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IN HIS WORDS: How The Star carried Neil Armstrongs story of his trip to the moon, and back, on August 20, 1969.
James Clarke
I am one of a handful of newspaperman to have interviewed Neil Armstrong.
I found myself sitting with him at a dinner in Joburg, which ended in a chat.
I had heard he was an automaton without emotion whose pulse never wavered during the Apollo 11 mission.
“Were you never scared?” I asked.
“No.”
“Not once?”
“Not once. I was part of the planning. I knew at every stage what would happen next.”
But later he admitted experiencing a patch of anxiety. It was when, a day before landing on the moon, he looked down at planet Earth and realised what a small, fragile, lonely place it was.
Afterwards he flew to Zululand to join a friend of mine, Natal conservator Nick Steele, who took Armstrong on a white rhino capture expedition in the Umfolozi Game Reserve. He recalled the astronaut as “a taciturn man who rarely smiled”. But when Steele dropped him off, Armstrong grinned, shook Nick’s hand and said: “That’s the second most exciting thing I’ve done in my life!”
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