Memorial for Neil Armstrong to be held in D.C.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (KTRK) -- A true American hero is set to be honored in Washington Thursday. A public memorial service will be held for Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

Armstrong died last month, at age 82. Services will be held at the national cathedral, but we spoke with the flight director of the mission that put Armstrong on the moon.

By all accounts, Neil Armstrong would not have been comfortable with the tributes which have come since his death. He shunned the label of hero, though that's how he will be memorialized in Washington D.C. on Thursday.

At the Washington National Cathedral, embedded in one window is a rock brought back from the moon by Armstrong and the Apollo 11 astronauts, so it's fitting that one of the pioneers of space who brought that rock back would be given a public memorial there.

Armstrong the man who made history so many years ago. He died August 25 after complications from cardiovascular surgery. He was 82.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard," former President John F. Kennedy said at the Rice University campus.

It was 50 years ago Wednesday that President Kennedy set the U.S. on a course of space exploration.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong said then.

By 1969, the eagle had landed. Armstrong's boot marking on the moon the first human footstep.

"We lost a tremendous human being. We lost a man who knew what he wanted to do," Apollo 11 flight director Christopher Kraft said.

Armstrong was a private man but Kraft knew him as well as anyone. As NASA's first manned space flight director and director of flight operations during Apollo 11, it was Kraft who suggested Armstrong take that first step on the moon, not Buzz Aldrin.

"We knew what he wanted to do, we knew how good he was at accomplishing whatever he set out to do and whatever we set out to do," Kraft said.

It wasn't till 25 years later that the two talked privately about what they'd accomplished. Armstrong, Kraft notes, was unusually humble. That humility not found often among men who were daring to go where no one had gone before.

"I didn't see that happen very often in astronauts," Kraft said. "He believed in the team, he believed in the people behind him."

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Nation says goodbye to moonwalker Neil Armstrong

  WASHINGTON -- The nation bid farewell Thursday to Neil Armstrong, the first man to take a giant leap onto the moon.

The pioneers of space, the powerful of the capital and the everyday public crowded into the Washington National Cathedral for a public interfaith memorial for the very private astronaut.

Armstrong, who died last month in Ohio at age 82, walked on the moon in July 1969.

"He's now slipped the bonds of Earth once again, but what a legacy he left," former Treasury Secretary John Snow told the gathering.

Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, Mercury astronaut John Glenn, 18 other astronauts, three NASA chiefs, and about two dozen members of Congress were among the estimated 1,500 people that joined Armstrong's widow, Carol, and other family members in the cavernous cathedral.

Collins read a prayer tailored to Armstrong's accomplishments and humility. A moon rock that the Apollo 11 astronauts gave the church in 1974 is embedded in one of its stained glass windows.

"You have now shown once again the pathway to the stars," Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon said in a tribute to Armstrong. "As you soar through the heavens beyond even where eagles dare to go, you can now finally put out your hand and touch the face of God."

Cernan was followed by a slow and solemn version of "Fly Me to the Moon" by singer Diana Krall.

The service also included excerpts from a speech 50 years ago by John F. Kennedy in which he said America chose to send men to the moon by the end of the 1960s not because it was easy, but because it was hard. The scratchy recording of the young president said going to the moon was a goal that "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone."

Shortly after that speech in 1961 at Rice University, Armstrong, not yet an astronaut but always a gifted engineer, was already working on how to land a spaceship on the moon, NASA administrator Charles Bolden recalled. Snow talked of the 12-year-old Armstrong who built a wind tunnel. But most of Armstrong's friends and colleagues spent time remembering the humble Armstrong. Snow called him a "regular guy" and "the most reluctant of heroes."

Bolden, a former astronaut, said Armstrong's humility and courage "lifted him above the stars."

"No one, but no one, could have accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and more grace than Neil Armstrong," Cernan said. "He embodied all that is good and all that is great about America."

Bolden read a letter from President Barack Obama saying, "the imprint he left on the surface of the moon is matched only by the extraordinary mark he left on ordinary Americans."

Armstrong commanded the historic landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon July 20, 1969. His first words after stepping onto the moon are etched in history books: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Armstrong insisted later that he had said "a" before man, but said he, too, couldn't hear it in the recording.

Armstrong and Aldrin spent nearly three hours walking on the lunar surface while Collins circled above the moon. In all, 12 American astronauts walked on the moon before the last moon mission in 1972.

Armstrong was a U.S. Navy aviator. He joined NASA's predecessor agency in 1955 as a civilian test pilot and later, as an astronaut, flew first in Gemini 8 in 1966. After the moon landing he spent a year in Washington as a top official at the space agency, but then he left NASA to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He later was chairman of two electronics companies, but mostly kept out of the public eye.

A private service was held earlier in suburban Cincinnati for Armstrong, who will be buried at sea.

In her homily Thursday, the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop for Washington, talked of how Armstrong sought to encourage young people to do even more, go even further.

Among the crowd in the cathedral was 14-year-old Shane DiGiovanna of Cincinnati, a young man who has spent his life grappling with an incurable skin disease and hearing loss. Shane idolized Armstrong and had always wanted to meet the first man on the moon, but it never happened.

But the eighth-grader met Cernan and former Apollo 13 commander James Lovell when they recently announced a memorial fund named for Armstrong at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center, where Shane has been treated.

The Armstrong family invited Shane to join them at the Washington memorial service, something Shane called a "really big honor."

Just as Armstrong was working on the lunar lander after the Kennedy speech, Shane said he is now working on drawings of a lander for Mars. He wants to be an aerospace engineer.

"I'm hoping," Shane said, "to definitely contribute a lot to the next step."

(Copyright ©2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) Get more Local »

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Value of Armstrong signatures spikes posthumously

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Neil Armstrong's death has made anything with his signature on it much more valuable to collectors, so we spoke with a local man who wrote about collecting signatures from the first man to walk to on the moon.

"This gentleman was a genuine part of American history," author and collector Anthony Pizzitola said.

Pizzitola says he knows quite a bit about Armstrong. The Houstonian and history buff has been collecting the first man on the moon's autograph for 30 years now.

"It's so unique, simply because it is the holy grail of autographs among collectors. He was the first modern day Christopher Columbus," Pizzitola said.

Pizzitola wrote the book, "Neil Armstrong, the Quest for his Autograph," and he has one of the largest collections of rare Armstrong signatures, including pricey signed prints of the astronaut in his white space suit and in training photos. They're pricey, since Armstrong stopped signing autographs in 1994.

"Now his death has catapulted that off the launch pad to 20-30 percent higher prices," Pizzitola said.

But now the potential demand for Armstrong's rare autograph has collectors like Pizzitola sending strong warnings about fakes.

So how can you tell if your autograph is real?

"It is very tough to distinguish between an original Armstrong and a fake Armstrong," Pizzitola said.

Pizzitola says one way to spot a fake is by looking at the American flag patch on Armstrong's white space suit photo. He says Armstrong always wrote above or below the flag, not floating around.

"This is a prime example. If somebody has something of this nature, it is a fake," he said.

Pizzitola says you should also be careful for reproductions produced with autopens. You can't tell at first glance, but Pizzitola says the autopens leave squiggly lines in the signature.

Pizzitola is a member of the Universal Autograph Collector's Club. He says the group has experts who can authenticate signatures on many items, and it is free of charge in most cases.

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