Getting to the moon is not a risk-free endeavor, despite the fact that the engineers who worked on the Apollo program did their best to minimize the amount of things that could go wrong during the trip. In addition to facing the typical dangers of sending someone into space – the rocket exploding during launch, for example – the astronauts spent several days locked in their module until they reached their destination, landing in a place with a different gravitational field , they walked on the Moon trusting that their suits would not fail at any moment and they took off again from the surface of another world … To violently re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, of course.
Knowing these details, it is not surprising that President Richard Nixon had prepared the speech he was going to deliver if things went wrong on the Moon and the Apollo 11 astronauts never returned. In it he said, among other things:
“In ancient times, man looked at the stars and saw heroes in the constellations. In modern times we do the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.”
Interestingly, Armstrong’s famous phrase “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was criticized because it sounds a bit odd, because right thing would be to say “one small step for a man”. At first the failure was attributed to the nerves of the moment, but an analysis of the transmissions done in 2006 revealed that Armstrong had got the phrase right (“a small step for a man”) and that the failure was in the transmission.
After serving in the Korean War as a pilot, studying aeronautical engineering, working as a test pilot and astronaut, as a university professor, and even visiting the North Pole with the explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong passed away from complications that arose during an arterial coronary bypass. Unfortunately, it is not a crazy end for an astronaut: it seems that they have a greater risk of suffering cardiovascular problems than those of us who stay on dry land.
