, eh?

Reminds me The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice by Howard Rodman, in a strange inverted sense.

[Merusk]

Oh, I get that not knowing about the other landings and astronauts names isn't uncommon; I'd have to look them up myself, but at least I know they did happen.  Was the movie Apollo 13 so long ago that kids in their early 20s wouldn't have seen it or something?  Even that gives the info that men have walked on the moon, doesn't it?

Kids in their early 20's wouldn't have watched it because it was a Drama that came out in 1995. They'd have been 3-5 at the time.

Now consider that given the current state of our space program in another, oh, 15 years we'll have kids asking if we really sent people in to space once.

[Tebonas]

Don't you have schools to teach children about stuff like that?

[Murgos]

We have, at this moment, remotely controlled robots on Mars, some of which have been operating for years.  This is so much more a technological & scientific feat than sticking three guys on top of a controlled explosion and using physics to go ~240k miles that it's not even in the same ballpark.

When it's time to put people back on the moon, we will.  If we absolutely had to stick a human back on the moon, budget and safety be damned, I have no doubt that we could do it in less than a year.  At the moment though it makes no sense.  Anything a human can do there, now, can be done better by a robot.

What we do need though, is efficient earth to orbit transport, and hey, that's what we are focused on and making great strides at.

e: TL:DR; stop being so defeatist, space exploration is proceeding and doing marvelous things.

[Xuri]

Anything a human can do there, now, can be done better by a robot.

Except inspire young people to become astronauts, that is. :P

[lamaros]

Anything a human can do there, now, can be done better by a robot.

Except inspire young people to become astronauts, that is. :P

If you need extra inspiration to be an astronaut you're not worthy. Looking up at the night sky should be enough.

[kaid]

Anything a human can do there, now, can be done better by a robot.

Except inspire young people to become astronauts, that is. :P

If you need extra inspiration to be an astronaut you're not worthy. Looking up at the night sky should be enough.

Problem is when a large chunk of people look up at the night sky all they see is orange haze and one or two of the brightest stars and the moon.

[Sjofn]

That is the worst part about where we live, you can't really see the stars very well. It always makes me sad to look up and not see much.

[Merusk]

Don't you have schools to teach children about stuff like that?

Yur funnie.