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Wow, it really is an an amazing speech.
Wait, but Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin weren’t the only two crew members. What if other people had died, too?
What “Awesome work” did Gawker do here? The speech has been available for a long time.
Related: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/12/opinio…
@2 – Then the world would have plummeted into chaos as President Nixon, too dumbfounded to say anything, just stared into the camera, unable to ad-lib the name “Michael Collins”.
With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, the lunar landing seems like a foregone conclusion. We learn in school that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people on the moon, period, and then the Vietnam War ended in 1974 and then Ronald Reagan got elected and then…. This speech really pulls into sharp focus the bravery of those two and the audacity of the endeavor as a whole.
Beautiful. Thank the maker he didn’t need to read it.
@5, way back in the era of teletype terminals and remote mainframe computers, we played a lunar-gravity-simulation game called LEM where you had to trigger short engine blasts to slow your descent to the moon’s surface and land gently enough to prevent damage, without running out of fuel. Though that was some years after the first real lunar landing, it helped convince me of the near-miraculous nature of the whole moon effort. I never could understand how that whole ungainly contraption could stay upright for landing, or the ridiculous dented-golf-ball top half separate and ascend to rendezvous with the command module.
@2, Armstrong and Aldrin were the ones in the lander module, and presumably the thought was that Collins could still manage to get back from lunar orbit. Armstrong nearly used up their fuel trying to land, and the entire landing was the part no one had ever done before.
@3, true, this speech did make the rounds during the recent 40th anniversary of the landing…
Is anyone else old enough to hear Nixon’s voice reading this in their heads? It sounds just like him. Creep-o.
@9. I thought it was Nixon’s voice but it was just an old David Frye performance.
No, I hear Nixon’s voice too – unfortunately, I sometimes still hear it even when I’m not reading an old speech of his.
I second @3. This has been going around the blogs today as if it were some awesome brand new piece of journalistic archaeology, which it isn’t.
That said, it gives me chills to read it, followed by nausea at the idea that it’d be Nixon’s voice reading it. It was bad enough to have to listen to Dubya at the Columbia memorial ceremony, and Reagan at the Challenger ceremony.
9,yes! 10, oh wait, you’re right!
And 11, yeah, I was just imitating him in my kitchen the other day. Pretty much the David Frye voice.
“Pray with me, Henry!”