It’s strange in a way why this should be so affecting for baby boomers. It shook me up too when Yuri Gagarin died and the death of Armstrong has had an equal effect. Perhaps it’s because, living through that age, these people represented for us the Future, of flight between the planets, colonization of the Solar System, all the stuff we thought the Space Age heralded. They were the trailblazers to Man’s place among the stars.
Now they are dead and the shitty, pedestrian world is the same as ever, manned flights to the Moon a distant memory, our planetary neighbors as distant and unreachable as ever. The Future turned out to be the Past.
Armstrong’s death reminds some of us of a time when our dreams took on reality in front of our very eyes and anything seemed possible. A time long gone.