Late great engineers: Neil Armstrong - reluctant American hero

In its coverage of the arrival of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon, the New York Times of 21^st July 1969 opted not for a tone of triumph, but for one of dignified statement of fact. The editors, perhaps sensing that this was the one story that needed no journalistic embellishment, calmly stated that “men have landed and walked on the moon.” The newspaper referred to the mission’s civilian commander simply as Mr Armstrong. If you cast your eye to the top of that news column, you’ll see that the writer’s name is John Noble Wilford, whose copy lives up to his middle name. The more you strip this story to its bare bones, the less linguistic fanfare deployed, the fewer adjectives used, the more noble the story becomes.

This almost muted announcement is strangely in keeping with the character of the mission commander Neil Armstrong, described in a statement released by his family on his death in 2012 as a ‘reluctant American hero’. He was the man who admitted he may have fluffed his lines on stepping out of the Lunar Module and who modestly hoped that history would forgive him the error by retrospectively inserting the word ‘a’ into his statement – “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – so that it would make sense. The world reacted by saying that Armstrong, that most famous of all-American super-heroes, couldn’t have made such a mistake: there had been a crackle of static in the audio transmission, his speech patterns had created an unfortunate elision, we weren’t listening properly. But Armstrong, a quiet and humble man (often mistaken for a recluse), is quoted in James R Hansen’s biography of the astronaut First Man as admitting to his human fallibility, while justifying the slip in saying: “I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and certainly the ‘a’ was intended.” We now put the ‘a’ in square brackets. We all know what he meant. He was also a man that wanted to be judged on his life’s work, not one moment of ‘fireworks.’