The Day I Shook a Space Traveler’s Hand

Author’s note- I came back to re-read this in mid 2018 and realised how much vitriol I included in this piece.  I will leave it unedited as I think this serves as testament to how much a person can change.  I read the judgemental words I wrote and was shocked and a little horrified.  I’m happy to say those words no longer become me.  Were I to write this today, it would be a very different tone.  

I went to an event at a local science centre recently and on display was a pair of gloves from a space suit worn by Neil Armstrong, the first human being in the history of the species to step onto a celestial body other than Earth, and I remembered the day I shook the hands that had filled those gloves.

Mr Armstrong”s tentative first footfall on the Moon is arguably the biggest “first” to have ever occurred.  Columbus discovering America was big for Europe but there were already people here.  Marco Polo standing in the court of the Chinese Emperor was a huge discovery for Italy, but you can”t really ”discover” a place where there is already a system of government.  Lewis and Clarke set out into the wild unknown but again where they went was just new to them not new to the people that lived there.

All of the previous explorers throughout human history, those who plumbed the depths of the Marianas trench and those who ventured into the unimaginably strange world of the quantum and the first humans to set foot on new continents ages ago, did so within the bounds of this sphere.  Many faced dangers, many faced incredible hardship, but never in all of human history have three people been so far from home and help.

Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins were three explorers that did something utterly unprecedented- they surpassed all other exploratory expeditions that had ever set out for strange and unknown lands.  They didn”t set our for a place hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of miles away.  When this trio inserted into lunar orbit they were over 230,000 miles from home and utterly alone.

These men had come to a place with no sky.  The only air and water was in cans.  The lifeless expanse of empty space surrounded them with only dead rock to support them.  This was no mission to discover new lands or peoples or trade routes where if something went wrong you still had a chance of getting out of it, where you could use local resources to survive.  There was nothing there to keep them alive should even the tiniest bit of equipment fail them.  Everything around them would kill them if the ship or their suits failed.  They were more alone than anyone had ever been with only thin sheets of metal and mylar between their skins and certain death.

There was no possibility of help.  They had to rely on themselves and their equipment that had never been tested on the surface of another world.

We overuse the word hero today.  We will say anyone is a hero if they overcome a little bit of adversity or do something slightly out of the ordinary.  But to go to an entirely new place in the cosmos, where quite literally no man has gone before, and to do so without a safety net, without a means of escape, and without any precedent for what may happen when you get there in the name of science and discovery is absolutely a heroic feat. The men of Apollo 11 deserve the title of ”hero.”

Hero and celebrity worship as it exists in modern culture is sickening and demeaning.  We make people famous for no reason and they are elevated in our society in a way that shames and diminishes us all for the vapidity of this idiom of modern “culture.”  We worship empty husks of useless people who contribute nothing and concern ourselves with the minutiae of their shallow lives to distract from the monotony of our own.

What we call heroes today are anything but.  A sports player is no hero, he or she contributes nothing to society other than entertainment.  The same for actors and all the other people we see on the large and small screens.  There is nothing wrong with being an accomplished athlete or actor and providing entertainment as a service but there is rarely, if ever, anything heroic about it despite the hyperbole the marketing division festoons their accomplishments with.

But there was a time, in the late 1960s, when the world watched breathlessly as real heroes, intelligent, hardy men, braved the exhilarating dangers of riding the very edge of scientific discovery and pushing that boundary a little farther by stepping foot into that which was completely unknown.

A hero does something incredible, often at great risk to his own safety or even life.  A hero does what he does for reasons other than income or renown; they do it for the sake of doing it, because it”s right, because it”s necessary.  A hero adds something powerful to the human condition.

When I saw the gloves on exhibition I felt close to that momentous and unrepeatable moment in history.  No matter how far the human species goes in this universe, the moment Mr Armstrong set foot on a body other than Earth can never be surpassed.  It was the first of all the future firsts in space exploration.

The first person to set foot on Mars or another planet is still a runner up.  The first person to leave the solar system and the first person to visit another star system will be heroes, but they won”t be the first to do something no other human has ever done as Mr Armstrong did.

On 16AUG2011 I was stationed, as a civilian contractor, at FOB Phoenix in Kabul, Afghanistan and Neil Armstrong was visiting as part of a USO tour.  I was unable to attend his presentation due to my work duties and I was dismayed for the lost opportunity.  I knew I would likely not get another chance to see this living milestone of human achievement.

The morning passed and the presentation had ended an hour ago when our lunch hour came. I walked over the to the dining facility, or DFAC.  Mr Armstrong was seated with a group of officers and senior enlisted personnel having his meal and conversing.  I felt it was the height of presumption to interrupt but I did so anyway.  I apologised to the group, though apologising for something you did deliberately and knowingly is rather disingenuous, and turned to Mr Armstrong.

We spoke briefly and I asked to shake his hand.  His demeanour was humble and kind and he seemed genuinely happy to talk to me.  While we spoke for less than a minute he was fully engaged with me and I felt honoured to have been able to pass words with a human being who had stood on another world.  He even invited me to join the group and sit at the table but I decided it was better to not push my luck with the military personnel.

53 weeks later the news reported Mr Armstrong”s death and I was uncharacteristically moved by the death of a famous person.  But he was no celebrity as we call them today.  He avoided fame and the limelight his whole life and sought none of the vacuous things society craves of our idols.  He was from another time, shaped from a different mould and I was grateful to meet him and express my appreciation for the monumental risks he accepted in order to accomplish his mission and move humanity farther out into the cosmos.

The sight of those gloves brought that moment back to me.  It was the only time in my life I’d felt awe at simply meeting another person.  Those gloves touched another world at the same time they touched the hand of someone pushing against the curtain of human ignorance and who was taking our species” first, small steps, though it was a giant leap for us all, into the larger Universe.

“I think we”re going to the moon because it”s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It”s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we”re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.” -Neil Armstrong