Neil Whosis? What You Don't Know About The 1969 Moon
Landing
Forty-five years ago, this week, 123 million of us watched Neil
and Buzz step onto the moon. In 1969, we numbered about 200 million, so more
than half of America was in the audience that day. Neil Armstrong instantly
became a household name, an icon, a hero. And then — and this, I bet, you
didn't know — just as quickly, he faded away.
"Whatever Happened to Neil Whosis?" asked the Chicago
Tribune in 1974.
This is a missing chapter in the space exploration story. We
like to think that after Apollo 11, the first duo on the moon became legendary.
We know the names Aldrin and Armstrong now (or, at least many of us do), and we
imagine they've been honored and admired all this time, the way we honor our
favorite presidents, athletes, and war heroes. But that's not what happened.
In his new book, No
Requiem for the Space Age, Matthew Tribbe describes how only a year
after the landing, a vast majority of Americans couldn't remember Neil
Armstrong's name.
"One year ago
his name was a household word," said the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin.
But when the Bulletin asked its readers in 1970 to name the first man on
the moon, the guy who said, "One giant step for man ... ," 70 percent
of Philadelphians didn't know.
As Tribbe points
out, the New York Times did a similar study around that time, asking the
same question in an informal telephone poll, and in St. Louis, only 1 in 15
respondents got it right.
In Portland, Maine,
it was 1 out of 12.
In Milwaukee, 5 out
of 12.
In New York City, 8
out of 22.
The
World Almanac (a one volume, pre-Internet compendium of everything you needed to know) had Armstrong's name in the
index in 1970, but in 1971, Tribbe says, they took it out. You could still read
about the moon landing; Armstrong was still mentioned in the text, but while
early '60s hero-astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepard stayed in the index,
Armstrong didn't. Readers, apparently, weren't looking him up.
Armstrong, of course, noticed. "I had hoped, I think, that
the impact would be more far-reaching than it has been," he told The
Chicago Tribune. "The impact immediately was very great, but I was a
little disappointed that it didn't seem to last longer."
Same for Buzz Aldrin:
"I'm certainly a little disappointed," he told the Philadelphia
Sunday Bulletin in 1970. After a world tour, a White House dinner,
countless ticker-tape parades, Aldrin had left the space program, divorced,
skipped from job to job. By the late '70s, he wrote in his 2010 autobiography, Magnificent
Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, Aldrin was working at a
Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills — where he failed to
sell even one car in six months.
What happened? The
space program, so glamorous, so exciting for a short while, failed to keep the
public interested once the moon was conquered. As Tom Wolf writes in
his book The Right Stuff, by 1970, "Things were grim. ...
The public had become gloriously bored by space exploration."
Astronauts as a
group seemed a little lonesome, directionless. Harry Nilsson, the songwriter, wrote a tune in 1972 that went, "I wanted
to be a spaceman/ that's what I wanted to be/ But now that I am a spaceman/
nobody cares about me."
In his book, Matthew
Tribbe explores some reasons for this falling off. He says the orderly,
top-down, get-it-done, military/engineering style that created NASA (and was
largely responsible for its success), bumped into a more skeptical, more
mystical youth counterculture. Feats of engineering and technology didn't mesh
with the campus kids' enthusiasm for rebellion, self-expression, and a more
open-minded approach to race, gender and drugs. NASA's engineers seemed like a
tribe apart. They were widely admired — yet, over time, became defensive.
Tribbe also says the
space race was basically a Cold War exercise, a USSR vs. America dash to the
moon, and once the U.S. got there first, then second, then third, then fourth,
the race was over. People asked, "Why continue?" And NASA didn't have
a very good answer for that one.
Fantastic,
Beautiful, Fantastic, Beautiful
But most
intriguingly, Tribbe devotes a whole chapter of his book to, of all things,
rhetoric. People, he thinks, were eager to hear what it was like to escape the
Earth's atmosphere, to travel weightlessly, to touch down on an alien planet,
to be the first explorers to leave "home," and too often (much too
often), the astronauts talked about these things using the same words —
"beautiful," "fantastic" — over and over. If space
exploration was to be a grand adventure, it needed explorers who could take us
there, tell us how it felt, explorers who could connect with those of us who
can't (but want to) come along. Inarticulateness, Tribbe thinks, hurt the space
program.
And yet, though
Armstrong never got more eloquent, when he died last year his passing was
widely mourned; his name, his image, his talents celebrated. He was a hero
again. What changed? I think (and I'll talk about it in my next post) a lot of
the change had to do with language. Stay tuned.
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