First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Given the emphasis that Kraft, Donlan, and others placed on background and verbal checks, it is surprising that individuals in leadership positions in Houston did not know about Neil’s personal situation—not that it would have changed their thinking about the strength of his credentials for astronaut selection one iota. Today Kraft believes there was “absolutely no way” Armstrong’s piloting performance wasn’t affected in the short term by the tragedy. “The human brain is no different than any other computer. It’s a better computer, but it’s got to have those kinds of faults in it. The pilot won’t even be aware of it. The pilot is probably doing [the flying] to try to get away from it. He wants to go back and get in the fray. I think any good flight surgeon would not have let him fly for a while. But back at Edwards at that time, the only thing that a flight surgeon would have been doing is qualifying him physically every ‘x’ number of days. The chief test pilot up there [Joe Walker] should have been aware of the problem and kept him from flying. …Knowing Neil and knowing Janet, too, as I got to do, they might not have known how they were coping with it. They’re both of the personality that would try to bury that.”

  Neil himself should be given the last word. “Were you concerned at all about how your personal situation could have been affecting your job performance, especially your flying, in late 1961 and early 1962?”

  “I’d have to think that [my] performance was somewhat affected by the situation.”

  “Did Karen’s death play any role in your decision to leave Edwards and become an astronaut?”

  “I don’t remember any factors from Karen’s loss that influenced my work. Personally, it was a trying time. It might have affected my concentration on my work to some extent at the time, because we’d be going into the hospital and to the doctor. You know, a lot of families have these kinds of problems that they have to deal with. It’s not that unusual, unfortunately, but you just have to deal with those kinds of things. We did.”

  Whether Neil and Janet Armstrong handled “those kinds of things” together as constructively as they might have is another question.

  CHAPTER 16

  I’ve Got a Secret

  At 8:00 P.M. EST on Monday night, September 17, 1962, millions of Americans tuned in to the popular CBS television game show I’ve Got a Secret. By today’s standards, I’ve Got a Secret was almost quaint, with its panel of urbane New York celebrities, an unadorned set, and a top prize of $80 to any guest who could stump the panel. This evening’s panelists were the series regulars: actor and radio humorist Henry Morgan; the first Jewish Miss America and future public servant and philanthropist Bess Myerson; popular game show host Bill Cullen; and the actress Betsy Palmer. One of the show’s attractions was the sophisticated but playful camaraderie among the contestants and host Garry Moore’s genial and gracious demeanor. It was a formula that kept the show on the air from the early 1950s until 1976.

  In response to Moore’s usual greeting—“Will you come in, please?”—Neil’s parents emerged through a doorway to take their seats at a desk to Moore’s right. Facing the contestants, Viola, in a dark, knee-length cocktail dress and low-heeled pumps, and Stephen, in a gray business suit, introduced themselves. Then Viola and Stephen whispered their secret to Moore at the same time the words “Our son became an ASTRONAUT today” flashed on TV screens across the country. After the studio applause died down, the game began.

  MOORE: Now, panel, to help you classify Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong’s secret, the clue concerns a relative of theirs, and we’ll start the game with Henry [Morgan].

  MORGAN: Mr. Armstrong, is your relative’s name Armstrong?

  STEPHEN: That’s right.

  MORGAN: Has he ever made any public figure of himself?

  STEPHEN: Yes.

  MORGAN: Did he ever invent anything?

  STEPHEN (pauses for a second): Not that I know of.

  MORGAN: Whatever he did—I’m assuming he was in the newspapers and so forth—did he do it recently?

  STEPHEN: Yes.

  LOUD BUZZER

  MOORE: Twenty dollars down, sixty dollars to go. We go to Bess Myerson. Myerson asks several mundane questions before the buzzer sounds and Bill Cullen takes a shot.

  CULLEN: I think I have it!

  MOORE: Go ahead, buddy.

  CULLEN: Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong are relatives of Jack Armstrong…

  CULLEN AND FELLOW PANELISTS: the All-American Boy! After a few moments of laughter, Moore gets the game back on track:

  MOORE: Sixty dollars down and twenty dollars to go. And we go to Betsy Palmer.

  PALMER (still laughing): Does it have anything to do with linoleum?

  LOUD LAUGHTER

  STEPHEN (smiling): No.

  PALMER: Does it have anything to do with aeronautics?

  STEPHEN: It does.

  PALMER: Space?

  STEPHEN: It does.

  PALMER: Is your son going to fly out into space soon?

  PALMER: Is he a new astronaut?

  MOORE: That’s it!

  APPLAUSE

  MOORE: Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong are a very happy and a very proud couple—they’re still kind of in a state of shock—because this afternoon at three P.M., their son Neil was named one of America’s new astronauts.

  APPLAUSE

  MOORE: So we want to congratulate you and all of the new astronauts and all of their families. We would have liked to have had many more of them here, but we felt so lucky to get them here from Ohio.

  MOORE: Well, Mr. Armstrong, your son is one of the two civilians chosen. How long has he been flying, sir?

  STEPHEN: Since before he was sixteen years of age.

  MOORE: Before sixteen?

  STEPHEN: Uh-huh.

  MOORE: That would mean he had his wings before he had his driver’s license, right?

  VIOLA: That’s right.

  MOORE: I understand that he has been a test pilot since 1955, when he graduated from Purdue and was hired directly by NASA. Now, what did he do for NASA, sir?

  STEPHEN: Well, he tested various jet planes of different speeds: Mach 1, 2, 3, and so on, until he came up to the X-15.

  MOORE (reading from a prepared sheet): He flew the X-15 more than 3,900 miles per hour, over 207,000 feet. Now, how would you feel, Mrs. Armstrong, if it turned out—and, of course, nobody knows, but it turns out—that your son is the first man to land on the Moon? How would you feel?

  VIOLA: Well, I guess I’d just say, God bless him and I wish him the best of all good luck.

  Neil did not see his parents on TV that night; in fact, he did not even know his mother and father were appearing on the CBS program until after the fact, so cloistered did NASA keep its newest astronauts in the days leading up to their introduction to the country on Monday, September 17, 1962.

  The space agency forced Armstrong to play its own version of I’ve Got a Secret. The episode started four days earlier when, while at work in his office at Edwards, Neil got the phone call from Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office at the Manned Spacecraft Center, then still under construction on Clear Lake, southeast of Houston.

  Deke came right to the point: “Hi, Neil, this is Deke. Are you still interested in the astronaut group?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Armstrong.

  “Well, you have the job, then. We’re going to get started right away, so adjust your schedule and get down here by the sixteenth.” Slayton told Armstrong that he could tell his wife but otherwise to keep the news quiet.

  Even as a boy, it was never hard for Armstrong to keep a secret. His parents did not get the news about their son becoming an astronaut until sometime that weekend when they received a phone call at their Wapakoneta home from a NASA public relations officer who was helping CBS set up the Monday evening appearance on I’ve Got a Secret. Neil’s sister June and brother Dean did not hear about Neil becoming an astronaut until even later. “He came through Wisconsin for a short visit around the Fourth of July,” June recounts, “and he said to me, ‘I’m on my
way to Texas. I’m taking a couple tests.’ He was kind of flippant about it, ‘taking a couple tests.’ Next thing, I hear the announcement he’s been chosen as an astronaut!”

  As for the call from Slayton to Neil, “I was happy to get that call,” Armstrong relates. Slayton’s call really could not have surprised Neil much. As early as midsummer 1962, newspapers had been reporting that Armstrong was going to be named the “first civilian astronaut.” Based on information from “official sources,” an article in the Washington Evening Star on July 18, 1962, opened: “An X-15 pilot, Neil Armstrong, will be the first civilian selected for training as an astronaut. Conceivably he could command America’s first attempt to land men on the Moon.”

  NASA officials later denied the story, conceding that Armstrong was “definitely on the list” of 32 men out of an applicant pool of 253 who had survived the preliminary screening but indicating that no final selections had been made. Many close observers of NASA did not believe the denial. Nor did most of the astronaut finalists who came from the active military. One of the air force finalists, Michael Collins (who would not be chosen until the third class of astronauts, in October 1963), wrote home to his father: “I strongly suspect that at least one civilian will be included, for propaganda purposes, if nothing else, and Neil Armstrong will be on the list unless his physical discloses some major problem. I say this because he has by far the best background of the six civilians under consideration, and he is already employed by NASA.” James A. Lovell, a navy finalist who NASA did choose for the second group, felt much the same way about Armstrong as Collins, later writing: “Given his Agency pedigree, the odds had been good he would make this cut.”

  Yet if one takes Slayton at his word, Armstrong’s civilian status had nothing to do with his selection. “Nobody pressured us to hire civilians,” Slayton wrote later in his autobiography. The truth was, as we have already seen, that no such pressure was needed, at least in Armstrong’s case. All through the selection process, as Neil admits, his identification with the ways of NACA/NASA had been an advantage for him: “I was in Houston talking with people from my own organization, while for somebody coming off a fighter squadron or a carrier assignment, or coming over from a squadron, say, in Ramstein, Germany, this was a very different experience.”

  Armstrong was relatively confident that NASA would choose him as one of its next astronauts, but he could not be sure: “A number of us had combat experience. My education level was, I thought, competitive. My experience was rather broad, and having flown the rocket airplanes and things like that, and being involved in a variety of test-flight programs. Nevertheless, the areas that I didn’t know how well I compared were physical, emotional, psychological, and perhaps how I was perceived by other people. I didn’t know how I would grade in those categories. And any one of those could certainly evict you from the program.”

  During the four-month stretch from early June 1962, when he turned in his astronaut application late to Houston, to the day in mid-September when Slayton called him with the good news, Armstrong was too busy to worry much about whether he was going to become an astronaut. He spent the second week of June at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ostensibly taking his annual NASA test pilot’s physical but with the results of certain tests being relayed—unbeknownst to him—back to the Manned Spacecraft Center for evaluation as part of the astronaut selection process. Back at Edwards, Neil made a series of low L/D landings in the F-104; flew chase for Bob White’s X-15-3 flight (on June 21) and Jack McKay’s X-15-2 flight (on June 29); picked up his Chanute Award at an IAS event in Los Angeles (the evening of June 21); and flew a test program involving a radio altimeter for the Saturn rocket then under development.

  On July 5, 1962, Armstrong left for his AGARD meeting in France, where he presented a paper, “A Review of In-Flight Simulation Pertinent to Piloted Space Vehicles.” Coauthored by Euclid C. “Ed” Holleman of FRC’s Dynamic Stability and Analysis Branch, the paper (AGARD Report 403) demonstrated “how the environment of actual flight may be used to simulate many phases of manned space exploration,” culminating in “one of the most challenging and potentially most fruitful projects of the current space program”—an experimental flight vehicle then under development at the Flight Research Center that could simulate the final several thousand feet of descent to a Moon landing. Over the next years, this simulator, in the form of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), would make major contributions to the Apollo program. In the form of the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), which evolved from the LLRV, the machine in 1968 nearly cost Armstrong his life.

  Returning from the Paris conference, Armstrong spent all of his time preparing for his final flight in the X-15. It was to be Neil’s first time back in the number-one aircraft since his flight of December 9, 1960, when the cue-ball system replaced the nose boom for the first time. The objective of the flight was evaluation of the aircraft’s aerodynamic stability and drag handling qualities at hypersonic speed and in the relatively low altitude range between 90,000 and 110,000 feet.

  Although his X-15 flight on June 27, 1962 (number 1-32-53), resulted in the highest Mach number Armstrong ever attained in the X-15 program—Mach 5.74, or 3,989 mph—it did not come off, as most X-15 flights did not, without a hitch or two. The first sign of a problem came prior to launch when Neil saw that the hydraulic pressure in the aircraft’s number-one auxiliary power unit (APU) was behaving erratically. Upon landing, the reading turned out to be the result of a rather serious oil leak, one traced by the engine mechanics to a pinhole crack in the cockpit source transmitter line, which left very little oil in the reservoir of the APU at shutdown.

  Then smoke started to infiltrate the cockpit at just the time Neil was pushing the black rocket plane into the range of maximum speed. “The smoke was obvious,” Armstrong remembers. “There really wasn’t much to do about it. You couldn’t open the cockpit and let it out. You’re just stuck with it. But you’re shielded from it because you’re inside the pressure suit. You’re okay unless it’s some kind of fire hurting the aircraft systems. The best thing you can do is get the plane on the ground.” Armstrong managed to land safely, the few control difficulties related to operating the new type of trim tab that had just been installed on his sidestick controller.

  Following the X-15 flight, there was barely enough time for Neil to write up his pilot comments before he had to leave for Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. At Brooks he underwent an exhausting week of medical and psychological tests that went a long way toward finalizing the selection of the new astronauts. Not that the second group of candidates suffered what the original Mercury group had, yet, in Armstrong’s opinion, “there were some painful experiences. My sense at the time was that some of these things must have been specially designed to be medical research rather than diagnostic techniques.”

  A few of the exams were especially diabolical. “There was one,” Neil recalls, “where they syringed ice water into your ear for a long period of time until you sort of got uncaged, and another where you had your foot in ice water for quite a while. There were a lot of strange tests like that, which certainly were not standard ‘annual physical’ kinds of tests…. On another occasion, they sent us to Los Alamos, where the government had special facilities to weigh you underwater and compute your body mass density. A lot of strange things. There were also standard medical tests and some duplicating of what had been done earlier at Lovelace. But at Brooks there was a lot more focus on psychological testing.”

  One psychological trial that Armstrong distinctly remembers was an isolation test: “They put you in a black room where all sensory signals were removed. There was no sound, no light, and no smell. They told you to come out after two hours.” Neil applied engineering principles: “I tried to compute a way to figure out how long two hours were. So I used the song, ‘Fifteen Men in a Boardinghouse Bed’”:

  Fifteen men in a boardinghouse bed,

  Roll over, roll over.
<
br />   One turned over and the other man said,

  “Roll over, roll over.”

  One man thought it would be a great joke,

  not to turn over when the other man spoke,

  but in the struggle his neck got broke,

  Roll over, roll over.

  “You go through the ditty at fifteen, then you go at fourteen, then you go at thirteen, so by the time you get to the end, it’s pretty long. I could roughly compute how long that might take. I didn’t have a watch or anything, but I sang that song until I thought about two hours were up. Then I knocked on the door and shouted, ‘Let me out of this place!’”

  Another one of the ordeals involved high temperature. Examiners put him in a small room where the temperature ranged from 140 to 145 degreesF. Following a counterintuitive strategy, Neil reduced his metabolic heat generation to an absolute minimum by doing absolutely nothing but sitting quietly in a corner, trying not to move, or even to think. “I don’t know how well I did it, but I was able to stand it in there. Of course, those of us who came from Edwards were used to 115 degrees as a standard. We probably had an advantage over the guys who were stationed in Michigan.”

  One week working at Edwards following the exams in San Antonio, Armstrong traveled on August 13 to Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base for a final round of medical and psychiatric tests: “It was a chance to chat about what this program might mean and have a chance to express my opinions on the values and the challenges of this kind of work.” At Ellington Armstrong first came before NASA’s astronaut selection panel, a group that included Deke Slayton, Warren North, Walt Williams, and Dick Day. Occasionally John Glenn or Wally Schirra drifted in and out of the room. “We talked about the general nature of the program,” Armstrong relates. “I didn’t find it at all difficult or pressuring or anything. I found it a natural conversation about the kinds of things I was interested in at the time.”

  All thirty-two of the finalists (thirteen navy, ten air force, three Marines, and six civilians) gathered one evening for cocktails and dinner with a small party of leading officials from the Manned Spacecraft Center. Armstrong remembers, “I didn’t know too many of the people. I knew Schirra from the XF4H-1 evaluation. I knew some others a little,” including Gus Grissom, who had flown at Edwards until he was transferred back to Wright-Patterson in 1957. Slayton and Cooper, too, had also been stationed at Edwards, but the fliers’ duties had not overlapped. “We did not have military pilots in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots in the early days,” Neil explains. “Most contact with the military pilots was on the job, so that contact was restricted to situations where NACA/NASA pilots were working on a project with air force pilots. And I don’t recall being on any projects with Grissom, Slayton, or Cooper.” Armstrong knew John Glenn and Al Shepard only from the occasional flight-test event, though he also recalls meeting both of them back in the summer of 1954 when he was working between semesters at Purdue on catapult design at Patuxent River. Scott Carpenter was the only Mercury astronaut that Neil had never met.