RIP First Moon Man

I get goose bumps whenever I hear Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldren talk about their mission to the moon; arguably one of the most famous days in history.   Armstrong has just passed away at 82 - much to the devastation of me.

He was a great, humble man, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time recently viewing the extensive tribute to him, his fellow astronauts and all the space missions at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

NASA have long stopped caring about the conspiracy theorists and the wacky accusations the space agency faked the moon landing in an elaborate U.S. Government publicity stunt.

The so-called evidence base for the nonsensical conspiracy claims were dubious mood lighting, dodgy radiation level readings, the silky, softness of the moon's surface, and impeccable camera angles and footage, all of which have been credibly explained through evidence of the technical variety that lovers of secret plots get all cranky about. 

All but the most passionate conspiracy theorists seem to have put the fake moon landing old wives' tale to bed, what with the fact that it would be practically impossible to cover up and Soviet Russia would have sniffed out a scam a long time ago.

Although in 1982 NASA hired a space writer to definitively debunk the hare-brained rumours but decided against it, because clearly they had better things to do.  Why indeed give the clueless conspiracy nutters any more air time? 

On my recent trip to NASA I noted some compelling evidence indicating an actual moon landing in the grainy footage of all the rocket scientists and engineers at Houston Mission Control, as they tried to hide their complete horror and devastation when communication was lost with Apollo 11 moments before the 1969 landing.

Obviously NASA have a fabulous central casting unit and hired the best actors and extras of their generation for the moon landing because the raw emotion with tears, hair-raising stress and then sheer joy and exhilaration is fairly difficult to fake even if you are a talented actor like Snooki.

Armstrong was instrumental in landing the lunar module without any really useful assistance from Mission Control.  The spot that Houston had programmed in for the landing turned out to be replete with massive craters, gigantic speed bumps and deep potholes.  Obviously the local council just couldn't be arsed fixing the area up.  I guess that's a whole of solar system thing.  Plus it was the middle of the night and there were no street lights or, um, moonlight so he couldn't see very well.

So Armstrong decided to travel a bit further to find a place where he could parallel park without falling into a ditch or being carjacked by E.T.  By the time he landed, there was only about 30 seconds of gas left in the tank, so there was that too.  There isn't a petrol station close to you when you run out of gas on earth so good luck with that on a lunar space mission.  On top of that there was the whole first-man-on-the-moon expectation, so no pressure there.

RIP Mr Armstrong.