I have spent more time than most thinking about Armstrong, Project Apollo and his legacy in the long lens of history. This misunderstanding became much clearer when the program ended and all of the Apollo astronauts faced an existential crisis and a deep depression following their crowning achievement. Their lives - the lives of some of the smartest and most driven people to ever live - peaked in their 40's and that was it.

It's hard to imagine a different perception of Apollo than the one we have right now, but at the time people realized it would be historic, but they didn't grasp the magnitude of their achievement. This fact was especially true for the astronauts involved. No one - not even NASA - realized the obvious at the time; the astronauts were never going to be human beings after their moon walks. They were going to be such and such who walked on the moon. And in a way - in the eyes of history - every act following that point was essentially a footnote. After all, how the heck do you top walking on the moon?

This burden was further magnified for Armstrong. Most of us forget the depth of his fame. Carl Sagan wrote about an anecdote where an anthropologist told him that a previously uncontacted tribe (or rather assumed to be uncontacted tribe) asked about Apollo 11 and if it was true if human beings had indeed walked on the moon. Try to put yourself in his shoes and lift the weight he carried. Try to imagine being Neil Armstrong and waking up every single day with the weight that every literate child in the world will learn your name until humanity itself ceases to be. He became The First Man - not a person who was allowed to make mistakes. No, that was too undignified for The First Man.

And he hated every second of it. He refused to sign autographs. He stopped going out into public. Stopped giving interviews. (IIRC, the last one he gave was to an accountant https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/neil-ar...) And chose to live his life as a recluse.

But perhaps, this tendency is why he was chosen in the first place. Deke Slayton and the other administrators, wisely, knew that he would be a better First Man than someone like Aldrin, who can be described in the most charitable of terms as a fame whore. http://www.americaspace.com/?p=24709

And so one of the most shy and cerebral men of his generation was chosen to be a "living monument." And perhaps a monument to the American era as a whole. As of writing, Armstrong is already more famous than Alexander the Great - after whom at least three major languages have literally defined the word "great." (even now his name isn't Alexander of Macedonia, but Alexander the Great.) And Alexander himself will be forgotten before Armstrong is. He is without a doubt, the most famous human to ever exist. And long after the American empire ceases to be, he will still be remembered as an example of what we achieved. Barring a calamity, he will be remembered for all time as long as human beings are alive.

It was a very heavy burden, but Armstrong bore it with grace. Perhaps with greater grace than Washington himself, who exemplified the ideal of doing your service and saying goodbye to retire to a farm.

Beyond his technical mind. I am in awe of him as a human being. The more I learn about him, the more I admire him.