First Man

by James R. Hansen

  June recalled a telling incident from the spring after Karen’s death, when Neil took his family to Wapakoneta for a short vacation and a small, informal family reunion. “A baby sheep had died” at the Korspeter farm, June recounted. “The men went out to the barn to attend to the dead lamb. My husband later told me that Neil could not go into the barn. Neil waited outside while the other men took care of the animal.”

  Such intense feelings of sadness and loss did not keep Armstrong from regularly visiting his daughter’s grave. On several occasions after leaving California to become an astronaut, Armstrong returned to Edwards on NASA business, and when he did, he usually visited the children’s sanctuary in Joshua Memorial Park. According to fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson, “I would give him a ride, and he would want to stop by the cemetery. I would stay in the car. He’d go over and spend a little time by his daughter’s grave site.”

  Later in life, during Armstrong’s most celebrated days as an astronaut, there would be some curious personal moments that hearkened back to the loss of Karen. A number of newspaper stories following Gemini VIII and Apollo 11 show Neil holding a little girl in his arms. The most extraordinary of these appeared in a wire service article covering the Apollo 11 crew’s post-flight visit to London, England, in October 1969. Under the headline “2-year-old Girl Bussed by Neil,” the story began by explaining that Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins were about to set out for Buckingham Palace and an audience with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. “But it was a tiny girl who came to see the spacemen only to be nearly crushed against a barrier who won the heart of the slender, blue-eyed Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon. A policeman had picked up Wendy Jane Smith, two, when she was shoved against a barricade in front of the U.S. Embassy. Armstrong caught her eye and quickly stepped forward and kissed her while a crowd of more than three hundred cheered.”

  Was there an intensely personal—most likely, subconscious—relationship between Karen’s death at the end of January 1962 and Neil’s decision to submit his name for astronaut selection just a few months later? “I never asked him,” June confesses. “I couldn’t.” Yet it is clear to June that, through his becoming an astronaut, Neil turned it all around: “The death of his little girl caused him to invest those energies into something very positive, and that’s when he started into the space program.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Higher Resolve

  Armstrong has never related his decision to become an astronaut to his daughter’s death: “It was a hard decision for me to make, to leave what I was doing, which I liked very much, to go to Houston. You don’t have to be in any particular program or wear a particular color of shirt to find research questions that need answering…. But by 1962 Mercury was on its way, the future programs were well designed, and the lunar mission was going to become a reality. I decided that if I wanted to get out of the atmospheric fringes and into deep space work, that was the way to go.”

  Looked at in this way, Armstrong’s views about his future began to evolve on October 4, 1957. On that day, the Soviet Union launched into orbit the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, a stunning technological achievement that put a new sense of value and urgency on everything that the American aerospace community had been doing to prepare for flight outside the atmosphere. Previous to Sputnik, “space” had been a dirty word in the American political arena. When NACA official Ira H. Abbott in the mid-1950s mentioned the possibilities of spaceflight to a U.S. House subcommittee, one congressman accused Abbott of talking “science fiction.” Armstrong acknowledges, “Spaceflight was not generally regarded as a realistic objective. It was a bit of pie in the sky. So although we were working toward that end, it was not something we acknowledged much publicly. Not necessarily for fear of ridicule, but probably somewhat.”

  The day Sputnik launched, Armstrong was in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots: “What was happening in the test-flight world was a very hard sell to the press, and it became completely impossible once Sputnik came across the sky.

  “Sputnik did change our world. It absolutely changed our country’s view of what was happening, the potential of space. I’m not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead. President Eisenhower was saying something like, ‘What’s the worry? It’s just one small ball.’ But I’m sure that was a façade behind which he had substantial concerns, because if they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United States.”

  The Sputnik crisis quickly led to, among other things, the formal abolition of the NACA and its amelioration by NASA, from the start a much higher-profile organization. NASA’s first priority was to place a man in space through a program known as Mercury. “We were certainly aware of Mercury,” Armstrong notes, “from our colleagues in the military, friends and people we flew with daily, some of whom had been invited to consider applying for the astronaut program.” Of all the pilots who became the first astronauts—Gordon Cooper, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton from the air force; Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Alan Shepard from the navy; and John Glenn from the marines—Neil knew only Schirra well, from working with him at Patuxent River on the navy’s preliminary evaluation of the McDonnell XF-4H, which later became the F-4, a principal fighter for both the navy and the air force. With a few of the others, he had sat in occasional technical meetings and had seen them in the air or at the Edwards’s officers’ club.

  Unlike Chuck Yeager and other like-minded test pilots, Armstrong did not denigrate the Mercury astronauts as “Spam in a can”: “I didn’t have that feeling at all—the Yeager criticism of the whole idea of the way they were approaching space. At the time the Mercury program was started, it might have well gone that way. In a sense it did, in that they had a lot of chimpanzee flights. But the Mercury crewmen insisted on making their spacecraft an airplane-like device, with the same conventions as normal airplanes, so that their normal instincts would be proper. So I think that was a great contribution on the part of the Mercury guys…. I always felt that ‘form follows function,’ that engineering would decide the best way to go. I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.”

  This is not to say that Armstrong did not continue to prefer a winged pathway into space, via transatmospheric vehicles like the X-15 and X-20 Dyna-Soar. Even after the first suborbital Mercury flights in 1961, Armstrong thought “we were far more involved in spaceflight research than the Mercury people.

  “I always felt that the risks we had in the space side of the program were probably less than we had back in flying at Edwards or the general flight-test community. The reason is that we were exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits. That isn’t to say that we didn’t expect risks in the space program. But we felt pretty comfortable because we had so much technical backup and we didn’t go nearly as close to the limits as much as we did back in the old flight-test days.”

  A significantly higher rate of fatalities in the world of flight test supports Armstrong’s contention. Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White died in January 1967 when a fire broke out in their Block I spacecraft during a routine test while sitting on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy, and astronauts Theodore C. Freeman (in 1964), Charles A. Bassett and Elliot M. See Jr. (in 1966), and Clifton C. “C. C.” Williams (in 1967), died in crashes of airplanes they were piloting; but not a single American astronaut was lost in an actual space flight until the loss of the seven members of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew in 1986. In contrast, the flight-test community buried many of its members. In 1948 alone, at Edwards alone, thirteen test pilots were killed. One of them was the air base’s namesake, young Captain Glen Edwards; another was Howard C. Lilly, the first NACA test pilot to be killed during a research flight. In the next ten years, many test pilots lost their lives at Edwards. In th
e year 1952 alone, sixty-two pilots died there in the span of thirty-six weeks, an astonishing rate of nearly two pilots per week, many of them involving flight test. The navy’s test-flight mortality rate was just as disturbing. At Patuxent River, Lieutenant Pete Conrad, in the words of author Tom Wolfe, wore “his great dark sepulchral bridge coat” to more funerals than most members of his Princeton graduating class of 1953 wore their tuxedos.

  Armstrong might very well have chosen to remain in the challenging world of test flying. The X-15 program had hardly seen its last days. Neil’s final X-15 flight occurred on July 26, 1962. Though it was the sixty-fourth flight in the program, there were still 135 more X-15 flights to follow in the next six years, before the program ended in October 1968. Between the time of Neil’s first X-15 flight in November 1960 and his last in July 1962, the X-15 made thirty-five test flights; Neil flew seven, or one-fifth, of them. It has always been Neil’s understanding that, if he had stayed on at Edwards, he would likely have become the X-15 program’s chief test pilot. In that capacity, he would have flown the X-15 even more frequently, likely at a rate of one every four flights. “I liked the people I worked with at Edwards,” Armstrong recollects. “There was no reason to try to change things to get into a new field. Staying with the X-15, that was very attractive. It was a real project. It was good. I enjoyed it.” In the end, he just did not decide to do it.

  In November 1960, NASA named Armstrong a member of the air force/NASA Dyna-Soar “pilot consultant group.” Although the air force eventually complicated—some say, ruined—Dyna-Soar by trying to make it operational, the original intent of the Round Three vehicle was research. Its objective was demonstrating controlled lifting reentry, a technique (not unrelated to the lifting-body concept) that created enough aerodynamic lift to give a transatmospheric vehicle the cross-range necessary to maneuver down to established runways, as the Space Shuttle would later do. Lifting reentry provided a flexibility that the nonlifting, blunt-body ballistic capsules sorely lacked. Because it pushed technology so fast and so hard in so many areas (notably high-speed aerodynamics, high-temperature structural materials, and reentry protection concepts), Dyna-Soar, even more than the other X-series programs before it, served as a critical focal point for a wide range of future-oriented aerospace R&D.

  Although NASA engineers at Dryden had considered the possibility of air-launching the X-20 from a B-52 or B-70 mother ship, the plan that NASA and the air force adopted was to loft the Sänger-like boost-glider into orbit on top of a Titan III. This raised the problem of how to rescue the X-20 and its crew if some emergency, like a fire or booster failure, occurred on the launchpad. Such a nightmare scenario almost happened in the Gemini program, when, in December 1965, Wally Schirra in Gemini VI-A came awfully close to yanking the seat ejection ring between his legs and blowing himself and fellow astronaut Tom Stafford up and off their Titan. Because Dyna-Soar was a winged vehicle capable (unlike Schirra’s Gemini capsule) of real flying, a pilot inside the X-20, once blasted clear of his Titan booster, could perhaps fly the vehicle down safely to a runway landing.

  Armstrong (who had published a technical report on his low L/D testing in delta-wing aircraft using an F-102) conceived of a way to test the rescue concept. “That was our thing at Edwards,” Armstrong explains, “doing power-off landings.” The small escape rocket being planned for Dyna-Soar shot the X-20 up several thousand feet and it occurred to Armstrong that “maybe we could duplicate that. So I set about finding out if we could and see if we could get an airplane for it.”*

  The F-104 might have been used again if not for the fact that two F5D-1 Skylancers had just become available to NASA. The F5D was an experimental fighter built by Douglas that the navy had decided not to produce. Only four of the aircraft were ever built, with two of the prototypes given to NASA in late 1960 essentially as castaways. Armstrong flew one of the F5Ds on September 26, 1960, during a visit to NASA Ames. Neil realized immediately that the F5D could serve particularly well in a study of Dyna-Soar abort procedures because its wing planform was a good match for the X-20’s slender delta-shaped wing. Armstrong knew it took a plane like the F5D whose gear could extend out fully and safely at high speed, over 300 knots (345 mph): “So I went out and fiddled with the airplane to see what initial conditions I could get, what airspeed I could match, and how soon could I get the gear down to produce the drag for the L/D that I needed.”

  Armstrong began flight tests in the F5D in July 1961, just shortly after Karen Anne’s illness was diagnosed. While he and Janet were initiating what became the little girl’s first round of X-ray treatment, Neil occupied his mind with the problem of figuring out what kind of separation flight path and landing approach would best bring the X-20 down safely: “I fiddled with that. I think other guys also did it later, but I confirmed that it could be doable.”

  Between July 7 and November 1, 1961, Armstrong made no fewer than ten test flights in the F5D. By early October, he had developed an effective maneuver for the abort. Neil simulated the act of being shot away by the escape rocket by making a steep vertical climb in the F5D to 7,000 feet. At that point, he pulled on his control column until the “X-20” lay on its back. Rolling the craft upright, he initiated the low L/D approach. Landing came on a specially marked area on Rogers Dry Lake, a parcel that simulated the 10,000-foot landing strip at Cape Canaveral.

  Late in the summer of 1961, NASA installed a Cinerama camera into the nose of the F5D to film the abort procedure. On Tuesday, October 3, 1961, Armstrong demonstrated the Dyna-Soar rescue during a special visit of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Edwards. Two days later, Neil repeated the show for an audience that included Marvin Miles, the aerospace editor for the Los Angeles Times, who detailed the technique in a long feature.

  Armstrong handled the F5D research flawlessly. Much of the flying that he performed for Dyna-Soar came during the troubled times following the diagnosis of Karen’s tumor.

  It was six weeks after Karen’s death, on March 15, 1962, that the air force and NASA jointly named Armstrong as one of the six “pilot-engineers” for Dyna-Soar. The only other NASA pilot named was Milt Thompson, so the selection was quite an honor for Armstrong. The air force designees, all age thirty-two, were Captain Pete Knight, Captain Russell L. Rogers, Captain Henry C. Gordon, and Major James W. Wood. At thirty-one, Armstrong was the youngest of the group. “We were the pilots that were to do the development work, the simulator work, consulting on the aircraft, sitting in them, arguing through all the points,” Armstrong recalls. If a small fleet of X-20s actually got built, the sextet would be the prime contenders for first flying the X-20 when it came on line, then scheduled for 1964.

  As Armstrong looked into his professional future following his daughter’s death, he saw three choices: “I could have kept flying the X-15. The X-15 was real. You knew it was real…. I was also working on the Dyna-Soar. That was still an on-paper airplane, but it was a possibility. Then there was this other project down at Houston, the Apollo program. Project Gemini had not been really much identified yet at that point. Recognize, that in this world of aerospace R&D, we constantly see projects come and go. For example, I never flew the D-558 Skyrocket, although I was assigned to that project for a long time. I never got to that goal. I can’t tell you now just why in the end I made the decision I did, but I consider it fortuitous that I happened to pick one that was a winning horse…. I don’t think there was aEureka moment…. A pollo was just so overpoweringly exciting that I decided to give up these other opportunities to pursue it, even though I knew it may never happen.”

  Armstrong admits that the growing excitement surrounding Project Mercury may have had something to do with his decision. On February 20, 1962, three weeks after Karen’s funeral, Mercury astronaut and fellow Ohioan John H. Glenn orbited the Earth three times in Friendship 7. No celebration since that for Armstrong’s hero Charles A. Lindbergh in 1927 matched the national outpouring in honor of America’s newest hero. If ever there was a time to
entice a pilot out of his airplane and into a spacecraft, this was it. “Astronaut Glenn” appeared on the cover of countless newspapers and magazines in the winter and spring of 1962. Life put Glenn in his space helmet on its cover a full two weeks before he even made his Mercury flight; a ten-page, highly illustrated feature story entitled “Making of a Brave Man” called Glenn “a man marked to do great things.”

  Armstrong deliberated between four and five months over his decision to apply for astronaut selection. All the while, he continued to grieve for his daughter—and he continued to fly.

  Armstrong himself claims there were no noticeable ill effects on his work at Edwards, but the picture appears more complicated. In the months immediately following Karen’s death, Armstrong was involved in a series of flying mishaps at Edwards, an uncharacteristic stretch of “problem flights.” His peers and superiors at Edwards came to worry that Neil had become, in their words, “accident prone.”

  Even the very best pilot commits the occasional error and experiences the random mishap in the course of routine flying. In his first years at Edwards, Armstrong likewise had a few minor incidents. In his first and only flight in the Bell X-5 in October 1955, shortly after beginning his job at the HSFS, the landing gear door fell off during takeoff. In part it was Neil’s fault, because, in his attempt to get his landing gear fully retracted, he oversped the plane’s gear limit.* Then, in August 1957, in an incident previously mentioned, he cracked the nose-gear wheel of the X-1B when the airplane began porpoising after touchdown on Rogers Dry Lake. In yet another mishap, he hurt his thumb badly when he accidentally shut the canopy of the YRF-84F on his hand as he was doing his final pre-takeoff checklist. Other than those few incidents, the record of Armstrong’s flying at Edwards was remarkably unblemished. Even after Karen’s hospitalization, Neil’s flying showed no indication that his performance was suffering.