First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Armstrong’s experience exceeded all of the other astronauts’ when it came to the critical area of flight simulators. “That is really understandable,” Armstrong modestly explains, “because simulators were in their infancy in those times. Up until the time I got to Edwards, the only simulator experience I had—and perhaps the same with a lot of my contemporaries—was in the Link trainer where you learned to fly instruments. That was a very rudimentary, primitive state. But when I got to Edwards, they were developing simulators for research purposes—not for operational purposes—they didn’t exist much for operational. So I got exposed to lots of formative experiences, and worked actively with the guys in the simulator lab constructing simulations to try to investigate problems. So, yes, it was just natural that I was at the place where the simulators were and most people weren’t.”

  Still, in evaluating Armstrong’s strengths as an astronaut, many historians have seriously underestimated the importance of Neil’s background in flight simulation. It was a strength that Deke Slayton definitely did not miss when he handed out specialized technical assignments to the new astronauts in early 1963. Slayton gave Borman the Saturn boosters; Conrad, cockpit layout; Lovell, recovery and reentry; McDivitt, guidance and control; See, electrical systems and mission planning; Stafford, range safety, instrumentation, and communication; White, flight control; Young, environmental controls and pressure suits. “We didn’t have a choice in the matter,” Stafford remembered. “Deke just said, ‘Here they are.’” Not for a second did Deke consider giving Armstrong anything other than the responsibility for trainers and simulators. “What is probably true,” Armstrong states less boldly, “is that when I was assigned to a specialty, having simulators and training as my area of responsibility was pretty natural based on the fact that that was an experience where I had had quite a bit and the other fellows had literally none. So it was probably an easy pick for Deke.”

  In projects Gemini and Apollo, astronauts and spacecraft were to be committed to major, complex, and untried maneuvers that, of necessity, had to be carried through to completion, and usually on the first attempt. Simulation was vital to their success. Very little simulation was necessary for Project Mercury, which had as its very specific objective the placement of a man in orbit and his return. Project Gemini, on the other hand, which came to life in 1962 as a bridge between Mercury and Apollo, entailed orbital rendezvous and docking. Rendezvous and docking were seriously more dangerous and complex maneuvers than simply sending a capsule into orbit. Being able to chase down another object in space and then linking up or docking with it to take on fuel or other vital components that were required for the continuation of the mission was an absolute requirement of Apollo’s LOR mode. For that reason, learning how to rendezvous and dock, above all else, was Gemini’s primary purpose. Without the proven ability to rendezvous and dock, the other major objectives of Gemini—notably, long-duration flights and EVA (Armstrong considers “space walking” a terrible term and “not a Gemini objective” until it “secretly emerged” after Alexei Leonov’s EVA in March 1965)—were meaningless for Apollo.

  No astronaut played a more vital role in the development of flight simulators for Gemini and Apollo than did Armstrong. Often Armstrong found that a simulator did not behave like the spacecraft actually would in flight: “One of the things that I particularly did with all the simulators was to find out if the designers of the simulator had mechanized the equations of motion properly. So I would always be flying the simulator into areas that most people would not ever go, to make sure that when you got to a discontinuity in an equation, there would not be a mathematical error that would cause the simulator to misbehave. I found a surprising number of times that they were not mechanized properly. That responsibility was natural for me because I had done the same work at Edwards; I was always making sure that the equations of motion were properly integrated into the computer.”

  As they had at Edwards, Armstrong’s perspectives as a pilot added vital insights into simulator development. “The guys who were mechanizing the equations—sometimes contractors, sometimes NASA employees—oftentimes did not have the perspective of a pilot,” Neil explains. “They couldn’t visualize if you were pulling up to a vertical position and then rolling ninety degrees and then pitching forward back toward the ground, what that would mean to the pilot—what the pilot would actually see. Oftentimes they would mechanize the equations without any consideration of what was proper. They would just do the arithmetic without regard to the sense of being proper.”

  Armstrong made significant contributions to the Gemini launch-abort trainer, a fixed-base simulator built in the astronauts’ group training building at the Manned Spacecraft Center. According to Neil, “It was positioned so that astronauts were oriented as they would be during launch, laying on their back and facing up against an instrument panel ahead of you. We duplicated the launch profile with various kinds of malfunctions—engines going out and things—and depending on what went wrong, you had to have a procedure for either continuing or aborting, or in some cases ejecting, whatever the case may be. That was a very good simulator. It did not have the g-force on you, but we were able to tilt the seat back so that it would give the impression of g changing, at least in the sense of getting a feeling for the direction that the acceleration was taking. That was a very useful simulator.”

  In setting up the system of specialization in early 1963, Slayton understood that far too much was happening too quickly in the program for the astronauts individually to pick up on more than a small fraction of the technical whole. Deke’s idea was for the astronauts to share knowledge and experience freely between their various assignments. Thus, in late 1963 and early 1964, Jim Lovell, for example, whose specialty was recovery and reentry, wrote memos for the rest on “Parasail Primer” (July 26, 1963), “Gemini Egress Development” (February 7, 1964), “Ballute Test Results” (February 11, 1964), and “Gemini Survival Kits” (April 27, 1964).

  “There were a lot of memos flying around the office,” Armstrong explains, but “once you got on a flight crew, a very large percentage of your time was committed.” Until the third group of fourteen additional astronauts came on board in early 1964, “we had a bit of a gap, in my perspective. Some things weren’t covered to the degree we would have liked.”

  Another responsibility the astronauts shared was NASA publicity and making appearances before professional audiences, press, and the adoring public. NASA public affairs officers early on accepted the astronauts’ own idea of a rotating publicity schedule. Usually lasting a week at a time, the period of public appearances came to be known within the astronaut corps as “the week in the barrel.”

  Armstrong’s first week in the barrel started on July 6 when he flew to Staunton, Virginia, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. From there he was driven to the National Youth Science Camp being held at Camp Pocahontas in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Neil next headed for Washington, where on July 8, he presented a technical briefing at NASA Headquarters, visited the offices of several congressmen, and met with reporters. Following a night in a Washington hotel, he departed for New York City’s World’s Fair, where he posed for cameramen in front of Space Park’s X-15 exhibit and answered questions at a press conference. Early that evening he flew to Des Moines, Iowa, then on to Ames to address an aerospace workshop at Iowa State University and keynote a luncheon. A second aerospace workshop was at Drake University back in Des Moines, where Armstrong presented to an evening assembly of scientific societies. In that one day, Neil made five presentations. Exhausted by the incessant glad-handing and social conversation much more so than by giving his technical talks, he flew back to Houston from Des Moines early the next morning. The time in the barrel was the one aspect of being an astronaut that he could have lived without.

  Armstrong found the transition from research test pilot to astronaut—except for the public celebrity—relatively easy and comfortable: “There were some similarities between the tw
o in the sense that both were always planning and trying to solve problems and devise approaches, but since as astronauts we were trying to do an operational job, we were extremely focused. A research pilot tends to be more broad and generic, covering a range so that you have indications as to which might be the best path.” In Gemini and Apollo, “we were looking for not a range of stuff, but for the best method that we could find that would give us the ability to go at the earliest possible time, with maximum speed, and with the highest level of confidence. Quite a different responsibility, yet the skills, the engineering approaches, and the equipment available to us were really quite similar.”

  As time passed in astronaut training, Armstrong’s peers—not just in the New Nine but also in the Original Seven that came before and the Fourteen that followed—respected Neil’s abilities as a pilot, engineer, and astronaut, admired his intelligence, and they wondered at his unique personality traits.

  “My first impression of Neil was that he was quiet,” stated Frank Borman. “Because he was so quiet and so thoughtful, when he said something, it was worth listening to. Most of us were, ‘We’re operational, let’s-get-it-done people.’ Of course, Neil was operationally oriented, too, but he would be more interested in trying to understand exactly what the inner mechanisms of the system were…. Most of us came out of the same mold. But Neil was different.”

  “Neil was a very reserved individual—that was a first impression,” recalled Mike Collins. Personality-wise, in Collins’s view, “Neil presented a certain façade, a certain persona. I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, I think there’s a chink in your armor here and I want to, you know, probe a little bit.’ I never did that.

  “I think he was more thoughtful than the average test pilot,” Collins continued. “If the world can be divided into thinkers and doers—test pilots tend to be doers and not thinkers—Neil would be in the world of test pilots way over on the thinker side.” Buzz Aldrin understood Neil’s personality similarly: “Neil was certainly reserved, deep, and thoughtful. He would not utter things that would have much potential of being challenged later because of their spontaneity. I think you learned that in the test pilot business.”

  The Fourteen’s Dick Gordon, who got to know Armstrong well for the first time when they trained together for the Gemini VIII flight of 1966 (Neil as commander and Gordon as backup pilot) described Neil’s style of interacting with crew members as “very quiet.” “He would take a long time coming to a solution, but when it was made, that was that.”

  “Neil was patient with processes,” Collins differentiated. “Sometimes he could be impatient with people when they didn’t meet his standards.” Dick Gordon observed, “You could sense that he was upset about something, because he would tend to withdraw more than normal.” “I don’t remember seeing him lose his cool,” Buzz Aldrin concurred. “He could be stubborn, with hidden reason.”

  In the opinion of William Anders, another member of the Fourteen, one who served in the backup crew for Apollo 11, “Neil was not going to get bamboozled. Neil was not a shrinking violet; he just wouldn’t scream or yell. Generally, I don’t ever remember him being wrong, but he caught me wrong a few times.” “He didn’t seem to meet anyone halfway,” Collins has commented, with no criticism intended.

  To call Armstrong shy can be misleading, Collins testified: “I think he was quite happy with his own persona. It was not so much that he was unable; it was more that he was unwilling. He was unwilling to share with other people and that, perhaps, can be interpreted as shyness.”

  “Neil wasn’t an expansive guy,” Bill Anders offered. “He was totally professional—not overly warm but not cold. I don’t remember him and I sitting around having a casual conversation about ‘What are your kids doing?’ or ‘Have you seen any good-looking blondes lately?’ Not that Neil would not have a drink or two with you. But he was a straight arrow in all the ways that counted…. In my view, the character of the real person, Neil Armstrong, comes out generally higher than most of his colleagues.”

  “Neil is as friendly as you can get,” says John Glenn. “He was laid-back, friendly, a nice guy, small-town just like where I came from. I don’t think either of us put on any airs with one another.”

  Glenn and Armstrong got paired up in early June 1963 for jungle survival training, organized by the USAF Tropical Survival School, at Albrook AFB in the Panama Canal Zone. “We were just getting our jungle training like everybody else [in the Original Seven and New Nine]. One of the Choco Indian guys came around. After we had built our two-man lean-to of wood and jungle vines, Neil used a charred stick to write the name ‘Choco Hilton’ on it.”

  What Glenn and everyone else who ever spent any quality time with Armstrong enjoyed, and were surprised by, was Neil’s sly sense of humor. John Glenn remembered, “I always got a kick out of Neil’s theory on exercise.” Armstrong joked with his friends that exercise wasted a person’s precious allotment of heartbeats. Dave Scott, Neil’s crewmate on Gemini VIII, recalls Armstrong coming into the astronauts’ exercise room at MSC when Scott was sweating away pumping iron, getting onto a stationary bicycle, and setting its wheel at its lowest possible tension, and grinning at Dave, saying, “That a boy, Dave! Way to go!”

  Yet even his conscientious approach to work was distinctly flavored with Armstrong’s own salt. “He was a highly organized guy,” expressed Mike Collins. “Neil tended to do things on his own schedule, and that sometimes may have appeared to be disorganized.”

  “The guy was really cool—cool, calm, and energized,” described Dave Scott. “Neil was at his peak when he was operating at his peak. He was never in a frantic mode, but he was quick…. I was very comfortable with him, notthat I could predict everything that he was going to say or decide. I think you had to work with him to understand him. He was very easy to work with. He was a very smart guy. He could make an analysis of a problem very quickly. The guy was really cool under pressure.”

  Every commander in the U.S. space program exercised a different leadership style, and every style was unique. None more so than Armstrong’s. In Buzz Aldrin’s words, “Neil was not the boisterous Pete Conrad; and he was not the authoritarian Frank Borman. You mostly had to wait for Neil to make a decision and often you wouldn’t have a clue as to what was going on in his head in the meantime. You just couldn’t see through him. But even that opaque quality helped make him a great commander.”

  CHAPTER 18

  In Line for Command

  The first members of the New Nine to be assigned to a flight crew were Tom Stafford and Frank Borman. In February 1964, Slayton paired Stafford up with Mercury veteran Al Shepard, the first American in space, as the prime crew for the first manned Gemini mission, designated Gemini III. Assigned as the backup crew for Gemini III were Gus Grissom and Frank Borman. Although as anxious as the next guy for a flight assignment, Armstrong experienced no disappointment. “I had no expectation of getting it…. I was so pleased to be associated with the program, because it was going. It was happening. It was exciting. The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do.”

  Neil does seem to have been less concerned about just what job he had than were many of the astronauts. “I think they were all different people,” Neil remarks. “I looked forward to an actual flight assignment as much as anyone, as opposed to being in the backup role, but the backup role, I thought, was an important job, and just might turn out that we had to be ready, and we were going to be ready. In some flights it did turn out that the backup crews, or members of them, had to step in.”

  The crew assignments for Gemini III, in fact, had to be changed before preparation for the flight even got going. Because Al Shepard suffered from a chronic inner-ear problem known as Ménière’s syndrome that caused episodic vertigo (diagnosed back in August 1963), Slayton moved Grissom from backup to prime commander, and Gus picked John Young as his new mate. None too happy a
bout the change, Tom Stafford became the backup for Gemini III, under the command of Mercury veteran Wally Schirra. Frank Borman was removed entirely from Gemini III and was held for a later, unspecified Gemini flight.

  The mysterious matter of Slayton’s method for assigning astronauts to flight crews has been discussed in many NASA history books and in virtually all of the biographies and autobiographies of the astronauts. “I have my own ideas of how Deke assigned the crews,” Armstrong remarks, “and it’s not easy to explain. I don’t think it was a matter of simply switching crews back and forth and alternating. Deke’s principle concern was getting a qualified capable commander on each flight.

  “Deke had the secondary objective of putting people in the other slots so that they would be getting the proper training, preparation, or experience to slide them into a more important slot in their next assignment….”

  Within the flight crews, “we tried to divide the responsibilities such that each person was about equally loaded. We tried for each person to be able to know how to do everything if he had to, but we divided the responsibilities such that each would go into their area in substantially more depth. The job of the commander differed principally because he had the responsibility for the decisions, just as the commander of a ship or commander of an airliner. He was always responsible for his craft.