A good few years ago, I attended a course on leadership in academia and was asked to bring in a picture of a famous person who inspired me in their leadership. My choice was Commander Neil Armstrong.
For many of us, of course, he is the hero who was the first person to walk on the surface of the Moon, astronaut and US Navy test pilot. His legendary status in this capacity, however, often ignores his wider profile as a well-rounded person and personality, known for his sense of humour, an academic and an engineer. The film-based-on-the-book, First Man, is often criticised in reviews for its "boring" representation of the person. For me, I feel these often miss the point. Armstrong, like the other Apollo astronauts, was just that - human. Despite their vulnerabilities, the crews embarked on their missions in the face of considerable danger. Each would have gone to the Moon, surely having first wrestled with their own fears, sense of duty and personal motivations to go. Even today, with all of our familiarity with space travel, astronauts are not faced with certain odds of a safe return.
One aspect of Armstrong's life that First Man so beautifully captures is how the narrative of the loss of a child can permeate every aspect of a bereaved parent's life. While we cannot know his personal grief, it would be impossible to think that Armstrong, as a consequence of the loss of his baby daughter Karen, would be unaware of the realities of human mortality and its impact on a family. It is a curious dichotomy that the loss of a child can bring such a sense of both personal fragility and resilience. Writer James Hansen suggests that, from records of his flights prior to his recruitment into the astronaut corps, this appeared to have had an impact .
And, so, he went.
Adventurer, highly accomplished, capable of feeling fear (albeit countered by his cool-headedness, competence and self-discipline) and having experienced one of the greatest of personal losses. It's perhaps important to remember that, in these astronauts, we sent humans to the Moon in every sense.
Following Apollo, Armstrong returned to engineering and academia, always acknowledging that his achievements were far from his alone. Often misrepresented as a recluse, he had simply decided that he should not be a figurehead for the Apollo story when it really represented so much more than himself.
It is these demonstrations of leadership and his sense of duty that, for me, make Neil Armstrong, along with the other astronauts of that time, heroes.
Apollo 11 represents an important shift for all of us in our status as a space-faring species. We currently know of no other that has been able to make that shift to interplanetary travel. With technology that seems positively archaic today, Apollo demonstrated what collaborative work at all levels of organisations across the world could achieve when a political will facilitates it.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the production of life-saving vaccines have served as a recent reminder of what can be achieved when the best endeavours of society, science and technology are allowed to flourish. Today, we find ourselves facing an urgent need to tackle some of the biggest challenges in our history, with environmental change and antibiotic resistance, to name but two! It is perhaps time, then, once again, to channel the spirit of Apollo on a global scale. Time is short, but, as JFK said in his famous 1962 speech, "that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
And the others, too.
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