The final frontier.Follow

He will be mourned by his families and friends; he will be mourned by his nation; he will be mourned by the people of the world; he will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send one of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in his death, he binds more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But he was the first, and he will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. He spent the first 39 years of his life in explosive flying machines before sitting on top of a rocket and being fired at the moon. Neil Armstrong makes Holocaust Survivors look like pussies.

Armstrong served as a pilot during the Korean War. While on a reconnaissance mission in 1951, he was hit by anti-aircraft fire and lost one of the plane's wings but managed to fly it back to the airfield, ejecting at the final moment and surviving the undignified fate of dying in a war nobody remembers or makes films about.

After Korea, Armstrong signed up to be test pilot with the organisation that would later become NASA. He spent his time “testing” “experimental” high altitude planes filled with highly explosive rocket fuel and travelling at speeds far greater than the speed of sound.

Life for tests pilots was so risky that many would routinely die. In 1952, at Edwards Air Force, the base Armstrong would later serve at, 62 Air force pilots died in the course of 32 weeks. That’s 1.7 pilots per week. Or as Boeing might put it, 1.7 orders per week.

This was the climate Armstrong flew in. In one case, he had his X-15 rocket plane strapped to a B52 bomber which flew thousands of feet in the air and then (purposely) dropped the X-15, whose engines stubbornly refused to kick in and left Armstrong tumbling through the air and, probably, ******** himself.

In 1966 Armstrong and future moonwalker David Scott flew into Earth orbit aboard Gemini 8. Their mission was to practice docking with another vehicle in space, which sounds like a euphemism for Space Sex but was in fact a dangerous, complex manoeuvre that had never been successfully tried before.

After docking, something went wrong and Gemini began to spin out of control. The Astronauts undocked from the other vehicle, which made things worse and they began to experience temporary sight distortion, tumbling over and smacking into one another and coming dangerously close to unconsciousness. At the last moment, Armstrong gained control. They returned to Earth, having failed to dock their craft successfully without withdrawing prematurely, something many a Cracked reader can no doubt empathize with.

In 1968, Armstrong was aboard what was officially know as the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle and unofficially known as “the flying bedstead”, because it looked like a bed equipped with rocket engines.

It was notoriously hard to handle and sure enough, while flying it, Armstrong lost control while hundreds of feet in the air. He was forced to eject and his parachute opened just in time. Analysis of footage taken at the accident showed that Armstrong was two-fifths of a second away from death.

Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the Lunar Module, whereupon Buzz accidentally broke the ignition for the accent engine, leaving them stranded on the moon. Luckily, he had a pen with him, which he stuck in the slot, jiggled around and which managed to start the engine, returning them to earth and ensuring Armstrong’s reputation as the luckiest ******* in the world.