Where is Neil Armstrong?

The Moon landing is commemorated on July 20, 2009 for its 40th year. But did you hear anything about its most famous personality, Neil Armstrong? In a new magazine article from BBC Online, Mr Armstrong is enigmatic, and has spent most of his life post-Moon landing in recluse, away from the limelight.

True enough, we never heard any thing from his life. No biography or book. Rare interviews on television, too.

Here’s a snippet of the article:

That an ordinary small town boy from Ohio might struggle with becoming one of the most famous men on the planet is hardly surprising. But Smith thinks his steely, disciplined determination to shy away from the public eye is another of Armstrong’s strengths.

He says it helped him cheat death three times before he even got to the Moon.

“He always kept his cool. At one point on a flight he was just a fingernail away from not making it. Afterwards, fellow Nasa astronaut Alan Bean told me he saw Armstrong filling out an incident report but recalled him saying he’d just had a ‘little difficulty’.

“He thought Armstrong had stubbed his toe or something, but actually he’d been two-fifths of a second away from death. He couldn’t believe he was just calmly filling in forms as if nothing had happened – but that was the kind of man he was.”