Neil Armstrong: 1930-2012

Neil Armstrong, an unusually modest professional who considered moonwalk to be a job just like any other job, took this New World Symphony by Antonín Dvořák to his trip to Earth's only large natural satellite.




Exactly 40 later, in 2009, I combined the music (the final, fourth part "Allegro con fuoco" of the symphony, listen to the full piece) with the moving pictures above. Apologies that it wasn't optimized for similar sad moments. While I don't consider manned space flights a top priority, I do share the feeling that it's painful that the people have left the Moon – the mankind could soon find out that there is no living person who has walked on a celestial body – and I do think that someone should send people to Mars to make some progress in this obvious benchmark of the human power...

RIP Neil Armstrong.

(Because of the name, I can't avoid mentioning Lance Armstrong. The decision to strip him of all the titles and ban him for life seems cruel to me. I am no expert in these stories but it's my perception that his guilt has never really been proven – at least not an unusual type of substance – and the presumption of innocence was violated by the anti-doping authorities. So he remains the world's #1 cyclist in my eyes.)