Neil Armstrong remembers dead astronauts 40 years after his Moonwalk
Neil Armstrong paid tribute yesterday to the spacemen who died paving the way for his 1969 Moonwalk as President Obama prepared to honour him and his Apollo 11 crewmates in Washington today for the 40th anniversary of their historic mission.
In a rare public appearance, the first man on the Moon spoke of the colleagues who gave their lives for America’s early space programme and how their sacrifice laid the foundations for his spectacular lunar debut.
“Any time you go to a place where everything you see is different than anything you’ve ever seen before in your life, it’s unique and it’s memorable. And that certainly was,” he recalled of the moment that he gazed across the lunar landscape and planted his footprints in the dust.
He commemorated the life of Ed White, who in 1965 became the first American to walk in the vacuum of space but was one of three astronauts killed in a launchpad fire two years later during tests of the pioneering Apollo 1 spacecraft. The others were Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee.
Read entire article at Times (UK)
In a rare public appearance, the first man on the Moon spoke of the colleagues who gave their lives for America’s early space programme and how their sacrifice laid the foundations for his spectacular lunar debut.
“Any time you go to a place where everything you see is different than anything you’ve ever seen before in your life, it’s unique and it’s memorable. And that certainly was,” he recalled of the moment that he gazed across the lunar landscape and planted his footprints in the dust.
He commemorated the life of Ed White, who in 1965 became the first American to walk in the vacuum of space but was one of three astronauts killed in a launchpad fire two years later during tests of the pioneering Apollo 1 spacecraft. The others were Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee.