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This video, composed of NASA archive material and put together by Stephen Slater, is not just an excellent tribute to the first man to walk on the moon, but it's also a nostalgic snapshot of the early days of America's manned space program.
Video by DeepSky Videos
In an era where it's possible for the Curiosity Rover to send us a 3D image of Mars, and anyone can go online to browse a gallery of gorgeous satellite images of the earth, it's easy to forget how amazing it was when we first saw our planet from space.
"I'm looking at the earth," Armstrong says from orbit. "It's big and bright and beautiful."
In the Denver Post, astronaut Bruce McCandless II, who made the first untethered space walk in 1984, wrote a remembrance of Armstrong, who died August 25th at the age of 82. McCandless reflects:
With the passing of Neil Alden Armstrong, we have lost a modest, self-professed "pocket-protector" engineer with a willingness to take on an apparently impossible task, subjugate the associated risks, and make it look routine. America has been moving in the direction of risk avoidance, when what we need to do is look back at Neil and realize that great hitherto-unattained objectives are that way because they are risky or difficult.
Below, listen to Science Friday's farewell to Neil Armstrong:
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