Washington, July 19: (After the 1969 flight, Armstrong stayed on at Nasa for just two years. Wearied by the unending attention and demands on his time, he left to teach engineering at the University of Cincinnati in his native Ohio, not to return to public life again.)
The remarkable thing about the men who have walked on the Moon is how normal they are.
There have been only a dozen of them, two in each of six Apollo missions between July 1969 and December 1972. Another dozen have orbited the Moon, either in preparatory missions before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on to its surface 40 years ago, as pilots of the command modules, or as members of the crew of the crippled Apollo 13, whose safe return to Earth was one of the miracles of the United States space programme.
To this day, these 24 men are the only human beings to have travelled outside low Earth orbit – and will remain so at least until 2015, according to the scheme announced five years ago by President George W Bush for a permanent manned lunar base to serve as launch site for the exploration of more distant reaches of the solar system. Binding them is a single experience that only they among the 6.7 billion denizens of our planet have tasted, and that the rest of us, however enthralled by their feat, however awed by the cosmos, will never quite be able to grasp.
–Agencies