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NEIL Armstrong died today and, unless you are over the age of 50, his death most likely won't mean a lot to you.

That's a shame really, because in my lifetime, Neil's first step onto the surface of the Moon in 1969 was one of only two occasions I can remember when the world was united, if only for a moment.

I was in high school in Adelaide when it was about to happen, and like most kids in the state, and the nation - if not the world - we were sent home to watch it live on television.

It was certainly a vastly different and more innocent time because that's exactly what we did.

We didn't go to the shops, go play pinball or hang out somewhere. We went home, turned on our TV sets and watched glued around the globe as Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins piloted their rocketship to the Moon.

Collins had the job of caretaking the Apollo 11 mothership while Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface, Aldrin not far behind.

"One small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind," Armstrong said as his feet touched the surface, a worldwide viewing audience of 500 million (one sixth of all humanity) watching those grainy black-and-white images and mesmerised by the enormity of the achievement.

That night I am sure I was not the only person to stand in their backyard, staring at the Moon and wondering exactly where those two men were on the surface. 

The world stopped on July 20, 1969 and was united in a way it has never been before or since, and probably never could be again.

Three years later, Palestinian gunmen killed Israeli athletes captured in the Village at the Munich Olympics to reinforce the great divides in our world, as they held the planet hostage.

Just as 1969 had seen the earth soar, in 1972, it crashed back to earth.

(The only other time I can recall an event "uniting" the peoples of our planet was at the many and varied midnights on December 31, 1999. As we turned into 2000, we celebrated and partied together as a world. Of course, by September 11 the following year, the world again was watching mesmerised, not in joyous disbelief but abject horror, as passenger planes were flown into the World Trade Centre's twin towers in New York, our planet again to be plunged into division and uncertainty.)

But all of that was a long time away back in 1969, long before someone decades later would suggest the fluttering of the American flag planted on the lunar surface could not have been possible due to the lack of wind, reaching the conclusion the whole journey had been a hoax.

Hoax shmoax.

In 1969 we stared at the images, heard the President speak with the atronauts, and knew Armstrong was a hero for the ages.

In Adelaide, the new basketball venue at suburban Richmond, just five minutes from the CBD, was about to formally be opened. The Moon landing was so significant, the only name ever considered for it was the Apollo Stadium.

Like hundreds of thousands of other kids, I kept my newspaper coupons and was able to use them to get a bona fide NASA Apollo 11 Moon Mission patch for mum to sew on my tracksuit jacket, along with a shiny certificate with a picture of Armstrong, Aldrin, their lunar module and the flag.

These were heady times, when anything seemed possible. The world was changing.

The Beatles were still the pre-eminent music group, traditional ideas were being challenged and if man could walk on the Moon, anything seemed possible.

Neil Armstrong died today at 82 and the world has changed in ways we never could have conceived. Just take a look at your mobile phone's functions if you don't believe me.

We don't go to the Moon anymore - been there, done that - but Armstrong's passing today reminds many of us that we believed we could. That not even the "sky is the limit."

We should never stop believing in what we can achieve, in the difference we can make.

As Neil Armstrong becomes a celestial body himself, I hope his lasting legacy is just that - believe and you will achieve.

RIP