The great NEIL ARMSTRONG was born on this day in 1930.
His name must be capitalized and bolded on first mention, along with appropriate bows and genuflections in the direction of Wapakoneta, Ohio.
Everyone remembers Neil Armstrong saying “The Eagle has landed,” but few remember Armstrong showing his true colors with his comments a few moments later, after excitable congratulations from Houston:
TRANQUILITY: That may have seemed like a very long final [landing] phase. The auto targeting was taking us right into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater-diameters around it, and it required flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.
Just a few casual notes on the landing, fellahs. Nothing to get worked up about. A little manual flying over boulders on the moon. Very much like shooting womp rats in Beggar’s Canyon back home.
Thing is, if you read the mission transcripts and listen to the audio, Neil Armstrong was not pulling the aw-shucks, phony-laconic pilot thing. He truly was just doing his job.
Then he flew back to Earth, taught aerospace engineering for awhile, and retired to his farm. What a stud.
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