One Giant Leap Neil Armstrong's Stellar American Journey

ChapterOne To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, as brothers who know they are truly brothers. Archibald MacLeish For one crowning moment we were creatures of the cosmic ocean, a moment that a thousand years hence may be seen as the signature of our century.... Buzz Aldrin During that one bright shining instant in July 1969, humankind enjoyed a collective jolt that transcended the quotidian anxieties of life. Earthmen had succeeded where Icarus failed, flying toward the sun without melting their wings, setting foot in the heavens, on the shore of another world. Suddenly, as two of our number walked on an alien orb a quarter-million miles in space and stared with awe and longing back at our blue-green world, we realized where we were; that man was alone, precariously clinging to a spinning ball in the vastness of space. Through their eyes and the black-and-white flickering television images of them, and the images of ourselves they sent back, we finally had a fledgling "you are here" map of the universe in our collective mind. Even if the cynical view of the launch of Apollo 11, which said it was just spectacle to take our minds off the Vietnam War and the other troubles of the day, was true, it was nevertheless pageant on the grandest of scales, and the whole world reacted in kind. More than a million people were drawn to northern Florida's eastern coast to bask in proximity to the capes where the phenomenal voyage was to begin. Cape Kennedyas it was called for a decade until it was quietly decided the nation had gone overboard naming things after the slain presidentwas the space center, a hive of frenetic activity, where thousands labored to fulfill John Kennedy's promise to send a man to the moon and bring him safely back before the end of the seventh decade of the twentieth century. In the days and weeks before blastoff a ragtag army assembled, ranging from drug-addled nomadic hippies to families on vacation to retirees in campers. Vehicles of all sorts sported American flag stickersgenerally taken to mean to send a message that the occupants were against the people who were against the war in Vietnam. The flag stickers were fairly ubiquitous that summer; sixty-eight million of them had been distributed via copies of theReader's Digestthe previous winter. Pilgrims descended on the area, erecting tent cities, drawing their recreational vehicles, jalopies, high-finned Cadillacs, and VW minibuses in circles, camping around the sulphurous estuaries, mangroves, and sand dunes surrounding the cape. Lotus-like, they emptied grocery store shelves, culled 7-Elevens of beer and soda, depleted the region's McDonalds of their last all-beef patties, and finally, like any voracious army, turned to the land for succour, harvesting grapefruit trees and orange bushes and provoking outraged local farmers to brandish shotguns. Bars were sold out of liquor, and drugstores out of suntan oil. Motel rooms had been spoken for many months earlier. Even the nineteen state governors who attended were forced to stay sixty-five miles away in Daytona Beach. Service stations posted NO GAS signsan eerie foreshadowing of oil shortages that would roil America in the seventies. The city of Cocoa Beach parked a gasoline tanker and posted an armed guard behind city hall to supply police cars. Making matters more desperate, the incredible tangle of traffic that clogged the highways for miles around made timely resupply difficult. A blazing sun, eighty-five-degree heat, and 75 percent humidity begat frayed tempers, uncountable fender benders, and endless lines of crippled cars andWagener, Leon is the author of 'One Giant Leap Neil Armstrong's Stellar American Journey', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312875923 and ISBN 0312875924.