“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.”
I watched Armstrong step on the moon with my family in San Rafael CA, 13 at the time. We had missed all the Apollo flights before because we had lived in East Pakistan for the previous two years. But I followed space news actively since and after getting an aerospace degree in 1980, I joined Lockheed and have been doing space operations ever since. Armstrong and Huston Mission Control have been heroes to my coworkers and I for all this time. The cool professionalism as they landed. Tempered with a light touch of humor for sure, but cool, level headed awesomeness. Us old timers sure cringe at the new NASA celebrations… but then they aren’t really in real-time operations, they were cheering something that had happened 14 minutes before and had no real way to affect the outcome of. Not like the Apollo crews and mission control. Or all of the NASA manned spaceflight crews.
I notice that “passed away” is the phrase rather than “dead”. Why do we still do that?
- Dead is harsher and doesn’t convey sadness over the fact. To me “passed away” doesn’t imply heaven or anything mystical, just a loss of someone who was liked. When Rush Limbaugh dies, I’ll use the word “dead”.
