It's a story that we hoped we'd never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth's Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself -- along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It's still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth's atmosphere, he's still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We'll miss him.
[Image credit: NASA Apollo Archive]
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Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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NBC | Email this | Comments Of all the things the United States has done in space, the Apollo 11 mission is the most famous and impressive to many. Apollo 11 was the mission that put Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. The astronauts headed to the moon atop a Saturn V rocket that dropped its engines into the ocean a few minutes after the astronauts left the launch pad.
Amazon’s billionaire CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has announced that he’s been privately funding a project to seek out the sunken Apollo 11 engines and has recently located them. According to Bezos, the engines have been located on the bottom of the ocean at about 14,000 feet down. The team plans to lift those engines to the surface for the first time in more than 40 years. Bezos says the engines are NASA property and hopes that they will be displayed in a museum.
So far, there’s no indication of where the engines were discovered or when they would be raised from the ocean depths. “We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in,” Bezos wrote. “They hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”
[via AFP]
