First Man

by James R. Hansen

  What Armstrong did not know was the loss of hydraulic pressure had triggered the release of his emergency arresting hook. If Armstrong had known his arresting hook was down, his landing at Nellis AFB would have came off trouble-free; after all, he was a naval aviator with loads of experience making tailhook landings. The Nellis arresting gear consisted of a steel cable attached to a long length of ship’s anchor chain, each link weighing over thirty pounds.

  “There was a good jolt when I hit it,” Armstrong relates, “and it was completely unexpected because I didn’t even think about the hook being down, because I couldn’t see exactly what my situation was.” Down the runway for hundreds of feet, this way and that, links of heavy, broken anchor chain went careening like desert tumbleweeds. The F-104 stopped dead in its tracks.

  It took the air force thirty minutes to clear the runway and considerably longer to rig a makeshift, interim arresting gear. Driven to the building where the base operations officer was on duty, Armstrong took off his gear, explained what happened to the perturbed base ops officer, and mustered his nerve to telephone back to NASA to report his accident.

  By then everyone at NASA had been fearing the worst. When more than thirty minutes passed from Neil’s last check-in, Della Mae Bowling, the flight ops secretary, tried contacting him but got no answer. Then another fifteen minutes passed, still with no word. For the next hour, Della Mae tried calling Neil every four or five minutes. The Edwards control tower had no information. A few minutes later the tower reported that Neil had encountered a problem but had landed safely at Nellis.

  Soon, Armstrong was on the phone with Joe Walker, who told NASA test pilot Milt Thompson to go pick him up. The only two-seat aircraft available was an F-104B, which Thompson had not been checked out in. But Joe Vensel insisted, citing “no significant difference” between the B model (which had tip tanks) and the F-104A, which Thompson had flown many times. As soon he left the ground, Thompson knew Vensel “had stretched the truth a bit.” “All over the sky” after takeoff, Thompson could not crank it around tight enough to line up with the runway at Nellis. On his second go-around, a strong crosswind caught Thompson’s airplane, forcing him to plunk down hard enough to blow the left main tire. Chunks of rubber tumbled across the runway where thirty-pound links of steel chain had just been. A fire truck and base ops vehicle quickly joined Thompson’s crippled airplane as he parked it off the center taxiway. The only person who felt worse than Thompson at this moment was Armstrong as he watched the base ops officer shut down the runway for the second time that afternoon thanks to the questionable performance of a NASA pilot.

  The “Nellis Affair,” as it came to be known in the unwritten annals of Mojave Desert aviation, did not end there. NASA now had two stranded pilots. It had no choice but to send a third plane to Nellis. Unfortunately, the Gooneybird was up at NASA Ames. The only available plane was a T-33, another two-seater. But, almost beyond belief, as Bill Dana headed in long and hot, it looked like he was going to overshoot the runway. “Oh no, not again!” lamented the base ops officer, while Neil hid his head in his arm and Thompson watched “transfixed.” Fortunately, Dana got the airplane stopped in time. “Please don’t send another NASA airplane!” the air force officer begged. “I’ll personally find one of you transportation back to Edwards.”

  True to his word, when an air force C-47 happened to be passing through Nellis on its way to Los Angeles, the ops officer expedited the refueling to haul Thompson away. For years thereafter, the base ops officer related “the tale of the three hot-shot NASA test pilots” that ruined his runways. Whether the man realized later that one of them turned out to be the first man on the Moon is unknown.

  “That was a bad day all around,” Armstrong recalls. “We had a couple bruised airplanes, and we made the officials at Nellis irritated. The air force guys got sick and tired of these NASA guys coming and dumping old airplanes on them.”

  The following day, a group from NASA went out to Delamar to examine Armstrong’s tire tracks. The day after that, an accident investigation board convened in Joe Vensel’s office. According to Milt Thompson, the tracks on the lake bed told the whole story.* Armstrong was not present at the accident investigation board, as he left that day for Seattle and another round of consultation on Dyna-Soar. In his logbook for the day of the Delamar flight, Neil recorded the event as an “inadvertent touchdown.” To him, that indicated that he “put the gear down to simulate the X-15 procedure and drag, but did not intend to touch down.” So “the main cause was my misjudging in that glare situation resulting in an advertent touchdown prior to the gear fully extending.”

  A few of Armstrong’s colleagues at Edwards believe that Paul Bikle, the FRC director, in his own mind did connect the short string of mishaps in Neil’s flying to Neil’s emotional state following his daughter’s death, temporarily grounding Armstrong after the Nellis mishap. Bikle was known for handling his pilots sternly. “Bikle didn’t diddle around,” Stan Butchart remembers. “He always made a decision right then and there, yes or no…. You knew where you stood with him.” Armstrong agrees: “Bikle was very pragmatic. He was good at correcting you when he thought you were off base, but he was never disagreeable in the process. He was a fun-loving guy and he tended to joke more than he talked when he was criticizing you. He’d rather make fun of you than make light of you.”

  Armstrong declares that the only times he was ever grounded during his career at Edwards were for medical reasons and that Paul Bikle never grounded him or even talked to him about it. Perhaps Bikle did not have to. The day after the debacle in Nevada, Armstrong left on what turned out to be a two-week trip to Seattle. He flew round-trip on a commercial airliner, returning on June 4. The first two days back at Edwards, Neil stayed at home and did not fly. His first flight following the Nellis Affair came on June 7, when he piloted an F-104 in the company of Bill Dana.

  Certainly, Armstrong by this time had decided to apply for astronaut selection. When exactly that happened is not clear. NASA formally announced that applications would be accepted for a new group of astronauts on April 18, 1962. This was two days before Armstrong’s X-15 overshoot flight. Very possibly, Neil knew nothing about NASA’s announcement until April 27. On that day, the FRC’s in-house newsletter, the X-Press, ran a story entitled “NASA Will Select More Astronauts,” specifying an additional five to ten slots. The new pilots would participate in support operations for Project Mercury and then join the Mercury astronauts in piloting the two-man Gemini spacecraft.

  The requirements for selection could not have suited Armstrong better if had they been written for him specifically. The successful applicant had to be an experienced jet test pilot—preferably one presently engaged in flying high-performance aircraft. He must have attained experimental flight status through military service, the aircraft industry, or NASA. He had to hold a college degree in the physical or biological sciences or in engineering. He needed to be a U.S. citizen who was under thirty-five years of age (at the time of selection) and six feet or less in height. His parent organization, in this case NASA’s Flight Research Center, had to recommend him for the job.

  The director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Robert R. Gilruth, would be accepting applications until Friday, June 1, 1962. Pilots meeting the qualifications were to be interviewed in July. Those who passed a battery of written examinations on their engineering and scientific knowledge were then to be thoroughly examined by a group of medical specialists. The training program for the new astronauts was to include work with design and development engineers, simulator flying, centrifuge training, additional scientific training, and flights in high-performance aircraft. Virtually the entire training syllabus involved activities that Armstrong had already done.

  Curiously, the same day as the X-Press report, Life magazine published an issue headlined “Man’s Journey to the Moon: Preview of the Greatest Adventure of All Time.” The cover shot featured a man testing a “Moonsuit.” Inside was a feature
entitled “Our Next Goal, Man on the Moon.” Sidebars and captions highlighted “Moonship and Rocket in the Works,” “A Model Menagerie of Moon Vehicles,” “Complex Mysteries to Solve Before Fixing a Flight Plan,” and “The Hunt for Ways to Live There.” Whether Armstrong saw this issue of Life is uncertain, but, even if he did not, its existence in April 1962 suggests just how deeply the idea of the Moon landing had penetrated the American psyche in the year since President Kennedy’s lunar commitment. This deepening public interest in the possibility of a manned Moon landing “before the decade is out” surely played some small role in Armstrong’s thinking about whether to become an astronaut.

  So, too, may have his visit to the Seattle World’s Fair. From May 9 to 11, 1962, Armstrong was in the city to attend the Second Annual Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space, an event cosponsored by NASA, the American Astronautical Society, the American Rocket Society, the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots to explore the potential international applications of space science and technology. Armstrong with coauthors and fellow X-15 pilots Joe Walker, Forrest Petersen, and Bob White, all members of the test pilots’ “100,000 Foot Club,” gave a presentation on “The X-15 Flight Program.” Other speakers at the conference included NASA Administrator James E. Webb (“The Role of Government in Scientific Exploration”), Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (“The New World of Space”), director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center Bob Gilruth (“Projects Mercury and Gemini”), NASA’s Director of Spacecraft and Flight Missions George M. Low (“Project Apollo”), and several other notables in space-related fields.

  Attendance at this conference and at the conjoining Seattle World’s Fair could not help but impress a person who was thinking seriously about a career in space exploration. The fair, whose theme was “the possibilities of life in the 21st Century,” featured the 605-foot-tall Space Needle and the Monorail, both of which became Seattle landmarks. Festivities began on May 9 when former president Dwight D. Eisenhower started a clock in Seattle that was to count down to the end of the millennium. At the very same instant, President Kennedy, on Easter holiday in Florida, pressed a telegraph key that triggered a radio telescope in Maine that picked up an impulse from a star ten thousand light-years away and then lit up the fairgrounds.

  The star attraction on the second day of the World’s Fair was astronaut John Glenn, fresh off his orbital flight for Project Mercury two and half months earlier. “Throngs of awestruck admirers” lined Seattle’s streets to catch a glimpse of the famous red-haired “spaceman.”

  Only one person besides Armstrong ever knew that Neil’s application to Houston arrived late. This was Dick Day, the FRC flight simulation expert with whom Armstrong worked closely ever since Neil joined the NACA’s High-Speed Flight Station. In February 1962, Day transferred from Edwards to Houston to become assistant director of the Flight Crew Operations Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center. In this capacity, Day oversaw all astronaut training programs and equipment. Two months after arriving in Houston, Day also found himself, thanks to his former boss at Edwards, Walter Williams, not just a member of the selection panel for the second group of astronauts but the panel’s ad hoc secretary.

  According to Day, Armstrong’s application for astronaut selection missed the June 1 deadline. Day explained how and why Neil’s application was processed anyway: “There were several people from Edwards who had gone on to Houston. Walt Williams, for one. Walt had gone on to be the operations director in Houston for the Space Task Group. He wanted Neil to apply, and I wanted Neil to apply. I really don’t know why Neil delayed his application, but he did, and all the applications came to me, since I was the head of flight crew training. Neil’s application came in late, definitely, by about a week. But he had done so many things so well at Edwards. He was so far and away the best qualified, more than any other, certainly as compared to the first group of astronauts. We wanted him in.”

  Technically, since Armstrong’s application missed the deadline, NASA should not have accepted it. However, no one but Day and Williams knew the application arrived late. When it came in, Day slipped it into the pile with all the other applications prior to the selection panel’s first meeting. Personally, Day had no concerns whatsoever about Neil’s prospective performance as an astronaut—and Day knew the ups and down of Neil’s flying record at Edwards as well as anyone, except for the details of what had happened since Day left Edwards in February 1962: “I never gave a thought to his personal affairs, and I don’t think Walt Williams or anyone else did, either.”

  Armstrong does not remember sending his application in late. Yet he does credit Day, who died in 2004, for his powers of persuasion: “You were responsible for getting me to transfer over to Houston,” Neil wrote Day in a 1997 e-mail.

  Except for Monday, May 21—the day of the Nellis Affair—Armstrong did not spend a single day in his office at Edwards from Wednesday, May 9, to his return from Seattle on June 4. Undoubtedly, the application waited for him on his desk. If he completed it soon after returning to Edwards, the timing of its arrival in Houston would fit what Dick Day has indicated, about a week late.

  To some at Edwards, Neil’s decision came as a surprise. “He never mentioned anything to anybody,” relates his good friend Stan Butchart. “We never knew that he had applied, unless maybe he had told Joe Walker. But Neil never said anything to me, and we were as close as we could be. The first thing we knew was when it was announced.” Fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson concurs: “I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that Neil wanted to leave Edwards and go into the space program.”

  Virtually everyone at Edwards thought that Armstrong was a great choice to become an astronaut, especially when it was announced in early June 1962 that he was to receive the prestigious Octave Chanute Award. Presented by the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, the Chanute Award went to the pilot that the IAS deemed had contributed the most to the aerospace sciences during the previous year. According to Dick Day, Paul Bikle, the director of NASA’s Flight Research Center at Edwards and Day’s own former boss, did not think so positively of Armstrong. Bikle chose not to recommend Armstrong for astronaut selection, because, in his mind, Neil’s immediate past record in the air raised some serious concerns about his performance.

  At the end of May 1962 Neil scheduled a two-week trip to Europe to coincide with the 21st Meeting of the Flight Mechanics Panel of the NATO Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development, to be held in Paris from July 6 to 10. On his way to France, where Armstrong would present a paper (coauthored by Robert Rushworth), he was to stop in England in order to fly the new Handley Page HP-115, a very low aspect-ratio (70-degree leading-edge sweep) research airplane built to investigate the low-speed characteristics of the slender delta, the wing form being considered for the British supersonic transport that evolved into the Anglo-French Concorde.*

  Paul Bikle pulled the plug on Neil’s British sojourn. In a memorandum sent to NASA Headquarters on May 29, 1962, Bikle wrote, “Due to commitments of Mr. Neil A. Armstrong in relation to the X-15 program, it will be impossible for Armstrong to participate in flights of United Kingdom aircraft” specified for the last week of June.

  Whether the accelerating workload in the X-15 program was the only reason for Bikle canceling Armstrong’s visit to England in the summer of 1962 is a question only Paul Bikle can answer, and he is no longer living. Given the series of mishaps in Neil’s flying that spring—culminating in the Nellis Affair on May 21 and the accident investigation board that looked into it on May 23, just five days prior to Bikle sending the memo—and given Bickle’s subsequent refusal to support Neil’s astronaut application, one can only wonder whether Bikle privately did not want Armstrong over in England test-flying one of the RAF’s newest experimental jets. Neil never understood Bikle’s decision as such: “I am confident that Paul’s memo was a form response. There could have been many reasons for his conclusion. We would have to know what the
overall workload at the time was and how many FRC pilots were available to handle it.” Forty-two years after Bikle canceled the British trip, Neil does not harbor any disappointment, “but I don’t remember well enough to say I wasn’t.”

  Armstrong did eventually have the chance to fly the HP-115, on June 22, 1970, eleven months after his Moon landing.

  No one has ever understood the mentality of test pilots or astronauts better than Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., the “Voice of Project Mercury” and the original director of NASA’s manned spaceflight operations at Mission Control in Houston. Upon graduating with an aeronautical engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1944, Kraft went to work in the Stability and Control Branch of NACA Langley’s Flight Research Division where he rubbed elbows with such talented flight test engineers as Bob Gilruth, Charles Donlan, and Walt Williams, men who in the summer of 1958, following Sputnik, took Kraft with them into the Space Task Group, which planned and administered Project Mercury.

  Kraft did not serve on the selection panel for the second group of astronauts, but he had a lot to do with defining the selection criteria. “Charles Donlan was in charge of that,” Kraft recalls, “and he talked to me about it because he valued the association I was having with the first seven astronauts. I emphasized that we should go talk to the people who know the candidates, know their character, and know their capabilities…. People likeGilruth, Williams, and myself were looking for qualified test pilots.

  “I hardly knew Armstrong out at Edwards,” Kraft continues. “I didn’t know about his daughter’s death. I did know that he had had a few accidents—what pilot hasn’t—but I never associated them with any psychological event. What I knew was that Walt Williams thought he was first rate. Certainly, based on what we knew about him, and what we saw when we met him, Gilruth and I and everybody else felt the same way.”