Editorial: America should shoot for the stars again
The moment Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, he became slightly otherworldly in our eyes, cloaked in a golden aura that did not sit easily with his shy and private ways.
But Armstrong understood the power of that aura and used it, sparingly, over the years for a cause he believed in fully: human space exploration. One of his last high-profile public appearances, in 2010, was to testify before a Congressional committee against the Obama administration’s plan to redirect NASA’s efforts away from human exploration of space and toward more basic long-term science research.
That, Armstrong said, would be “devastating.”
NASA’s first priority, he said with a touch of the same poetry he brought to his first step on the moon, should be “learning to sail on this new ocean.”