First Man

by James R. Hansen

That’s all, but it’s a load. The two labs are the only afternoon classes and there are no Saturday classes. I should be able to get home on weekends some times pretty easily. There will be a lot of homework in the summer even though there aren’t many classes.

  Today, we went to Indianapolis to the first model airplane contest. My control lines broke on the first official flight so I didn’t have a chance to win anything.

  I think I am doing better in my studies lately. I enjoy analytics [though he received a final grade of 4] and I understand a little of the chemistry we are studying [also a 4 grade].

  I’ll send the laundry again & hope you’ll send Les’s blanket back. There are six weeks of school left yet. (6) I won’t be out until the middle of June. I saw a show tonight that was the best I had seen in a long time. It is called“Sitting Pretty” with Clifton Webb, Maureen O’Hara, and Robert Young. I especially recommend it to you & Dad. It is a comedy. I’m running out of paper, so I’ll stop.

  Love, Neil

  In the fall of 1948, “The navy wrote me a letter,” Neil explains today, outlining “some new options” in the Holloway program: take the four semesters as planned or begin military service early, after three regular semesters plus a term of summer school. Given that the engineering curriculum was built around two-part courses—Thermodynamics I followed by Thermodynamics II, integral calculus coming right after differential calculus, and so on—“I thought it wasn’t good to cut that in the middle.” When he told the navy “I’d go to the end,” the navy answered. “Well, you made the wrong choice. You’re going to come out early.”

  Armstrong took seventeen credit hours that fall, including Descriptive Geometry, a second semester of physics and another one of calculus, a speech class, plus more physical education and band. Perhaps his anticipation of leaving for the navy affected his academic performance, because his grades were the lowest of any Purdue semester—a 4.17 GPA, caused by three 3s, including one in calculus. While his 3 in physical education might be explained by the fact that Neil was never overly interested in sports or exercise, the bigger mystery is why he also received a 3 in band, an activity that he had enjoyed since junior high. When asked about it, Neil answers, “I have no idea.”

  When Neil left for navy flight training in February 1949 after four semesters at Purdue, he was only eighteen and a half years old. When he returned to the university in September 1952, he had just turned twenty-two. For the first time since second grade, Armstrong was not younger than the majority of his classmates. “I was really getting old,” he relates, laughing. “When I went back to [the] university, kids looked so young!” According to his Purdue friend and fellow navy pilot Pete Karnoski, Neil was “still the quiet, pleasant type, easygoing and friendly, still a young kid, even though he had seen some fighting in Korea.”

  Coming to Purdue for the second time, “I really knew what I wanted to do.” After significant exposure to operational flying and handling high-performance jets, he thought “maybe there was a way to find a combination where I can do both airplane design and piloting.” An internship in the summer of 1954 at the Naval Flight Test Center at Patuxent River in Maryland cemented his career goal.

  Sharper focus and greater maturity resulted in improved grades, as did the fact that Armstrong was now taking specialized courses in his major. In his first semester back, he earned three grades of 6 and two of 5. One of his 6s was in Calculus II, in which before leaving for the navy he had managed no better than a 3. In no engineering course did Neil receive a grade lower than 5. Those courses included Statics and Kinetics, Aircraft Layout and Detail Drafting, and Mechanics of Materials, in which he earned 6s, and Elementary Heat Power, Fluid Mechanics, and Thermodynamics, in which he earned 5s. He even made it through Differential Equations with a 5.

  In the fall of 1950, a young and energetic Caltech graduate, Dr. Milton Clauser, had taken over Purdue’s aeronautics department. Believing that the AE program was “not rigorous enough” and that it was “slanted toward a terminal degree program for those going directly into industry,” Clauser proposed more theoretical courses and fewer laboratories—a curious move by a man who was most recently head of mechanical design for Douglas Aircraft. Yet Clauser’s new curriculum was geared toward the emerging field of “engineering science.” Armstrong did not choose to pursue the new Theoretical Aeronautics option that premiered at Purdue in the fall of 1954, but he did, in his final semester of coursework, take its very challenging course on vector analysis.

  Doctoral candidate Les Hromas served as the instructor for the Wind Tunnel Laboratory that Armstrong took in the fall of 1953. “Two navy flight veterans were in that Wind Tunnel class,” recalls Hromas. “Neil and his friend Tom Thompson.” Hromas recalls as “rather humorous” his classroom objective of demonstrating to two navy flight veterans—one of whom (Neil) had flown seventy-eight combat missions in Korea—what makes an airplane fly.

  In the same fall 1953 term, Armstrong taught a section of GE (General Engineering) 224, Aircraft Layout and Detail Design, a course he had aced just the year before. According to Richard H. Petersen, a 1956 Purdue graduate who later became the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center, “We would draw at drafting tables. Neil would roam around and offer comments or suggestions.”

  Just as Neil’s academic life improved during his second stay at Purdue, so did his social life. He pledged a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, and lived in the frat house (at 503 State Street). “We [pledges cleaned] it imperfectly,” Neil remembers, “but far better than contemporary standards.” Those were also the days of “The Paddle,” which, according to Armstrong, was “used effectively” for fraternity initiations and misconduct.

  Marvin Karasek, “an amazing pianist and composer,” was Phi Delta Theta’s musical director who wrote all the songs for a musical in the 1952 Purdue Varsity Varieties all-student revue. Armstrong, whom Karasek recruited as a Phi Delt, sang in Karasek’s show and still remembers most of his lyrics. When Karasek moved on to graduate school the following spring, Neil succeeded him as the fraternity’s musical director.

  For the next two Varsity Varieties, Armstrong wrote and codirected his own short musicals. The first of his shows, in fall 1953, was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Codirected by Chi Omega’s Joanne Alford, whom Neil took out on a couple of dates, it featured music from the famous Walt Disney film, including “Someday My Prince Will Come.” However, Neil’s humorous prince “wore a black suit, shirt, tie, and fedora and drove in a black MG convertible.” The second production, which Neil entitled The Land of Egelloc (“college” spelled backwards)—alternatively titled La Fing Stock—was synopsized in the program: “New words have been given to the familiar music of Gilbert and Sullivan [transposed into minor keys] for this satire on college honoraries.”

  Armstrong’s showmanship might have affected his grades. In the semester of Snow White, he received C grades in two courses, Psychology for Engineers and Dr. Hsu Lo’s Aircraft Vibrations, and a D in Electrical Engineering (Direct Current). While busy in The Land of Egelloc, he received C grades in Aircraft Power Plant Laboratory and in Vector Analysis and withdrew from a course in Introductory Nuclear Physics.

  No doubt the thought of eighteen-year-old Janet Shearon, the first love of his life, further distracted Neil from his academic work. He met Janet, who was studying home economics, casually at a “trade party” cohosted by Janet’s sorority, Alpha Chi Omega, and Neil’s fraternity. The second time they spoke was early one morning when she was on her way to a home economics lab and he was delivering the school newspaper, the Purdue Exponent. Neil also drove a tomato truck for a local cannery and in the summertime sold kitchen knives door to door.

  He also had intermittent weekend responsibilities as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, carpooling with his Purdue navy buddies to the Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois, north of Chicago, to fly F9F-6 jets. In civilian garb, he flew among fellow veteran military pilots as part of the Purdue Aero Flying Club, which he
chaired during the 1953–54 academic year. Lafayette’s Aretz Airport housed the club’s few small planes: an Aeronca and a couple two- and four-place Pipers.

  One weekend in 1954, Armstrong suffered a minor accident following an air meet in Ohio. Neil thought he would fly a club Aeronca to Wapakoneta, but a rough landing in a local farmer’s field caused, according to Neil, “damage sufficient to prevent flying it back, so I took off the wings and returned it to West Lafayette on a trailer.” Dean, chuckling, tells the story a little differently: “They had to disassemble it and haul it back to Lafayette on our grandfather’s hay wagon.”

  Armstrong finished his last coursework in early January 1955. He did not attend commencement exercises, instead returning to Wapakoneta to prepare for his job in Cleveland at NACA Lewis. Purdue sent by mail the diploma awarding his bachelor’s of science degree in aeronautical engineering. His final grade point average of 4.8 on a 6.0 scale did not win him any academic awards or honors, but it represented a highly respectable performance in a very demanding field stretched out over nearly seven years. After returning from the navy, his GPA averaged a 5.0. This included the equivalent of A or B grades in twenty-six out of a total of thirty-four courses.

  For the rest of his life, engineering would be Armstrong’s primary professional identity. Even during his years as a test pilot and as an astronaut, Neil considered himself first and foremost an aeronautical engineer, one whose ambition to write an engineering textbook set him apart from virtually all of his fellow fliers. It is only in this context that one can truly understand a statement that a frustrated Armstrong would make to a Cincinnati newspaper reporter in 1976: “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?”

  Two of the most important—and rarely acknowledged—points about the Apollo lunar landing program are that it was engineering—much more than science—that accomplished the Moon landing, and that an engineer, not a scientist, was the first to set foot on another world.

  PART THREE

  WINGS OF GOLD

  I’ll always remember him for the way he could talk about flying, no bragging, no great statements, just a man who was cool, calm, intelligent, and one of the best fliers I ever knew.

  —PETER J. KARNOSKI, ARMSTRONG’S ROOMMATEFOR BASIC TRAINING, CLASS 5-49, NAVAL AIRTRAINING COMMAND, NAS PENSACOLA

  Where do we get such men? They leave this ship and they do their job. Then they must find this speck lost somewhere in the sea. When they find it, they have to land on its pitching deck. Where do we get such men?

  —“ADMIRAL GEORGE TARRANT,” FICTIONALCHARACTER IN JAMES A. MICHENER’STHE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI

  CHAPTER 7

  Class 5-49

  If Neil Armstrong had not become a naval aviator, he would not have been the first man to walk on the Moon.

  The first American to fly into space, Alan B. Shepard Jr., was a U.S. Navy aviator. So was the commander of the very first Apollo flight, Walter M. Schirra. Of the one dozen human beings privileged to walk on the Moon, seven of them wore, or had worn, the navy’s wings of gold. Most remarkably, six of the seven mission commanders who piloted Apollo spacecraft down to lunar landings were naval aviators. This included not only the first man to walk on the Moon but also the last man to leave its surface to date, Eugene A. Cernan, in Apollo 17. In between Armstrong and Cernan, fellow navy pilots Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. (Apollo 12), Alan Shepard (Apollo 14), and John W. Young (Apollo 16) flew Apollo spacecraft down to the lunar surface. Navy captain James A. Lovell Jr. would also have done so if not for the near-tragic mishap occurring on Apollo 13’s outbound flight. Only David R. Scott (commander of Apollo 15) did his military flying with the U.S. Air Force. Interestingly, the head of NASA’s Astronaut Office who handpicked all of the Apollo commanders, Donald “Deke” Slayton, was himself an air force officer.

  Since the days of John Paul Jones, navy men have been practicing celestial navigation. It was a natural evolution for what became the world’s greatest navy to take military advantage of the new ocean of space. As early as 1946, the navy commenced feasibility studies of global command and control of the U.S. fleet via Earth satellite vehicles. The Naval Research Laboratory and Office of Naval Research’s Viking rockets set a number of altitude records, including a flight in May 1949 that reached an altitude of 51.5 miles.

  In 1955, the Eisenhower administration selected navy’s Vanguard to become the first U.S. satellite. A joint effort with the National Academy of Sciences, Vanguard lagged behind the Soviet Sputniks, first launched in the fall of 1957. That December, the Vanguard program suffered the nationally televised humiliation of a launchpad explosion at Cape Canaveral. No one was killed, but the disaster—dubbed by the press as “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik”—forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to green-light the alternative U.S. army satellite program headed by Dr. Wernher von Braun. On the last day of January 1958, von Braun’s team launched the nation’s first satellite, Explorer I, on the first try. Vanguard remained grounded until March 1958.

  Still, much about the emerging U.S. space program would be defined by “the Navy Way.” The service’s TRANSIT satellites, first launched in April 1960, established satellites’ effectiveness as navigational aids. Three of the seven original Mercury astronauts were naval aviators (Shepard, Carpenter, and Schirra) and one (Glenn) flew as a marine. Five of the “New Nine,” the second group of astronauts, of which Armstrong was a member, were navy pilots (Armstrong, Conrad, Lovell, Stafford, and Young). Apollo 12, the second lunar landing mission, had an all-navy crew (Conrad, Bean, and Gordon). Four navy flyers (Conrad, Kerwin, Weitz, and Bean) and two Marine Corps officers (Lousma and Carr) participated in Skylab missions. An all-navy crew occupied the very first Skylab, in 1973. At the helm of the first Space Shuttle flight—the mission of the orbiter Columbia in April 1981—sat yet another all-navy crew (Young and Crippen). Navy captain, Shuttle pilot, and International Space Station astronaut Jeff Ashby has observed: “It is as if ISS is our first ship and we are learning to sail.”

  The training of a naval aviator harnesses men (and since the 1970s, women) to machines, culminating in landing an airplane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Between February 1949, when he reported to the commander of the 4,000-acre naval air training base in Pensacola, Florida, and August 1950, when, just two weeks after his twentieth birthday, he ceremoniously received his navy wings of gold, Neil Armstrong passed the test.

  Recalling his days as a Holloway scholar in the fall of 1948, Armstrong surmises, “I suppose the navy saw the Korean War coming” and “needed to ratchet the volume up a little bit, so they called us up early.” Orders arrived on January 26, 1949, for Neil, as well as Purdue classmates Donald A. Gardner, Thomas R. “Tommy” Thompson, Peter J. “Pete” Karnoski, and Bruce E. Clingan, to start flight training.

  Neil went by train from Wapakoneta to Cincinnati, where the group convened, joined by two Holloway students from Miami of Ohio University, David S. Stephenson and Merle L. Anderson, for the 720-mile rail journey to Pensacola. On February 24, 1949, eight days after passing medical exams at the naval air station, they pledged their oath as midshipmen, the lowest grade of officer in the U.S. Navy.

  The navy designated the Pre-Flight training group to which Armstrong (serial number C505129) and his six friends were assigned as Class 5-49, the fifth class to begin training at NAS Pensacola in 1949. New classes formed about every two weeks that year, for a total of nearly two thousand trainees. Yet during World War II, as many as 1,100 cadets per month were beginning Pre-Flight. In 1945 alone, 8,880 men completed flight training with the U.S. Navy.

  Forty midshipmen belonged to Class 5-49, which included roughly the same number of naval cadets, “NavCads,” enlisted men selected for navy flight training. “Pre-Flight” ground school lasted four months.

  For sixteen weeks in the classroom, Armstrong and his mates took intensive courses in Aerial Navigation (128 hours), Communications (fifty-five hours), Engineering (forty hours), Aerology (i.e., meteo
rology, thirty hours), and Principles of Flight (eighteen hours). They studied aerodynamics and the principles of aircraft engines. They learned how to send Morse code and understand the basic tenets of weather forecasting. As Neil remembers, there was “very little time away from the grind.”

  Much of that grind involved learning how the navy wanted things done: eighty-seven hours of Physical Training, sixty hours of the Essentials of Naval Service, thirty hours of Military Administration Courtesy and Bearing, and thirteen hours of Gunnery. In the first weeks of Pre-Flight, recalls classmate Tommy Thompson, “we learned such important things as how to polish our shoes, how to wear the uniform, how to march, how to take orders, how to handle weapons, the difference between a lieutenant and an admiral, et cetera.”

  Armstrong and the others were drilled by marines, taught flight basics by marines, and disciplined by marines. Lieutenant Mano, dubbed “Mighty Mouse” after his five-foot-four stature, was a disciplinarian who, Armstrong recalled, “probably gave everyone low grades” in Physical Training. Lieutenant Colonel R. D. Moore, who was in charge of the Military Department, graded Neil for his final assessment on Military Courtesy (Neil’s mark: 3.0, “Very Good), Military Behavior (3.3, “Outstanding”), Military Drill (3.0, “Very Good”), Initiative (3.0, “Very Good”), Social Adeptness (2.9, “Very Good”), Stability (2.8, “Very Good”), Character (3.4, “Outstanding”), and Leadership (2.7, “Fair”).* Any violation of conduct was punished. According to Pete Karnoski, “Everybody, even Neil, walked [disciplinary] ‘tours.’” Records indicate only one “Delinquent Report” for Armstrong, dated March 31, 1949, resulting in ten demerits and a four-hour Saturday tour.

  At liberty, midshipmen might converse with a pretty young lady at Pensacola’s San Carlos Hotel or take her for a dinner at the Harbor View Restaurant, where red snapper was accompanied by the young aviator’s new favorite drink, Ballantine India Ale. At the white-columned Officer’s Club at Mustin Beach, where American divorcée Wallis Simpson met King Edward VII years before, girls from Mobile came over to Pensacola every Friday and Saturday night to meet the young naval-aviators-to-be. As Midshipman Pete Karnoski recalls, “the attraction was reciprocated.” And Neil? According to Karnoski, “Yes, Neil was one of us in those sorts of endeavors.”