Not Me

Fifty years ago, NASA made a really good choice. They picked Neil Armstrong to be the first man to walk on the moon. I know there has been some discussion lately about the hierarchy of commander and pilot and so forth, and which way the door on the lunar landing module opened, but I still believe their choice was inspired. In spite of the fact that he blew his line.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Neil left out an indefinite article. In his version, "man" and "mankind" are essentially synonyms, rendering his statement void of meaning. "That's one small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind." That would have provided contrast for the two clauses, comparing his action of stepping onto the moon's surface to that of everyone else who had ever lived.
I tend to forgive Commander Armstrong for this little faux pas. He had a few other things on his mind. Most notably: "Will I be able to crawl back up that ladder once it's time to go?" And it probably goes without saying that there were six hundred fifty million people watching on TV back home. A few years before that, "everyone" watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. And that was seventy-three million. Which makes me wonder why Brian Epstein missed his shot to book the Fab Four a gig on the moon.
But let's get back to why they picked Neil. They didn't pick me. Perhaps because I was only seven years old at the time and though my brothers and I had undergone our own version of astronaut training by spinning around tied up in a hammock until we nearly puked I would not have been the ideal candidate. I would have worried that there was no actual lunar surface, just a sandy trap waiting for the first food source to be foolish enough to step out onto that gray wasteland. Or that inhabitants of the moon had been laying in wait, avoiding detection by telescope and unmanned probes to jump out and take their first hostage.
Maybe that's a little ridiculous. How about something, anything, going wrong with the life support system while he's standing out there in a vacuum? Or let's say they had a really successful romp on the moon and picked up a bunch of rocks and dirt and when it was time to go, they packed a little too much and the fuel they had wasn't enough to get them back to Michael Collins and the Command Module, orbiting above. Sorry guys. You and Buzz are just going to have to tough it out until help arrives. Except there was no help. Just go ahead and do your best with this thing that no one has ever done before and hope that nothing goes wrong.
I'm sorry. I survived the whole hammock thing, but hanging around on the moon waiting for my oxygen to run out is not something for which I would have readily volunteered. And what about Buzz? Well, he was the second man on the moon, but he was the enforcer. I dare you to go up to Buzz Aldrin and tell him the moon landings were fake. For All Mankind.