Dear Neil Armstrong: Letters to the First Man from All Mankind

Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics

by James R. Hansen (Editor)

In the years between the historic first moon landing by Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, and his death at age 82 on August 25, 2012, Neil Armstrong received hundreds of thousands of cards and letters from all over the world, congratulating him, praising him, requesting pictures and autographs, and asking him what must have seemed to him to be limitless―and occasionally intrusive―questions. Of course, all the famous astronauts received fan mail, but the sheer volume Armstrong had to deal with for more than four decades after his moon landing was staggering. Today, the preponderance of those letters―some 75,000 of them―are preserved in the archives at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Dear Neil Letters to the First Man on the Moon publishes a careful sampling of these letters―roughly 400―reflecting the various kinds of correspondence that Armstrong received along with representative samples of his replies. Selected and edited by James R. Hansen, Armstrong’s authorized biographer and author of the New York Times best seller First The Life of Neil A. Armstrong , this collection sheds light on Armstrong’s enduring impact and offers an intimate glimpse into the cultural meanings of human spaceflight. Readers will explore what the thousands of letters to Neil Armstrong meant not only to those who wrote them, but as a snapshot of one of humankind’s greatest achievements in the twentieth century. They will see how societies and cultures projected their own meanings onto one of the world’s great heroes and iconic figures.

Genres: Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

James R. Hansen is a professor of history at Auburn University in Alabama.His book From the Ground Up won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1988. For his work, The Wind and Beyond (NASA) - (six-volume series), he was awarded the Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work by the Society for the History of Technology in 2005.

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now finished both books of letters to Neil Armstrong edited by James R. Hansen. Hansen organizes this first collection around different themes than the second. For instance, several writers offered suggestions about what Armstrong should say upon setting foot on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969 and the first chapter focuses on this theme. Many people felt he should speak words of spiritual or religious significance, but (as seen in both books of letters) this was not in his character. Another chapter focuses on congratulatory letters from the Soviet Union and other nations of Eastern Europe, which allows historians to understand that even in the midst of the Cold War people did feel admiration for an astronaut on the opposing side of the divide. Additional chapters offer more personal insights into Armstrong's character. For instance, readers will see that he turned down many requests to commercialize his name or to participate in political causes. He stuck to his policy of refusing to undertake in such activities, and Hansen concludes that it would be hard to conceive of any person remaining more true to who he was after becoming world famous than Armstrong. I agree with this. This collection of 350 letters will do much to instill this in the minds of readers who want to understand him.