The couple took an apartment in Westwood, so Janet could take classes toward her college degree at UCLA. Neil returned to his bachelor’s quarters on North Base at Edwards and commuted to Westwood on the weekends, a round-trip of over 180 miles. According to Neil, “That was for one semester. Then we moved up to the Antelope Valley and rented a house in an alfalfa field. That was down on the desert floor [at 5026 East Avenue L, within the city limits of Lancaster]. Then we moved into another rental house up in Juniper Hills. When we went up there, we found and bought the property with the cabin on it.”
The move, in late 1957, meant that Janet never earned her degree, something she always regretted.
Compared to the creature comforts of the Shearon home in agreeable Wilmette or even her family’s summer place in Wisconsin, life in the rustic 600-square-foot cabin overlooking Antelope Valley qualified Janet for membership in the Daughters of the Pioneers. The cabin was intended for weekend use. Its floor was bare wood. There were no bedrooms per se, just a room with four bunks. The cabin had a tiny bath and a small kitchen, but only primitive plumbing and no electricity. Even after Neil finished installing the wiring, Janet did all of the cooking on a hot plate. They enjoyed neither hot water nor a bathtub. As Neil recalls, “a shower was a hose hung out over the tree limb.” To bathe their first baby, Eric (whom they came to call Ricky), Janet got a plastic tub, filled it with hose water, and waited ten minutes for the sun to warm it. Only slowly, after a lot of remodeling, did the cabin really become livable. Yet both Neil and Janet “loved it.” The remote physical setting up in the San Gabriel Mountains was gorgeous and, with very few neighbors, provided “total relaxation away from everything.”
Eric Alan Armstrong was born at the Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster on June 30, 1957. A daughter, Karen Anne Armstrong, was delivered at the same hospital on April 13, 1959. The Armstrong’s third and last child, Mark Stephen, was born on April 8, 1963, after the family moved to Houston in the fall of 1962. (In mid-1956, the couple lost a child when Janet spontaneously miscarried.)
Armstrong’s job at Edwards, as Janet once said, “was some fifty miles…but only one stop sign away.” Neil carpooled with fellow High-Speed Flight Station employees who lived in the tiny towns of Littlerock and Pearblossom right below Juniper Hills. Charles Garvey made models in the HSFS woodshop. Betty Scott worked as a human “computer,” one of the NACA employees—virtually all women—who, in an age before electronic computers, did the tedious mathematical work of converting all the flight data into meaningful engineering units. Her first husband, Herb Scott (Betty later married Jim Love), also rode in the carpool, as did Bill LePage.
Being a test pilot made Armstrong the worst of the carpoolers. “He wasn’t very reliable,” Betty Love admits. “It might happen that he had to stay and work on a simulator. But the guys out in the parking lot would sit and wait and finally he’d send word out or come out himself and say…he’d take a company car home. We used to roust him. The guys did; I didn’t. He took it and handed it right back! He was no pussycat.”
At Edwards, some of the stories of Armstrong’s driving have become legendary. Milton O. Thompson, a fellow test pilot and later chief engineer at what became the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, chronicled Neil’s “automobility” in his 1992 book on the X-15 program, At the Edge of Space:
Neil lived in a small house on a couple of acres in Juniper Hills on the southern edge of the Antelope Valley. Neil had several cars, none of which were in good mechanical condition. Neil worked out a pretty good procedure to compensate for the questionable condition of his automobiles. His home was up in the hills above the Pearblossom Highway. He would simply start rolling down the hill in one of his cars on the way to his job at Edwards. If thecar started running and sounded good, he would continue on across Pearblossom Highway and head for Edwards. If it did not start, or it sounded bad, he would simply make a left turn at the highway and coast on down to an automotive repair shop. He would then walk back up and try another car. Later that day after work, he would stop at the shop to pick up the other car. He really had a car repair production line going. The mechanic at the repair shop knew him well.
Typical of many stories told about Neil after he became famous, this one, too, has been embellished over the years.
Armstrong did have an interesting little collection of motorcars. Soon after he moved to California, he traded his 1952 Oldsmobile toward a new Hillman convertible, a snappy European import. “Then a fellow at the High-Speed Flight Station had a ’47 Dodge,” Neil explains. “He threw a rod on the way to work, so he sold me the car for fifty dollars ‘as is.’ I hauled the car up to the cabin and rebuilt the engine. A friend, Keith Anderson, reground the shaft and the cylinders and put in oversize rings and rebuilt the carburetor. It ran very well after that. It is probably true that from time to time I would go down to Vern’s Garage—mostly for the Dodge.” Neil particularly wanted the Dodge in good running order because the ’47 model had a backseat “where you could put your legs straight out without hitting the front seat.” The legroom was great, “and in a carpool situation that was pretty nice.”
“I don’t know if you could say that Neil drove like he flew or flew like he drove,” Betty Love said, posing a riddle. “Neil always sat back in the [driver’s] seat like he was in an easy chair and crossed his left leg over his right knee…. And he would drive that way!” Love once started a carpool conversation about the snow level in the San Gabriels, inquiring of Armstrong “if he ever put his [airplane] wingtip so he could fly along the snow level [and if the snow] would all be the same altitude or did it just look like that from the road.” Intrigued by the question, Neil kept looking off at the snow line as he drove. A moment later “there was a car coming towards us—a pickup truck, actually—and I was ready to tell Neil that he’d better be careful, but it was already too late. He was already over the line,” recalls Betty Love, “and he ran the truck into a ditch, and it happened to be an air police.” Neil showed the MP his identification and “instead of bawling him out, they saluted him and told him to go on his way but to be more careful of where he was on the road.” Clearly, some privileges came with being a test pilot.
Another time the Armstrongs and a group of friends left on a Saturday morning for a picnic and canoeing on nearby Jackson Lake. “All the kids wanted to ride with Neil,” Betty Love remembers. “They wanted to ride in a convertible,” but after what must have been an exciting ascent up the narrow, winding hilltop roads leading to lake country, “nobody wanted to come home with Neil…. Even Jan stayed in the car that she had gone up in—she and her little ones—and Neil came home by himself.”
Contrary to Betty Love’s riddle, it is not a question of whether Neil drove like he flew or flew like he drove, for he did neither. Driving a car in the earthbound two dimensions simply did not engage his mind in the powerfully stimulating way that flying an airplane did.
Armstrong reported to work at the High-Speed Flight Station on July 11, 1955. His formal job title was Aeronautical Research Scientist (Pilot).
Originally, the NACA employed only twenty-seven individuals in its Muroc Flight Test Unit. Its entire operation was hemmed in on a few dozen acres at “South Base.” In 1951 Congress appropriated an additional 120 acres and $4 million. Via a new concrete parking apron and taxiway, this dual-hangared facility, which opened in June 1954, gave the NACA High-Speed Flight Station (formally named on July 1, 1954) ready access to the enormous runway that stretched southwest to northeast on the west side of the dry lake bed. At 15,000 feet long and 300 feet wide, it was, in Armstrong’s words, “a wonderful runway for those big machines.”
High-Speed Flight Station chief thirty-six-year-old Walter C. Williams epitomized the NACA tradition of “engineer in charge,” having led the first detachment of NACA personnel from Langley to Pinecastle, Florida, and from there on to Muroc in 1946 for the purpose of flying the X-1. He ran the NACA’s desert flight research operation until joining the S
pace Task Group in September 1959 to develop launch operations and oversee the building of a worldwide tracking network. As one of the top men in Project Mercury, Williams served as the director of flight operations for the first three Mercury flights, those made by Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn in 1961 and 1962.
Williams “was a gung-ho individual,” remembers one of his engineers, Clyde Bailey. “Yet he was particularly concerned about safety.” So lean was Williams’s HSFS administratively that his “Office of the Chief” consisted solely of himself and one secretary. His Research Division’s main office was staffed by just four people: Williams’s number-two man, De Elroy E. Beeler; his assistant Hubert M. Drake; and two secretaries. Eleven people ran the offices of Williams’s four divisions—research, operations, instrumentation, and administrative. “Real research work” and its supporting activities got done in divisional subsidiaries known as branches and sections.
Armstrong’s Flight Branch was part of the Flight Operations Division, grouped with the Operations Engineering Section, Aircraft Maintenance Branch, Fabrication and Repair Section, Inspection Section, and Operational Aircraft Maintenance Section. The latter, Aircraft Ops, employed fifty-five workers, more by far than any other single organization at the station. Total HSFS staff numbered 275, a fraction of the nearly nine thousand at Edwards AFB.
Flight Operations Division reported to forty-four-year-old Joseph R. Vensel. A former research pilot at Lewis, Vensel had gone off flight status after losing a good bit of his hearing and transferred to Edwards in the early 1950s. Vensel’s authority extended to all aircraft maintenance, inspection, and operations engineering. Ops Engineering required Vensel be knowledgeable about aircraft design, because research aircraft often needed new wings, tails, appendages, or other alterations built on-site in NACA shops. Assisted by secretary Della Mae Bowling, Vensel worked out of room 237 of the NACA building. In the adjacent office were the desks of all his test pilots.
Under Vensel was Neil’s immediate boss, the head of Flight Branch, thirty-five-year-old chief test pilot Joseph A. Walker. Born in 1921 in Washington, Pennsylvania, Walker earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Washington and Jefferson College in 1942. Entering the Army Air Corps, he flew P-38 fighters in North Africa during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with seven oak clusters. In March 1945, Walker became a test pilot for the NACA in Cleveland, contributing the next six years to the laboratory’s aircraft-icing research by “droning around in the crappiest winter weather that they could find in the Great Lakes region.” As part of what was becoming a virtual pipeline between Lewis and the HSFS, Walker came to Edwards in 1951. His promotion to chief test pilot came just months before Neil arrived. A close friendship would grow not just between the two men, but between their wives as well.
The twenty-four-year-old Armstrong once again ranked the most junior pilot. Joe Walker’s ten years of research pilot experience included an estimated 250 flights at Edwards, well over one hundred in experimental aircraft including the Bell X-1, Douglas D-558-1 and D-558-2, Douglas X-3, and Northrop X-4. Between January 1952 and April 1954, Walker had made seventy-eight test flights in the Bell X-5 alone. The X-5 was America’s first high-performance variable-geometry (“swing wing”) aircraft, though its spinning tendencies had killed air force pilot Raymond Popson in October 1953.
Even more experienced than Walker was HSFS test pilot A. Scott Crossfield. It was Crossfield whom Armstrong came to replace, yet, recalls Armstrong, “We were side by side in the office for nearly a year…. [He] had announced that he was going to be the pilot on the X-15 program, whoever won it. He had [employment] agreements with all the different bidders.” (North American Aviation was the eventual winner over Douglas, Bell, and Republic.)
At thirty-four years old in 1955, Crossfield was already a legend. A naval aviator who trained but saw no combat during World War II, Crossfield had earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Washington in 1946. Joining the NACA as a research pilot at Muroc in June 1950, he flew hundreds of research flights, including eighty-seven in the rocket-powered X-1 and sixty-five in the jet-powered D-558-1 and D-558-2 aircraft. In November 1953, Crossfield became the first person ever to fly at Mach 2—or faster than 1,320 miles per hour—when he took to the sky over Edwards in the D-558-2 Skyrocket.
Fellow HSFS test pilots in July 1955 were Stanley P. Butchart and John B. McKay. Both men were thirty-three years old (born in 1922) and both were naval aviators during World War II. Butchart had served in the same torpedo-plane squadron with future U.S. president George H. Bush, VT-51. In 1950, both Butchart and McKay received degrees in aeronautical engineering—Butchart at the University of Washington, Crossfield’s alma mater, and McKay, at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After a brief stint at Boeing as a design engineer on the body of the B-47 bomber, Butchart came to the HSFS as a research pilot in May 1951. McKay began with the NACA slightly earlier, but as an intern, and did not assume pilot status until July 1952. Both men flew a variety of research aircraft, including the D-558 and X-5. Butchart became the station’s principal multiengine pilot. Hundreds of times he flew a B-29 Superfortress up over 30,000 feet in order to air-launch a research aircraft.
Stan Butchart first met Armstrong in March 1955 at NACA Langley, soon after Neil had started his job at Lewis. “Hey, I want you to meet the newest pilot,” Eb Gough had said to Butchart in the chow line at the Langley cafeteria. “Neil still had on his old navy flight jacket and I thought, ‘Boy, this kid is not even out of high school yet!’ He looked so young.” Gough told Butchart that Edwards was really where Armstrong wanted to be. Looking at Armstrong’s résumé, Butchart figured that “somebody had to pick him up quick.” Walker and Vensel agreed and tabbed him for Crossfield’s slot.
Armstrong started flying the first day he arrived at Edwards, in a P-51 Mustang, one of America’s most significant and most beloved military airplanes. “It was quite elegant,” Armstrong says. “Just didn’t have the performance of the F-8F.
“I was in a learning mode for the first few weeks,” Armstrong recalls, flying almost every day, either in the P-51 (with an F-51 designation) or in the NACA’s R4D, a military version of the celebrated Douglas DC-3 transport. “They were telling me the various activities that I should be looking for [leading up to an air launch]. They would be venting the oxygen tanks and starting the turbopumps for the exhaust. I had been introduced to the aircraft on the ground, but this would be my first time actually to observe it in flight…. As they became more confident in my abilities, and as I became more experienced, they gave me more and more jobs.”
Though in position to chase D-558-2 Skyrocket and X-1A launches that ultimately aborted, on August 3, Armstrong saw his first actual drop while flying chase in the F-51 on Crossfield’s D-558-2 flight investigation of stability and structural loads at supersonic speeds. Later that month, Armstrong also checked out in the YRF-84F, the prototype of Republic Aviation’s swept-wing jet fighter (maximum speed 670 mph), and first crewed on the B-29. Armstrong’s first launch assist on a research aircraft came on August 24, 1955, again with Crossfield piloting the Skyrocket.
“Generally, the person in the left seat was in command of the drop,” Neil explains. “The person in the right seat did most of the flying. Over the years I flew in both positions probably an equal number of times.” Without question, this was challenging flying. “We were usually taxing the performance limit of the aircraft because there was a lot of excess drag due to having the [research] aircraft slung beneath the B-29’s belly. We also wanted to get as high as we could for the launches,” typically up in the 30,000- to 35,000-foot region, which would take an hour and a half or more. After that, “it was a matter of getting into the proper position.”
In air launching lurked unanticipated dangers. On August 8, 1955, just an instant before Joe Walker was to be dropped in the X-1A, an explosion within its rocket engine rocked the B-29. “I thought we’d hit another airpl
ane,” remembers pilot Stan Butchart, “and in those days there wasn’t anybody else up there above twenty thousand feet!” Alarmed by the big bang, Walker immediately scrambled up and out of the X-1A and into the bomb bay of his mother ship. The X-1A was too damaged to fly, and the B-29 could not risk landing with it still hooked to its underside. Butchart had no choice but to jettison the research aircraft into the desert. The machine exploded on impact, ending the X-1A program.
Armstrong saw the whole thing. “Neil Armstrong was real new,” Butchart remembers, “and he was flying off our wing in the F-51. So we gave him a good introduction to how the game went.” It was learned later that a gasket blew when Walker threw the switch to pressurize the liquid oxygen and water alcohol in the X-1A’s fuel tanks.
The cause of the accident proved to be a simple leather gasket made by the Ulmer Company to seal propellant plumbing joints. When saturated with liquid oxygen, Ulmer leather was so unstable that a shock of any magnitude caused the gasket to blow. Unfortunately, a number of accidents occurred—involving the X-1-3, X-1A, X-1D, and X-2—before engineers identified the malfunctioning gasket and a fix was made.
Eight months after arriving at Edwards, Armstrong experienced one of his own closest shaves ever, during what should have been just another routine air launch. It happened on Thursday, March 22, 1956. In the NACA’s launch B-29 modified and designated P2B-1S, Armstrong was flying in the right seat with Stan Butchart in command to his left, along with five crew members. Their job that day was to take the number two D-558-2 research airplane up to an altitude of a little over 30,000 feet and then drop it so HSFS research pilot Jack McKay could take it through a flight investigation of its vertical tail loads.
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