| | I never could stand much of Tom Wolfe, but his The Right Stuff captured essential insights. It inspired me to learn to fly and eventually to work at Kennedy Space Center.
Wolfe paints Armstrong as an outsider. He was a civilian test pilot in a program dominated by military jet fighter jocks. He came from operations, a desk jockey. When he flew, he tested freighters, not fighters. His breath-taking landing on the Moon was argued by other astronauts as not-quite-incompetence as he passed up one pre-chosen landing site after another, running the fuel down to where he had 8 seconds before a crash -- don't call it a crash "landing"... You can walk away from a crash landing on Earth because Earth has air and water and medical personnel...
If Neil Armstrong is iconic of anything it is individualism in the purest, truest metaphysical meaning of the word. The individual is unique, not reducible to prediction, and capable of unpredictably glorious achievement.
St. John, Philip (pseud of Lester Del Rey). Rocket Jockey. Philadelphia: Winston, 1952.
Only four hours were left before the 18th Armstrong Classic would begin - the interplanetary race to the inhabited worlds and moons of the Solar System was named after the first man to land on the Moon. (Talk about predicting the future! Del Rey must have had a crystal ball to know about Armstrong.)The Moon in Science Fiction (here.)
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