Ohioans in Orbit, The Astronaut State

John Glenn was from Cambridge, Ohio. Neil Armstrong was from Wapakoneta, a town of roughly eight thousand people in Auglaize County. Judith Resnik, who died on Challenger in January nineteen eighty-six, was from Akron.

James Lovell, commander of Apollo Thirteen, was born in Cleveland. Altogether, Ohio has produced more astronauts per capita than any other state, a fact so consistent that NASA researchers have actually studied why. No single explanation holds.

Ohio had a strong aerospace industry centered on Dayton and Wright-Patterson. It had good public universities. It had a culture, rooted in the Wright brothers' workshop, that treated the air overhead as a problem to be solved rather than a limit to be accepted.

But statistics can only carry you so far. At some point you are left with the individual: a boy in Wapakoneta in the nineteen forties, lying on his back in a field, thinking about what it would mean to go up. Neil Armstrong took his first flying lesson at age fifteen, before he had a driver's license, and paid for it with money earned at twenty-five cents an hour.

He flew combat missions over Korea, flew experimental rocket planes at Edwards, and on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, stepped off a ladder in the Sea of Tranquility. What he said when he did so, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, he later maintained should have been one small step for a man, the indefinite article lost to static. The distinction matters: with the article, it is a modest human observation; without it, the sentence contradicts itself.

Armstrong was an engineer, and the imprecision bothered him for the rest of his life. He retired to a farm in Lebanon, Ohio. He gave few interviews and kept most of his records private.

He died in Cincinnati in two thousand twelve, and his family scattered his ashes at sea.