Astronauts don't die on Saturdays

The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, dies

History loves the first, and Neil Armstrong was clearly one of its favorites. The American answer to the Soviet Gagarin, he did everything to distance himself from that most important achievement in his life. “I don’t like that most people know me as the same guy from the moon. It seems to me that deep down we all want to be celebrated not for some bright flashes of our biography, but for the sum of everything that has been done, created and said," he said in a recent interview. But the love of history is inevitable and cruel. As long as there have been history books, Neil Armstrong has been reserved in them as the first man on the moon.

Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He spent his childhood near Dayton, the birthplace of one of the two Wright brothers. This neighborhood meant a lot to Armstrong - in few of his interviews he constantly remembered it. On the flight to the Moon itself, he took with him a fragment of the propeller and wing of the plane of the legendary brothers.

Since school, Armstrong had palate pain. “When I was at school, we only talked about pilots. And sometimes about girls,” he said. At the age of 15, Armstrong already received his pilot's license - before he even had a driver's license. In 1947, Neal went to study as an aeronautical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana. He also entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but refused to study there - Massachusetts seemed to him, the future conqueror of the Moon, too far from home.

Armstrong studied under the famous "Holloway Plan" - a program in which young men received a free education in exchange for three years of service in the US Navy. After two years of study, Neal was drafted into the Army and within just a few months, qualified as a naval aviator, he found himself on the front lines of the Korean War. During one of the flights in September 1951, his plane was shot down, but the pilot was able to bring the car to friendly territories, where he ejected. In total, during his service, Neil Armstrong flew 78 combat missions and received several awards.

By the way, Edwin Aldrin was supposed to be the first to set foot on the Moon - this is exactly what was written down in the mission plan. But it turned out that the internal structure of the lunar module did not allow this to be done - the hatch opened inward in such a way that it prevented the pilot from getting out (he had to climb over the commander).

After three years of service, he returned to study at Purdue University. “I remember when I returned to college after the Korean War, my peers seemed so young to me that I didn’t even know what to talk to them about,” he said in an interview.

In 1955, Armstrong began working for NACA - the predecessor of NASA - as a test pilot. He has worked with some of the world's fastest aircraft, including the X-15, which is still considered the fastest manned aircraft. The future captain of Apollo 11 flew on more than two hundred experimental machines. In 1962, Neil Armstrong joined the astronaut team. This significant event coincided with a tragedy in his personal life - his daughter Karen died after a long illness.

Neil Armstrong made his first flight in 1966 on board the Gemini 8 spacecraft. The main goal of the mission was docking with a satellite, and together with his partner David Scott, Armstrong managed to complete it. However, the flight ended in failure - some time after undocking, the device began to rotate uncontrollably. As it turned out, as a result of a short circuit, one of the shunting engines did not turn off at the specified time. Using braking engines, Armstrong managed to stabilize the device, but, according to the rules, he was obliged to return the ship to Earth. As a result, most of the tasks were not completed, among them Scott's spacewalk.

According to his colleagues, Armstrong always gave the impression of an unbending and cold-blooded person, capable of acting intelligently even in the most critical situations. There have been many stories about him (unlike the story with Mr. Gorski , real ones) since his days as a test pilot, but the most striking case was in 1968: Armstrong worked on the LLTV - the device on which the Apollo astronauts practiced landing to the earth's satellite. During one of these flights, the device lost control. Armstrong tried to regain control of the car until the last moment, but at an altitude of 30 meters he ejected, as it turned out, at the last moment - the incident report said that a delay of 0.5 seconds could have cost the astronaut his life. Having miraculously escaped death (he only had his tongue bitten through), Armstrong immediately after landing went to write a report about what happened. “We had to finish the job,” Neil said after this incident.

On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, carrying Neil Armstrong (commander), Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, set off for the Moon. They reached the Earth's satellite on July 20. Collins remained in orbit, and Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility. "Houston, this is Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed," the ship's commander said the famous words. And then, leaving the ship, Armstrong said live on air the even more famous phrase “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The team's return was triumphant, but after the second flight Armstrong did not return to space. More precisely, they say, they didn’t give it to him - they saved him as a symbol. Just two years later, Neil Armstrong left the American Space Agency to take a teaching position at the University of Cincinnati. Since the early 90s, he went into business, lived quite modestly and even a little secretly, avoiding politics and the press.

On August 25, 2012, Neil Armstrong died at the age of 82, presumably due to complications from coronary artery surgery. US President Barack Obama called Armstrong one of "America's greatest heroes." Obama's election rival, Republican Mitt Romney , said that "with incredible courage and inexhaustible love for his country, he went where no man had gone before."

It is unlikely that Armstrong himself would have liked all these pretentious words. His family's proposal in the official death notice seems much more natural. They invited everyone who wanted to honor the memory of Neil to go outside in the evening, look at the Moon and wink at it. After all, somewhere there, almost 400 thousand kilometers from the Earth, in the gray dust there were traces of that very small first step of a person whose death is a huge loss for humanity.

PS In a 2011 interview with Esquire, Armstrong said a wonderful phrase: “Astronauts don’t die on Saturdays. At least I don’t know of a single case.” Such a sad irony - now we know that he was wrong.

Andrey Konyaev

Astronauts don't die on Saturdays

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