What Neil Armstrong Knew Is What We Never Will
By Charles P. Pierce
at 1:09AM

JACKSONVILLE — Somewhere in my house, most likely in the drawer containing all the stuff I can't find, there's an old three-by-five card containing the only autograph I have ever sought. It belongs to Sir Edmund Hillary, credited with being the first man to climb Mount Everest. I saved the card for more than forty years because there was only one other autograph I wanted on it. It was the only autograph worthy of sharing space on that card. But that other person was shy and didn't talk very much and, on Sunday, in a quiet moment in a very noisy time, a period of its history in which his country's ambition is a small and withered thing, Neil Armstrong died at the age of 82.
My god, we almost lost him twice even before he made Cronkite's palms sweat on TV in 1969. In 1966, as commander of Gemini VI, with his spacecraft docked with a booster rocket, a thruster froze in the ON position, and the whole jerryrigged assemblage started to spin so wildly that Armstrong and his crewmate, Dave Scott, nearly passed out from the torque. Finally, the two men managed to gain control. Then, during his training for his Apollo XI mission, Armstrong's lunar-landing trainer quit on him a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Armstrong ejected just before the vehicle crashed. That was the great gift that he had — that great icy core of knowing that there was always something else to try, that a man can outthink his fate, on the spot, if he knows what he knows and when to apply it. There was in this guy a terribly fierce opponent for mischance.

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