Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

by Jay Barbree

  “We lost Challenger because of a leak in a field-joint,” Sam said flatly.

  “An O-ring leak,” I asked?

  “That’s it.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  “How do they know?”

  “They have pictures,” Sam said without hesitation.

  “Pictures?”

  “Pictures of the leak,” Sam explained. “They show flame blowing out of the sucker like a blowtorch.”

  “Where did the pictures come from?”

  “From a fixed engineering camera north of the pad.”

  “Away from our cameras? Where we couldn’t see?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What did the leak do, burn into the tank?”

  “Not at first,” Sam explained. “It burned through a tank support structure before reaching the tank. Its fuel,” he continued, “fed the flames—hell, they burned everything they touched.”

  “And just what caused the leak?”

  “My best guess,” Sam explained, “the O-ring was still frozen at launch. The sucker couldn’t do its job.”

  “Makes sense,” I agreed before asking again. “We can’t see it on our launch tape?”

  “No way.”

  “Can you get me those pictures, Sam?”

  He laughed. “You trying to get me shot?”

  “Not today,” I told Sam, congratulating him again before hanging up and phoning a trusted source at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She confirmed Sam’s information and with two solid sources we were ready to break the story on Tom Brokaw’s NBC Nightly News.

  Our producer Danny Noa shoved a small model of the space shuttle in my hands and we opened the show that evening with the story.

  Using the model I pointed to the suspected location. I answered Tom’s questions, essentially reporting that the cause of the tragedy was the failure of O-ring seals in the aft field-joint of the right solid rocket motor. The extreme cold had rendered them inflexible. Frozen, the O-rings simply could not do their job.

  * * *

  No sooner had I left the air than the phone began ringing. Producers Geoff To-field and Danny Noa were fielding most of the questions, but one came in I had to take.

  “You looked pretty sharp for a farm boy tonight,” Neil Armstrong said.

  “Hey, Neil.” I was grinning all the way through the line. “How’s the milking going?”

  “We’re getting a couple of quarts,” he laughed. “What can you tell me you didn’t tell Brokaw?”

  “Nothing more, really,” I assured Neil. We talked about what I knew and I promised to keep him up to speed on what I learned. I did, and in less than four months Neil and the Presidential Commission on Challenger confirmed my report. In doing so the first man on the moon provided thorough leadership throughout the presidential commission’s investigation, again setting another example to follow.

  Tom Brokaw and Jay Barbree breaking what would later be voted the number one story of 1986. (NBC Nightly News)

  The commission found that the Challenger accident was caused by a failure in the O-rings sealing the aft field-joint on the right solid rocket booster. The failure was caused by pressurized hot gases and eventually flame “blowing by” the O-rings. Flame made contact with the adjacent external tank structural support, causing the structure to rupture the tank. The failure of the O-rings was attributed to a design flaw, as their performance could be too easily compromised by such factors as those low temperatures on the day of launch.

  The report also determined the contributing causes of the accident were failure of both NASA and its contractor, Morton Thiokol, to respond adequately to the design flaw. The commission offered nine recommendations to improve safety in the space shuttle program.

  Neil Armstrong and Challenger investigators inspect a space shuttle from beneath. (NASA)

  Neil and his fellow commission members summarized their conclusions extremely well in the final report: “The decision to launch the Challenger was flawed. Those who made that decision were unaware of the recent history of problems concerning the O-rings and the joint and were unaware of the initial written recommendation of the contractor advising against the launch at temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit and the continuing opposition of the engineers at Thiokol after the management reversed its position. They did not have a clear understanding of Rockwell’s concern that it was not safe to launch because of ice on the pad. If the decision-makers had known all the facts, it is highly unlikely that they would have decided to launch Challenger on January 28, 1986.”

  The space shuttle’s solid rockets were redesigned as the commission ordered and Neil returned to retired life. “I think our conclusions and findings were right on,” he told me. “It was a very hard-working commission and our answers have never been effectively challenged.… It was a national tragedy,” he continued, “but we learned a great deal from it, and the subsequent shuttle program benefitted. That was ours and spaceflight’s reward.”

  * * *

  September 29, 1988: Space shuttle Discovery sat on its launchpad. Five seasoned astronauts waited: Commander Rick Hauck, pilot Dick Covey, crew members Mike Lounge, Dave Hilmers, and George “Pinky” Nelson. They had been handpicked to return the rebuilt shuttle to flight after seven of their numbers had been lost.

  Two hundred and fifty thousand other souls surrounded the spaceport to lend their support. Twenty-four-hundred members of the news media stood at the press site. They were there to report NASA’s comeback from its worst disaster.

  At 11:37 A.M., eastern time, Discovery’s main engines roared. Seconds later the twin solid rockets fired. The assembled thousands crossed fingers and gritted teeth as the two redesigned solid rockets lifted the five astronauts skyward, boosting the space plane and rocket combination straight and true. Two minutes later the huge viewing assemblage broke into wild cheers. The boosters, whose predecessors had been the primary cause of the Challenger accident, burned out and peeled harmlessly away from the shuttle and its human cargo. They were the first of 220 of the redesigned solid boosters that would be flown without the slightest problem until they and the space shuttle fleet were retired.

  Possibly Neil Armstrong’s greatest legacy following his life of flight as a pilot, engineer, and investigator was the way in which he handled his extraordinary life, which resulted in many of those who would drive aircraft and spacecraft to regard him as one of the best of all times. Neil never thought of himself as special, but everyone else did.

  President Ronald Reagan opened an awards ceremony in the White House Rose Garden with the announcement, “America is back in space.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SPACE SHUTTLE AND BEYOND

  NASA entered the final decade of the twentieth century fully recovered from its worst spaceflight accident with the agency building on the pioneering work of Neil Armstrong and the astronauts of the space industry’s first three decades. A couple of pretty fair space shuttle drivers Robert “Hoot” Gibson and Charlie Precourt both walked in the shoes of Deke Slayton as chief astronaut. Both played major roles in one of Neil’s oldest dreams—building a permanent space station.

  The International Space Station would in some minds be the beginning of an orbiting space city, a gravity-free outpost where Earthlings could multiply, raise families, live longer, and produce the stuff and foods needed for self-sufficiency in space.

  But as Gibson, Precourt, and a handful of others knew, the station’s primary job would be to teach humankind how to survive in space. NASA already had a small taste of operating its own space station in 1973 when it used rockets and spacecraft modules leftover from canceled Apollo flights. The agency had launched three separate crews of three astronauts each to spend up to nine months aboard a station named Skylab. The astronauts proved humans could work in space. But soon after the Russians lost the moon race they, too, got serious about space stations. They launched a series of Salyut laboratories, each ca
rrying two or three cosmonaut crews who could stay in space for months.

  There was that brief thaw in the Cold War in 1975 when Deke Slayton’s heart was deemed strong enough for space flight. Tom Stafford commanded and Vance Brand rounded out the three-man crew of Apollo-Soyuz. They drove the last Apollo to a rendezvous and docking with the Russians’ Soyuz. Eleven years later, in 1986, Russia sent into orbit what was, to many who made space stuff work, the first real space station. It was called Mir, and cosmonauts stayed aboard their home in the sky for up to a year.

  In 1991, as the Cold War ended, Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed an agreement calling for the first U.S.-Soviet manned space flights since Apollo-Soyuz. It was to include a visit by a U.S. astronaut aboard a Soyuz-TM spacecraft, and a flight by a Russian cosmonaut on a shuttle mission. A major milestone of this agreement occurred on June 29, 1995, when Hoot Gibson and Charlie Precourt docked space shuttle Atlantis for the first time with Mir. They exchanged crews and checked out the Earth-orbiting community.

  Astronaut Charlie Precourt was one of those directly responsible for helping bring Russia on board as a full member in the U.S.’s plans for building the International Space Station. He reflected on how the first docking with Mir was a beneficiary of the pioneering work of Armstrong and the Apollo astronauts:

  Docking the shuttle with the existing Mir station would be our first step in learning to work together to build the International Station. We had done lots of rendezvous missions with the shuttle to retrieve satellites—like when we repaired the Hubble Space Telescope—but we hadn’t yet physically docked with another spacecraft. Mir and Shuttle each weighed over 200,000 pounds and we knew lots could go wrong if we didn’t prepare correctly. Neil’s experience was a critical contributor to our success. We studied the results of the Gemini and the later Apollo dockings and we had procedures for every conceivable combination of thruster issues as well as a number of other potential failure modes. Neil’s first-ever docking of Gemini with the Agena had to be aborted because of a stuck thruster. His quick reaction saved the mission and likely his life. That experience helped every subsequent mission of its kind. Hoot and I, along with our flight engineer Greg Harbaugh, put hundreds of hours into simulations just as Neil did, to test and adjust our plans.

  Precourt paused and then continued: “When the day came it went off beautifully. Hoot made contact with Mir at 1.2-inches-per-second in perfect alignment with the Mir docking mechanism. We were within a second of the planned docking time.”

  The man who was counted among the Air Force’s best test pilots said honestly, “Our success was largely due to Neil having paved the way,” and Precourt’s praise for Neil Armstrong didn’t stop there. The chief astronaut went on to say:

  Charlie Precourt commanded two dockings with Mir and is seen here driving the shuttle to a perfect arrival with the Russian space station. (NASA)

  In the astronaut office of the shuttle era, we all admired Neil’s accomplishments as a pilot. We had all been inspired to pursue careers in aerospace and strive to become astronauts watching the first moon landing in 1969. Neil’s abilities as a pilot were what we all aspired to.

  But what was most amazing to us was how well he performed as a pilot on so many “firsts.” We all knew it was challenging enough to fly a spacecraft even on flights downstream of the first, but Neil made all his firsts look like he’d been there many times. And yet as inspiring as Neil was to us as pilots, perhaps most inspiring to those of us who flew as shuttle astronauts was Neil’s character and humility. He never wanted to talk about Neil. He would always vector the conversation to the team, and the lessons of the mission, or the machines. His eyes would light up whenever the conversation was about comparing experiences with different aircraft. Neil was the ultimate example of a gentleman, and we all looked up to him for his strength of character.

  The space shuttle and Mir securely docked. (NASA)

  Other astronauts also like to tell stories about Neil, like the time retired astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz had been asked to give a talk on his work on a plasma propulsion system during one of the astronaut reunions. Plasma propulsion many feel is the gateway to interplanetary travel. Chang-Diaz remembers, “After the briefing, while I was packing up my computer, one of the attendees came to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Neil Armstrong. I really enjoyed your presentation and I am glad you are working on this—it is what we need to get to Mars.’ My jaw dropped. I actually had never had the opportunity to meet one of my all-time heroes. I found myself at loss for words.”

  Similarly, shuttle commander Brian Duffy relates being with Neil at the 30-year reunion of the Gemini 8 team in Houston, an experience that made a real impression: “I had heard that Neil was a fairly private person who avoided the limelight that accompanied his feats,” Duffy said:

  I was not disappointed to learn firsthand that he was exactly that, but very personable as well. The reunion brought people who had worked together as a great team, and let them reconnect after many years. Neil was wearing a lightweight summer suit because of the heat, and his eyeglasses had large lenses that tinted automatically in the bright daylight. He made some brief remarks to the mostly older assembled group, and they ate up every word he said. He was obviously very respected by all.

  After a few hours, it was time for him to head to the airport for his evening flight home. We proceeded to the counter for Neil to check in. The young lady behind the counter, perhaps in her early twenties, took the reservation Neil handed her and proceeded to print out a boarding pass. From the side, I was watching for any sign that the young woman recognized perhaps the most well-known name in the world as the gentleman with the tinted glasses and old briefcase that stood in front of her. There was nothing. No recognition. She calmly folded the boarding pass and documents and handed them back over the counter to Neil and said, “Have a nice flight Mr. Armstrong.” Neil softly said, “Thank you,” and picked up his things. Respecting Neil’s humility, I never said anything to the agent; not that I didn’t want to let her know whom she’d just met!

  Charlie Precourt added:

  For those of us fortunate enough to have flown the space shuttle, Neil Armstrong was our inspiration, our role model, and the pride of our astronaut corps. It would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate representative of humankind to be our first to set foot on the moon. He accomplished the mission with the highest level of skill and has since represented all of those who contributed to that feat with the greatest of humility and dignity.

  One of my most rewarding assignments was when I was privileged to select, train, and work with many shuttle and International Space Station crews. All had their own particular challenges to prepare for missions. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that whenever we would question ourselves about how to handle a situation, in flying or in life, we had Neil’s example to lean on.

  * * *

  Space shuttle trips into space were running like a well-oiled clock when Neil began needling his jungle training buddy John Glenn. Neil knew the old space icon was getting restless, knew he had wanted to go back into space since Kennedy grounded him for being too much of a hero. “Now’s the time for you to go, John,” Neil said. “You’re a big bad United States Senator. Who’s going to stop you?” Neil teased.

  John finally decided Neil was right. He’d had enough of Washington politics, and had retired from the United States Senate after serving 24 years. But there was one small problem! John was 77 years old. Many asked, “Can a septuagenarian handle it?”

  “That’s precisely the point,” argued John. “I should go up and let the scientists take a look at this aged body, see if seniors can function better in space than here in the gravity of Earth.”

  Chief astronaut Charlie Precourt smiled and gave his okay and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin gave John the green light. Space shuttle Discovery’s Commander Curt Brown and its pilot Steve Lindsey welcomed the shining knight of earlier years with open arms, and the spaceport swelled
with grey-haired pride.

  On October 29, 1998, anchor Brian Williams and this old broadcaster were before the NBC cameras reporting John Glenn’s launch into a blue and happy sky. Neil and I and those who admired and loved John Glenn were never more proud. We prayed and wished him luck and spent nine days watching this 77-year-old never miss a step.

  In orbit John proved to be the champ we all knew he was by taking care of his assignments, having fun, and doing a little rocking and singing. Commander Curt Brown reported, “Let the record show John has a smile on his face and it goes from ear to ear.”

  Glenn took the microphone and added, “Hello, Houston. This is PS 2. They sprung me out of the mid-deck for a little while. This is beautiful. The best part—zero G—and I feel fine,” same as he said from Friendship 7 on America’s first orbit 36 years earlier.

  Medical research during Glenn’s mission included a battery of tests on John to research how the absence of gravity affects balance and perception. The research also took a long look at the immune system response, bone and muscle density, metabolism, blood flow, and sleep.

  John Glenn’s second flight at age 77 did much for extending the retirement age. On November 7, 1998, at 12:04 P.M., eastern time, John Glenn and crew aboard Discovery touched down on its Florida landing strip.

  John Glenn, 77, training for his space shuttle flight. (NASA)

  Less than an hour later, with all housekeeping chores completed, John Glenn strolled off the shuttle Discovery seemingly without a care in the world. The lack of gravity in space weakens astronauts’ arms and legs, and it takes some, even those in their thirties, days to return to normal. It was believed that Glenn would need a wheelchair.

  Well, forget about it! John walked by me and winked, and I hit a smart salute and hid a couple of tears. He’d just brought us aged ones hope we could keep on marching through life with purpose.

  Neil had no better friend than John Glenn and when he saw John doing his “nine-day spaceflight walkaround inspection” only an hour after landing, Neil didn’t stop smiling for days.