Neil Armstrong

I was a kid of 6 or 7 when my father would screen films for us about the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. He had an old film projector, with copies of newsreels about the 1962 World Cup and the NASA briefing films on the space program, which he got from the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura in Chuquicamata. He also had some LIFE magazines about the space race, and a series of books the same magazine published in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

With all that influence it was only natural that I wanted to be an astronaut, like John Glenn, Alan Shepard or Neil Armstrong himself. I read a lot about these astronauts’ stories as a kid, and even if it sounds nerdy I’m a fan of movies like Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff (oh, I’m a huge fan of that one, when I take the time to set up the home theater gear to enjoy the sound of that film).

So when Neil Armstrong came to Chile I was there and I listened to him. He struck me as a very simple man, an ordinary gentleman recounting his great feat. I remember two moments from that talk. The first is when he describes his impression on approaching the moon and noticing that it is a sphere, a three-dimensional object, something we can’t appreciate from the surface of the earth. The other moment was more moving: when he recounts the first step on the moon. At that instant all of us in the audience got to our feet to applaud him.

It’s true, much of the trip to the moon has to do with one more battle in the context of the Cold War; there are even skeptics who ridiculously believe the whole thing was staged. We forget how remarkable this feat was, how risky it was. If we consider that what separated these men from the cold of space and from radiation, in some parts of the spacecraft, was nothing more than a sheet of aluminum foil...

It was a great feat carried out by brave men, the kind who awaken admiration in a six-year-old boy, an admiration that will stay in his heart forever.…