I wasn't going to write about this. I sat down twice this week meaning to do a normal post — something about my RSS reader setup, actually, which is half-finished in a draft I'll get back to — and both times I closed the laptop instead.
Neil Armstrong died on Saturday. He was 82, complications from heart surgery, and by the time most of us heard it was already all over Twitter with that particular hush that settles in when something like that happens. I was making coffee. My phone buzzed on the counter and I almost ignored it because it buzzes a hundred times a day for nothing, and then I saw the notification and just stood there for a second holding the pot.
Here's the thing that's been bugging me all week: I never met the guy, obviously, wasn't even born for another decade and a half after Apollo 11, and yet it still landed like a gut punch. I think it's because of what he represented rather than anything I actually knew about him personally, which, by every account, wasn't much, since he was famously private and mostly avoided the spotlight after 1969. He didn't do the rounds. He didn't cash in. He went and taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati and mostly just lived his life. There's something almost old-fashioned about that kind of restraint that I find myself admiring more the older I get.
And the timing is what really got me. We've had Curiosity sitting on Mars for three weeks now, sending back these absurd, crisp color photos of a landscape nobody's ever stood on, and just last Wednesday it did its first test drive, rolled forward about fifteen feet, pivoted, backed up a bit, the whole thing choreographed down to the second by a room full of people at JPL who were practically giddy on the live feed. I'd been refreshing NASA's site checking for the wheel-track photos like a kid waiting on a package. That was the mood of the month, this quiet optimism that we're still capable of doing hard, precise, expensive things just because they're worth doing. Then Saturday happened and it felt like some kind of hinge between two eras of the same story.
My nephew is eleven, and I mentioned Armstrong at dinner Sunday and he genuinely didn't know who I meant at first. Had to explain it was "the moon guy." I know, I know, I sound like every generation before mine complaining that kids these days don't know their history, my own grandfather said the same thing to me about Lindbergh, probably, but it still caught me off guard. There's a Buzz Aldrin joke in there somewhere about being remembered second, but I'll leave it alone.
I'll admit the rest of the tech world barely paused this week for any of this, because there was a jury in San Jose handing Apple something north of a billion dollars against Samsung and that ate every headline on every site I read, practically hour by hour. I'm not going to rehash the verdict here, if you want the blow-by-blow there are about six sites doing that better than I could right now, and honestly I found the whole spectacle a little exhausting to follow in real time, endless second-guessing from people who hadn't read a page of the filings. I do think it's going to reshape how phones look on shelves for a while, and I've got opinions on the "bounce-back" scrolling patent specifically being a genuinely dumb thing to litigate over, but that's a post for another day when I've cooled down about it.
What I keep coming back to instead is just this odd juxtaposition, a robot the size of a small car methodically trundling across another planet's surface, and the death of the one human being everyone on Earth could once agree was worth celebrating without an asterisk. Armstrong reportedly asked that people who wanted to honor him "go out and do something productive" instead of mourning, which is such a plain, un-sentimental thing to ask for that it's almost funny, in a good way. I don't have a tidy way to end this. I just wanted to write it down before the week moved on to whatever's next, because it felt like it deserved more than a retweet and then silence.