Returning to Juniper Hills through Los Angeles on November 3, Armstrong traded in both of his used cars and bought a used station wagon spacious enough to haul all of the family’s more precious belongings. The family’s furniture and clothing had already been shipped to storage in Houston. Neil took Rick with him in the car, while Janet flew east by commercial airliner two days later, arriving in Houston the same day her men did. For the next few months, the Armstrongs lived in their furnished apartment until completion of their home in the new El Lago subdivision, a few minutes east of the Manned Spacecraft Center.
For the entire Armstrong family, it was the start of a brand-new phase, one that would take them not just to the Moon and back, but, in terms of how they lived their lives, also to some places they would have preferred not to go.
PART FIVE
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
They say “no man is an island”; well, Neil is kind of an island…. Sometimes what he was thinking and his inner thoughts were more interesting to him than somebody else’s thoughts were to him, so why should he leave his island, go wading out into the shallows to shake hands with somebody, when he’s perfectly happy back in his little grass hut or wherever.
—MICHAEL COLLINS, GEMINI XAND APOLLO 11 ASTRONAUT
The heavy, private burden borne by an astronaut’s wife was not unlike the uncertainty felt by the wives of the sailors who took the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria across the unknown seas to find a new world five hundred years ago.
—EUGENE CERNAN, GEMINI IX, APOLLO 10,AND APOLLO 17 ASTRONAUT
CHAPTER 17
Training Days
By the time NASA named Armstrong one of its nine new astronauts in September 1962, the idea of a manned lunar landing had passed with amazing rapidity from the realm of imagining the future into the world of engineering tomorrow’s reality. Triggering that almost metaphysical transformation was a turbulent confluence of dramatic geopolitical events in the spring of 1961 that undermined respect for the fledgling presidency of John F. Kennedy and provoked Kennedy into making his astonishing commitment to a manned Moon landing.
On April 12, 1961, not yet fully three months into JFK’s term, the Soviet Union stunned the world by achieving another space first. Just as it had back in 1957 with Sputnik, the world’s leading Communist power beat the United States to the punch when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human space traveler.
The pain did not end there, certainly not for the Kennedy administration. Three days after Gagarin’s flight, a plot to invade Cuba and overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro failed miserably on the island’s southern coast at a place known as the Bahia de Cochinas (Bay of Pigs). Although the plot had been hatched by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Eisenhower presidency, President Kennedy hesitantly gave it his approval. When the confused CIA-backed invasion force got neither the expected air cover nor the insurgent support of native anticommunist forces, Castro’s unexpectedly efficient army of twenty thousand quickly drove the invaders back to the beach. Facing intense criticism for what many around the world called an indefensible exercise in intervention, the Kennedy administration could do little but agonize over its complicity in the misguided attack. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s articulate press secretary, later called the Bay of Pigs fiasco “the three grimmest days” of the Kennedy presidency—quite a statement given the apocalyptic gravity of the Cuban Missile Crisis that was yet to come.
JFK realized that only swift and dramatic action would restore American respect at home and abroad. To this purpose, Kennedy turned to the potential of the U.S. manned space program. Though Kennedy’s reticent record on space dated back to his days in the U.S. Senate, the president saw in NASA and its astronauts a means to a political end.
The Mercury astronauts were America’s newest heroes, even though only one of them had flown in space at the time Kennedy gave his speech (Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961). As writer Tom Wolfe would later explain in The Right Stuff, the early astronauts were “the best of the best” on to which American society projected “the mantles of the single-combat warriors of a long-since-forgotten time.”
Initially, President Kennedy was not convinced that even a manned Moon landing was bold enough to prove the point of American superiority over the Soviets, and even went so far as to suggest a manned landing on Mars. But NASA leadership assured him that the Moon was a worthy goal and that, with an unreserved national effort, the United States could beat the Russians to it.
“Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” With these historic words, expressed before a joint session of Congress on Thursday morning, May 25, 1961, the dynamic forty-three-year-old president threw down the gauntlet: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish…. It will not be one man going to the Moon, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”
Armstrong was in Seattle working on the Dyna-Soar project the day Kennedy committed the country to shooting for the Moon. Neil does not remember his specific reaction to watching the nightly news or to reading about JFK’s speech in the next day’s newspapers other than excitement at the prospect of new technology and knowledge. In contrast to Project Mercury, wherein a small, one-person capsule traveled around the world for a few hours, a program to achieve a mission as complex as a manned Moon landing would have to be infinitely larger and more elaborate. Astronaut operations and spacecraft versatility would need to expand exponentially.
Neil does remember wondering what the Congress would do. “Because the president can proclaim, but it’s the Congress that makes things happen. So that’s really where the question was. As it turned out, Congress was motivated to support the president in this area, which I’m not sure I necessarily would have guessed at that point, based on my recollection of what up to then had been set as national priorities.
“The world was caught up in what the Soviets were doing,” Armstrong recalls of 1961 and the Cold War. “It was a time of such incredibly high tension nationally and internationally. I think everyone felt we were right on the brink of World War III.” For most Americans, that meant carrying on with their lives as best as they could. “The reality was, you’ve got your job to do and you just go ahead and do it, and keep doing it and hope for the best.”
Very quickly after their selection, the New Nine got a close-up look at everything NASA was doing to push Apollo ahead. They attended the launch of the third manned orbital Mercury flight made by Wally Schirra on October 3, 1962. Most of the group had never seen a rocket launch before, from the Cape or anywhere else. An excited Pete Conrad watched with fingers crossed on both hands as the powerful Atlas lit up and roared upwards like a fiery sword. Nine hours and six orbits later, Schirra’s Sigma 7 spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean very close to its predetermined landing point near the carrier USS Kearsarge.
Three weeks later, the new group of astronauts headed out for the first in a series of contractor tours to the Pratt & Whitney Engine Facility at West Palm Beach, Florida, where the fuel cell for the Apollo spacecraft was being developed; to Baltimore, where the Martin Company was assembling Titan II rockets for the Gemini program, as well as to Martin’s plant in Denver, where the ICBM version of the Titan II was being built. They then made their way to Aerojet-General Corporation in Sacramento, maker of the Apollo service module propulsion engine; to NASA’s Ames Research Center south of San Francisco; and finally to the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Los Angeles. The builder of the Apollo launch escape system rocket, Lockheed was preparing to submit a bid for the Apo
llo lunar excursion module, a contract that eventually went to Grumman.
As Tom Stafford has noted, the trips were grueling: “We were all flying commercial, four of us on one flight, five on another…and everywhere we landed we faced a full schedule because we were not only new astronauts, but we were supposed to be the men who were going to the Moon. So they laid out lots of food and plenty of booze. The drinking never got out of hand. It was just a new challenge to be a celebrity, signing autographs, meeting the chief executives of major corporations.”
Most of the buildings at the Manned Spacecraft Center were still under construction, so for several months all of the astronauts worked out of rented offices in the Farnsworth-Chambers Building in downtown Houston. “Every Monday morning all astronauts would get together at eight A.M. for the pilots’ meeting chaired by Deke,” Stafford explained. “There we would get our schedule for the week.”
Much of the time Armstrong and the rest of the New Nine spent on the road. To become familiar with the Apollo launch vehicle—what in the end would become the Saturn V Moon rocket—they visited NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. They met the brilliant rocketeer Dr. Wernher von Braun for the first time. Just a few months earlier, von Braun had shocked his own people at NASA Marshall by shifting his support from earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR) to the more controversial lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR) as the best way to land on the Moon. Then the astronauts spent a couple of days at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis. Besides meeting “Mr. Mac” himself, company founder James McDonnell, they saw how the Mercury spacecraft were built and how McDonnell planned to design and build the new Gemini spacecraft. Returning to the Los Angeles area just before Christmas, the New Nine received Apollo technical briefings from the Space and Information Systems Division of North American Aviation, Inc., at Downey, California, the prime contractor for the Apollo command and service modules. At Douglas Aircraft Company’s facility in Huntington Beach, the visiting astronauts saw how the S-IVB upper stage was shaping up for the Saturn IB and the Saturn V.
The years 1963 and 1964 were all about astronaut basic training. George M. Low, a member of NASA’s original Space Task Group and a leading official in the Office of Manned Space who later served as program manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, once explained the “fantastic amount of preparation” involved: “Although the astronauts along the way did enjoy some fun and games, by and large they were the hardest-working bunch of guys I ever knew. Nearly every one of them was motivated on the morning of the flight not to let ‘the program’ down.”
As Armstrong remarks, “There wasn’t anybody that had done this and could tell us how to do it, because nobody had the experience.” Specialists in all the various areas pertaining to spaceflight “could tell us what they did know,” and those who became systems experts could explain “the details of how the inertial guidance system or the computer or certain kind of engine valves and so on would operate, and how we might handle malfunctions.
“The early part of astronaut training was similar [to navy flight training],” Armstrong explains. “NASA felt that its new astronauts with little experience with the sophistications of orbital mechanics or the differences between aircraft and spacecraft needed a quick primer.
“With some of those subjects I felt fairly familiar,” Armstrong states. “Orbital mechanics, for example, I had already studied at the University of Southern California. Some of them were new to me, but overall I didn’t find the academic burden to be overly difficult. I doubt that anyone did. But it was something we had to plow through.”
Along with the academic curriculum, Armstrong and his classmates went through a number of other formal training programs. In Operations Familiarization, they toured all pertinent launch facilities and studied the rigorous prelaunch procedures at Cape Canaveral and the new Mission Control Center in Houston. In Environmental Training, they were exposed to acceleration, weightlessness, vibration and noise, simulated lunar gravity, and the experience of wearing a pressure suit. Contingency Training involved not only desert and jungle survival schools but also learning how to use ejection seats and parachutes. Training in Spacecraft and Launch Vehicle Design and Development was accomplished by the astronauts’ participating in different engineering briefings and mockup reviews held at NASA centers and at contractor facilities.
To keep their piloting abilities and judgment in the cockpit as sharp as possible, the astronauts also went through an Aircraft Flight Training program. This they did by making regular flights in T-33, F-102, and T-38 aircraft assigned to MSC, based at Ellington AFB. They also rode out parabolic trajectories in what at the time was simply called the “Zero-g Airplane” (later known as the “Vomit Comet”), a modified KC-135 aircraft that simulated zero-gravity conditions for roughly thirty seconds at a time. Neil had gone “over the top” in zooms in the F-104A Starfighter but those flights into weightless conditions provoked nothing like the queasiness brought on by the abrupt changes in gravity due to a parabolic drop. Four days in the Zero Gravity Indoctrination Program conducted at Wright-Patterson AFB during the last week of April 1963 (through the support of the 6570th Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories) introduced Armstrong to some of the more fascinating features of the nearly traction-less experience: floating free, tumbling and spinning, soaring across the cabin by pushing off the walls and bulkheads, eating and drinking in a near vacuum, and learning to use wrenches and other hand tools.
In late September 1963, the New Nine attended the Water Safety and Survival School at the U.S. Naval School of Pre-flight in Pensacola. For the four naval aviators in the group—Armstrong, Lovell, Conrad, and Young—much of this training, including another confrontation with the Dilbert Dunker, was old hat. What was new for all of the astronauts was learning how to stay afloat and then get hooked up out of the water into a sling for a helicopter rescue while wearing a bulky pressure suit. Gus Grissom’s Mercury flight on July 21, 1961, had demonstrated just how dangerous such a water rescue situation could be. When the hatch to Grissom’s capsule mysteriously fired open minutes after splashdown, the rescue helicopter could not manage to lift the flooded Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft out of the ocean. In fact, the helicopter barely managed to save a flailing Grissom from drowning after his suit began to fill up with water.
None of the new astronauts had anything close to the experience riding a centrifuge that Armstrong did; many of them had never even seen one. John Glenn recalled from his torturous experience on “the wheel” that “at sixteen g’s, it took just about every bit of strength and technique you could muster to retain consciousness.” NASA aerodynamics expert and aerospace vehicle designer Maxime A. Faget, who visited Johnsville to watch the Mercury astronauts ride the wheel, challenged, “If you can get up to twenty g’s, you will be my hero for life.” As early as 1959, Armstrong had survived forces as high as fifteen g’s.
The New Nine got its initiation to the miserable instrument on a four-day visit to Johnsville in late July 1963. During the stay, Neil made eight “dynamic runs” on the centrifuge, his time in the contraption totaling five hours. All the astronauts also rode a centrifuge built on site at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
The New Nine were issued Para-Commander parachutes (made by the Pioneer Parachute Company). “[Ground School at Ellington AFB] would tow you up into the air to about three hundred feet and cut you loose and then you maneuvered down to a landing,” describes Armstrong. “We did that over land as well as over water, the latter near Galveston Island off the coast of Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico. That training went for quite a substantial period of time on an intermittent basis.”
To all of the astronauts, not just the New Nine, applied the NASA directive to add helicopter flight to preparations for flight simulations of a lunar landing. This training was done two astronauts at a time beginning in November 1963 at Ellyson Field, a part of NAS Pensacola that had been used for navy helicopter training since 1950. Armstrong trained with Jim Lovell f
or two weeks in mid-November 1963. By the end of the period, Neil completed nineteen hours of dual flight time (with an instructor) in a Bell H-13 helicopter, one of the most popular light utility helicopters ever built. First introduced in 1951, the H-13, as Neil well knew, had been used in the Korean War for observation and reconnaissance and as a litter carrier for evacuation of wounded ground troops. Armstrong also finished three and a half hours of dual night flying in the larger Sikorsky H-34 helicopter, one of the most successful transport helicopters of all time. He finished off his training with three hours solo time in an H-13. Along with the flying, he took another seventeen hours of class work covering unique aspects of helicopter aerodynamics and various systems of the H-13 machine.
“I found that very fascinating,” Armstrong recounts, “because I had not flown helicopters before. So I enjoyed that.” But NASA’s idea that learning to fly a helicopter would better enable its astronauts to make lunar landings, simulated or real, was problematic. As it turned out, “The helicopter was not a good simulation of the lunar module control at all. Had it been, we probably would have configured a helicopter such that it could duplicate the landing—and that could have been done with a great deal of less risk than flying the LLRV or LLTV. But we never could come up with anything that worked well. The natural requirements of helicopter aerodynamics precluded you from duplicating the lunar module’s characteristics.” Nevertheless, “the helicopter was valuable to understand the trajectories, visual fields, and rates of motion. You could pretty precisely duplicate the flight paths that you wanted to make; it was just that the controls you were using to do that were not at all the same.”
As a footnote, Armstrong and Lovell were driving back to Houston from their helicopter training in Pensacola on Friday, November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. Neil remembers: “We were in our separate cars, but we were sort of caravanning back westward on I-10 when I heard the news bulletin on the radio.” Neil had never met JFK, the man who was responsible more than any other single individual for what would become Armstrong’s historic destiny. Ultimately, the events that sealed each of their places in history were of such immediate and imposing import on the lives of people all over the world that they became the subject of the two most asked “Where were you when…” questions of contemporary times: “Where were you when President Kennedy was killed?” And, “Where were you when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon?” As for Kennedy’s funeral in Washington and burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Armstrong did not attend. The official representative for the astronauts at those events was John Glenn.
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