For someone who’s famous for being the first human being to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong seems like one really down-to-Earth kind of guy.
Last April, I heard the former Apollo astronaut publicly speak in Cupertino at one of the Flint Center’s excellent Celebrity Forum talks. Armstrong displayed a kind of boyish-bashful grin to the audience as he humorously related his historic adventure as commander of the Apollo 11 mission.
I found the guy was genuinely funny. How funny? Let’s just say that if Armstrong’s gig as first man on the moon doesn’t pan out, he should definitely consider a career in stand-up comedy. His aw-shucks, self-deprecating sense of humor was just as entertaining as the whiny wit I’d seen sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld perform at the Flint earlier this year.
Neil Armstrong even told a comical story literally tying South Valley to mankind’s first manned lunar landing. I’d never heard this fascinating connection before until his Cupertino lecture.
Describing himself as a “technician” taking a four-day trip “service call” to the “job site” (the moon’s Sea of Tranquility where the Eagle lunar module touched down), he explained how he and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin had to complete several chores on that historic landing. NASA had the two set up various scientific measuring equipment.
One interesting experiment, the one connecting the moon directly to the South Valley, involved a gizmo scientists call a laser retroflector. Essentially, this apparatus is a “mirror” made up of reflecting surfaces much like the divider Botts dots planted in the middle of highways. The idea was that a laser beam bounced off the contraption could measure within mere inches the distance from the Earth to the moon.
Now here’s where the South Valley connection comes in. From some parts of Gilroy, San Martin and Morgan Hill, if you look toward San Jose and scan the north-eastern horizon and find Mount Hamilton, you’ll see a pair of white domed structures on the ridge crest. These buildings house the telescopes at the Lick Observatory, the modern world’s first mountain-top astronomical site.
After Armstrong and Aldrin had finished setting up the retroflector at the lunar landing base, University of California scientists back at the Lick Observatory shot up a laser beam from their mountain summit site toward the contraption.
“They were nice enough to give me some warning so I could get out of the way,” Armstrong informed his Flint Center audience in a droll comment.
Well, the laser successfully hit the lunar target as intended. And it did bounce back to the Earth. But for some reason, despite the precise alignment, the return beam didn’t arrive anywhere near the Lick Observatory. Who knows? Maybe that day back in 1969, some puzzled farmer out in Fresno found his poor cow crispy-fried from the lunar laser bolt.
For more than a week, scientists monkeyed with the experiment. Finally, some egghead figured out the original geographical survey coordinates – the longitude and latitude numbers – for Mount Hamilton were inaccurate. On Aug. 1, after the correct coordinates were used, the laser from the moon found its return trip to the Lick Observatory perfectly fine.
“So I’d just like you to know,” Armstrong told his Silicon Valley audience, “that the billions of dollars the American taxpayers spent on the Apollo program was really used to locate Mount Hamilton.”
That wisecrack got a bigger laugh than any of Seinfeld’s.
Unlike Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts, after Armstrong retired from NASA, he decided to keep a low media profile. He rarely makes public appearances. So his talk at the Flint Center last spring was a special treat for space history buffs like me.
Born in the Midwest in Wapakoneta, Ohio, he’ll celebrate his 75th birth on Aug. 5. He still seems in fine shape and mentally sharp. And even at that age, he still would like to return to the moon or Mars, he says.
No doubt after famously “taking one small step,” he had numerous potential commercial opportunities. He could have made millions hawking Tang breakfast drink on television. But he chose not to use his worldwide celebrity for financial gain.
That says a lot about the man’s integrity.
One thing I also admire about Armstrong is how he genuinely gave credit to the thousands of NASA employees and contractors who designed Apollo’s impressive engineering systems and built the Saturn V rockets and lunar module.
He told the audience he couldn’t have flown to the Moon – and, just as important, return to Earth – without all those people.
That says a lot about the man’s modesty.
This week on one of the toasty-hot July evenings the South Valley has been enjoying lately, I took a sunset stroll at the Ponds Park in Morgan Hill. Looking in the direction of Hollister, I saw the nearly full moon climb from the southeastern horizon. The great orb’s face looked big and bright and beautiful. Focusing my eyes on the northern hemisphere, I found the Sea of Tranquility.
At that spot now stands the remains of the Eagle module, as well as a retroflector once linking a spiderweb of light from the moon to Mount Hamilton. And of course, still on the windless lunar surface, Apollo bootprints in the dust will long last on the Tranquility Base site.
One day in the next 20 to 30 years, I pondered as I gazed on the moonrise, some astronaut might venture a visit to that historic place. Perhaps it will be a girl or boy now studying in one of the South Valley’s schools. Who knows what child now longs to make the journey?
When that future lunar explorer stands amidst the Apollo 11 debris, he or she might gaze down at the most famous footprint in history – the one marking “one giant leap for mankind.” And I hope at that moment the future lunar astronaut might give a nod of acknowledgment to Armstrong and Aldrin. They took the whole wide world to the moon back on July 20, 1969.
