I wasn’t even a distant thought in my parents’ minds when you landed on the Moon in the summer of 1969. In fact, my parents themselves were barely old enough to know what the Moon was, much less grasp the importance of what it was that you did at that time.
I never had the privilege of meeting you, talking to you, or even seeing you in person. I only know you by virtue of the Internet and YouTube, and what history books have to say about you. I know that you are a hero. A legend. And perhaps that’s all I need.
When you stepped out of your lander and onto the lunar surface, you became the first person to touch another world. You became immortal, along with the 12 words you uttered for the entire world to hear: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
With those words you inspired millions of kids to want to be astronauts when they grew up, to chase the stars as you did. You triggered millions of imaginations to think about what it would be like—how cool it would be!—to help settle a terraforming colony on Mars or commit to the incredibly long voyage out of the quiet suburban neighborhood of our solar system and into the brilliant cacophonous metropolitan sprawl of our galaxy.
And now you’re gone.
You died at the end of a week that has so carefully mirrored weeks past it’s disappointing: a week rife with political ineffectiveness and opportunism, a week in which two separate mass shootings happened within hours of each other in two major cities; a week in which the world yet again threatened to tear apart at the seams.
We could really use a hero. We could use a worldview-shattering feat of awesomeness that brings all of humankind together—one not sponsored by McDonalds or Coca-Cola or brought to us in HD by NBC. We could use another manned Moon landing right about now.
I don’t mean to put all of this on you, Mr. Armstrong—after all, you are just settling into your new occupation of being dead, and you deserve a death as quiet and peaceful and unassuming as your later living years were. You were just immensely important to us all. You still are.
“Neil Armstrong was the spiritual repository of spacefaring dreams and ambitions. In death, a little bit of us all dies with him,” astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson tweeted on Saturday. Bill Nye, the popular children’s science presenter, said, “Neil Armstrong raised the expectations, the hopes and dreams, of every human on earth.”
Your crewmate on Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin, was the one who moved me to write this letter.
“Whenever I look at the Moon I am reminded of that precious moment, over four decades ago, when Neil and I stood on the desolate, barren, yet beautiful, Sea of Tranquility, looking back at our brilliant blue planet Earth suspended in the darkness of space,” he wrote. “My friend Neil took the small step but giant leap that changed the world and will forever be remembered as a historic moment in human history.”
I wish we—the whole of humanity—could pack in the petty politics for just one weekend and do something truly fantastic. I wish we could overcome all our privileges and stop seeing our fellow humans as “others” to be feared and hated. I wish we could turn our gaze towards the stars once more.
I wish you could be there to witness it when it finally happens.
Thanks for the universe of possibilities.