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briandmyers · 4472 days ago · link · · parent · post: Good bye to Neil Armstrong. The first person to set foot on the moon. He died today at 82.
By coincidence, I am halfway though reading "The Right Stuff", which tells the tale of the Mercury program (which led directly to Gemini and then Apollo). Neil's achievement was the act which ultimately restored the American space program's confidence - the Soviets had beaten the USA in the space race at almost every turn until then, but Apollo was finally something they could not match. In a way, it's too bad the Soviets didn't pursue their own manned Moon missions - we almost certainly would have had men on Mars by now, if the competitive pressure from the USSR had been maintained.