On the 50th anniversary of America’s premier historical peacetime accomplishment, Neil Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, is completing a multi-day small town celebration of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on 20 July 1969.
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With a population of around 10,000, Wapakoneta is a classic American small town surrounded by farm country. Located on I-75 about midway between Cincinnati and Toledo, Wapakoneta is older than the United States, having been first settled by the French in 1748 followed by English-American settlers arriving during the final years of the American War of Independence. Like most of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains, today’s Ohio was then also the home of many Indian tribes. Glacial scouring of the land during the last period of glaciation left much of western Ohio flat, ideal for agriculture.
In the years after the famous Apollo 11 landing, the Armstrong Air and Space Museum was built in Wapakoneta to honor the event and Ohio’s astronauts.
The museum now has a statue of the young Neil Armstrong on the walk leading up to the museum along with a statue of the pilot Armstrong near the museum’s entrance. Armstrong was born in Wapakoneta, returning to attend high school and fly solo at age 16. On graduation, he attended Purdue University to study aeronautical engineering. (He was also accepted to MIT.) After two years of study, he entered military service as a naval aviator flying during the Korean War. After fulfilling his military commitment, he resumed his studies to earn his bachelor of science degree from Purdue before becoming a test pilot and astronaut. On 20 July 1969, Neil and Buzz took a little stroll on the Moon as a half-billion people watched from a quarter million miles away—this author among them! Three years later, I was fortunate to have him as a professor at the University of Cincinnati.
As part of the 50th anniversary celebration, this new statue of Neil Armstrong was unveiled. It shows a calm pilot, focused on the mission ahead—an attitude that he carried throughout his life.
James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.