First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “I think the key thought above all else was having commanders coming up that would be right for that job and with the right experience to enable them to have a degree of confidence. Deke always said, and I think he was completely right, that he had to take the position that the guys had all come through the process, were all qualified to fly, should be able to fly, and should be able to accept any task they were given.

  “Having said that, Deke did say, and wrote in his own autobiography, that all that being true, he still wanted to get the best people into the best slots that were best suited for them. As an additional, less important technical reason—but I think it [was] a reality that was just as strong—Deke felt an obligation to his Mercury colleagues. He always put Gus, Al, and Wally, particularly, as his first-line guys—and properly so…. They were the firstclass of astronauts; they had been under the highest scrutiny; they should get their first pick.”

  Not everybody was cut out to be a commander. “Some flights required more, or special, skills and experience than others,” explains Armstrong. “There were special requirements where Deke wanted the second guy or the third guy on the list also to have about the right level of experience. If the mission didn’t require that, he wanted to get guys in there so that they would get some experience, so he would have the ability to use them in more difficult challenges on subsequent flights.”

  Slayton’s standard practice was to solicit the commander’s input about potential crew members. “I know he did with me,” Armstrong confirms. “I suspect he did with others.” This limited Slayton’s flexibility. “One rule we had,” Armstrong notes, “was a guy could not be on two flights at the same time. The training preparation period was fairly extensive, so Deke would have a crew and backup crew completely committed for quite a long time period and they couldn’t be touched for any other jobs. By the time you got three flights with crews assigned to them, you were using up twelve to about eighteen people, out of not so many. So he tried to think things through ahead of time. He thought that every flight was important, but particularly the early flights of a particular program—the early flights of Gemini, the early flights of Apollo. It was very important that we not stub our toe on those because of crew problems—because a failure early in a flight program jeopardized the entire program.”

  Neil was the only member of the New Nine that had a formal administrative responsibility within the Astronaut Office. In the office, Joseph S. Algranti ran aircraft operations, Warren North ran flight crew operations, and Slayton served as coordinator for astronaut activities. Helping out Deke was Al Shepard, who after his dizzy spells grounded him, became chief of the astronauts. Under Shepard in the organization was Gus Grissom, in charge of the Gemini group, and Gordon Cooper, in charge of the Apollo group. Deke gave Armstrong the responsibility for a third group called operations and training. Like Grissom and Cooper, Armstrong had a small number of fellow astronauts working under him in what Neil calls “a very loose operation.”

  “Deke gave me the assignment of coming up with something that would help him understand how many crews would be needed at any given point in time,” Armstrong recalls. “So I took a very simple approach. I took the launch dates as we projected them for Gemini and Apollo. There were several different kinds of Apollo missions at that point in time—different categories of Apollo missions (e.g., C missions to test fly the command and service modules in Earth orbit, D missions to test combined CSM and lunar module operations in Earth orbit, G missions for the first lunar landing). So I used that kind of a schedule with just the launch dates and said, ‘Okay, if that’s right, then how many flight crews do we need?’ I started at launch time and went back however many months that you would need the crew to be preparing. And none of these crew members were named—they were just individual A, B, C, D, and so on. I put in all these flights on a time line with block diagrams showing how many people had to be available. At the bottom I toted under each month how many astronauts were in flight status and how many available for flight. Along the bottom, the numbers might run twelve, twelve, twelve, twelve, ten, ten, ten, thirteen, fourteen, ten, eighteen, and twenty-one.

  “As Apollo started to come in and overlapped with Gemini, that was the way it looked. I also toted other things. For example, we had to allow a certain amount of time for people to take vacation during the year. They had to take their annual physicals and do their collateral duties as well as be assigned to flight crews. We had to have people to handle some things that meant they could not be on flight status while they were doing them. We had to have people available to study the next spacecraft that was coming on line.

  “It was quite a complex job. We actually had so few astronauts that almost everybody was assigned all the time. I would come off one crew assignment and within a few weeks be assigned to something else. That endured throughout the entire Gemini program.”

  Armstrong’s schematic allowed Slayton to determine when additional astronauts needed to be brought into the program, culminating in Houston’s announcement in June 1963 that NASA was looking for a new class of ten to fifteen additional astronauts. This third round of astronaut selection set a slightly more stringent age requirement (thirty-four years old rather than thirty-five). More significant, applicants no longer needed to be test pilots, in service of the broader scientific and engineering requirements of the Apollo lunar landing mission.

  Although the New Nine had no formal role in selecting the new class of astronauts, some did recommend to Slayton and Shepard the names of particularly good candidates. Armstrong does not “recall specifically identifying anyone that I thought we needed to get to apply.”

  Eight of the fourteen new astronauts selected in October 1963 turned out to be test pilots, five from the air force—Donn F. Eisele, Charles A. Bassett, Michael Collins, Theodore C. Freeman, and David R. Scott—two from the navy—Alan L. Bean and Richard F. Gordon Jr.—and one from the marine corps—Clifton C. Williams. The other six were all pilots whose wide-ranging academic backgrounds and flying experiences added important new strengths to the astronaut corps. Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. had just finished a doctorate in astronautics at MIT. His dissertation on orbital rendezvous concerned an essential maneuver for the Moon landing. Air force fighter pilot William A. Anders held a master’s in nuclear engineering. Navy aviators Eugene A. Cernan and Roger B. Chaffee both had engineering degrees from Purdue, plus Cernan had earned a master’s in electrical engineering from the U.S. Navy Postgraduate School. Again there were two civilians in the group. Ex–marine corps pilot Walter Cunningham held a master’s degree in physics from UCLA and was working for the RAND Corporation. Former air force pilot Russell L. Schweickart was just finishing a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

  It was in the company of these outstanding astronauts that Armstrong would actually experience spaceflight: with Dave Scott on Gemini VIII and with Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins on Apollo 11.

  On February 8, 1965, Armstrong received his own first assignment to a flight crew when Slayton named him as backup commander to Gordon Cooper on Gemini V. Although the mission’s primary objective was demonstrating preparedness for a rendezvous in space, the astronauts intended to stay in space for the designated duration of eight full days. This was twice as long as the Gemini IV flight then being planned for Jim McDivitt and Ed White. As Mike Collins explains, “‘Eight days or bust’ was their motto, and a covered wagon the motif of their crew patch.”

  Serving with Armstrong in the backup role was Elliot See. See supported Pete Conrad, who would sit in the right seat next to Cooper on the prime crew. Armstrong says, “Because everything was based on beating the Russians and getting there by the end of the decade, the schedule was overwhelmingly important.”

  Armstrong continues: “From a preparation point of view and competence-building point of view, it was very good because the secondary crew essentially learned everything about that flight so they could not only take that information forward but, during t
he prime flight, they could be useful at Mission Control Center—not necessarily at a CapCom job but being around and being available to talk to whomever wanted more information about how the astronauts in space did this particular thing or whether it would it be okay if Mission Control asked them to do this or that. So there was a very useful role for the backups.”

  As for his specific assignment as backup commander for Gemini V, Neil was “really pleased to be assigned to a flight, and quite satisfied to be in the position of backing up Gordon Cooper.” On the spectrum of personality types within the astronaut corps, Cooper and Armstrong were opposites. “Gordo” did a lot of flamboyant kinds of things, while Armstrong never did any. Some key MSC managers responsible for the manned space program, notably Walt Williams, did not care for Cooper’s foolishness and tolerated as little of it as necessary; virtually nothing Neil did ever bothered his bosses. Yet the differences between the two men never personally got in the way of their working together.

  “We seemed to work well,” Armstrong recollects. “Gordon was sometimes less dedicated than the rest of the guys about really learning how things should work. But Pete [Conrad, Cooper’s crewmate] was very good about that. So I figured that if Gordo did miss something along the way, he was in good shape with Pete at his side…. I’ve subsequently read about Walt Williams and maybe some other people not being enthusiastic about having Gordon on Gemini V, but Deke stood up for him and Gordo did a good job.”

  After assignment to Gemini V, general training continued for Armstrong but now represented only about a third of his work time. A second third, as Armstrong recounts, “had to do with planning, figuring out techniques and methods that would allow us to achieve the best trajectories and the sequence of events.” The final third of his time involved testing: “That was probably equal to thousands of hours in the labs and in the spacecraft and running systems tests, all kinds of stuff, seeing whether it would work and getting to know the systems well.”

  “We’d get home…sometimes,” Neil states. “But the reality of the world in those days is that a lot of the testing took place at two o’clock in the morning or four-thirty in the morning, and we were spelling each other off. The four of us spent enormous amounts of time together, working out the details. I would not say that we never cracked a joke or talked about something off the project, but we were always ninety-eight percent focused on the job we had to do.”

  Getting ready for the backup role in Gemini V did not preclude Armstrong from serving in a supporting role in Gemini III, a flight made by Gus Grissom and John Young in the spacecraft Molly Brown, named by Gus Grissom after the heroine of the Broadway play The Unsinkable Molly Brown, in wry deference to Grissom’s own Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, which sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after splashdown in the second manned Mercury flight. For Gemini III, the first manned mission in the Gemini program, Neil reported for a week of work at the worldwide satellite network tracking station in Kauai, Hawaii. Designated as a “primary” station, Kauai, the farthest north of the major Hawaiian Islands, transmitted verbal commands to the orbiting Gemini spacecraft. “Secondary” stations, such as the Caribbean Sea tracking station on Grand Bahama Island (GBI), handled radar and telemetry information only.

  In the view of some NASA folks, such assignments were partly a way for Slayton to give his astronauts a little rest and relaxation. According to Mission Control’s Eugene Kranz, “Slayton would send astronauts out at the very last moment to all of the sites that were generally good locations to go to—Bermuda, Hawaii, California, Australia.” If the astronauts were a little too aggressive about their responsibilities, as Kranz has charged Pete Conrad became when Pete showed up at the tracking station in Australia for Gemini III with word that Slayton wanted him to be in charge of the tracking site during the flight, it could lead to a tense situation.

  Having served similarly in Hawaii during Gordon Cooper’s Mercury 9 flight in May 1963, Armstrong was familiar with the place, its equipment, and its procedures. For Gemini III, he traveled to Hawaii roughly a week before the launch to help perform tracking and communications simulations: “We practiced the procedures and worked out the kinks. In the simulations, they would sometimes put in failures, so we would have to practice how to handle that.”

  Gemini III’s objective was to demonstrate the ability of a spacecraft to change orbits by firing its maneuvering thrusters, a fundamental requirement in the rendezvous maneuver, which in turn was essential to the Moon landing. Specifically, Gemini III was to demonstrate the ability to move around effectively in space by making three carefully executed “burns,” or timed firings of its rocket engines. As Armstrong remembers, Molly Brown performed flawlessly. The only real problems in the flight came at the end. The spacecraft landed about fifty miles short of its target, and the jerking deployment of the spacecraft’s parachute threw the astronauts into their instrument panel, shattering Grissom’s faceplate. “From the point of view of the responsibilities of the tracking station at Hawaii,” Armstrong recalled, “I thought it went well.” Happily, he played no part in the postflight hubbub provoked by astronaut John Young when he admitted in a news conference that he had smuggled a corned beef sandwich into the spacecraft, one that Wally Schirra had bought for him the night before the launch at Wolfie’s, a local Cape deli.

  During the twenty-one-week stretch between the launches of Gemini III and Gemini V, Neil spent no less than twenty-six days at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis where the Gemini V spacecraft was being tested and prepared for flight. “We all knew the spacecraft very well by the time it was shipped to the Cape,” Armstrong notes. As the monthly calendars indicate, another twenty-plus days were spent in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. Mixed in between were trips to California, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Colorado, and elsewhere in Texas besides the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

  Armstrong and the other members of the GT-5 crew traveled, conservatively, during this roughly five-month period, well over 60,000 miles—or about a quarter of the way from the Earth to the Moon. Some of the flying was done commercially, but the astronauts did a significant amount of it themselves. This helped them keep up their proficiency as pilots. “I was getting a fair amount of flying,” Neil confirms, “because we were just on the road a lot. It was mostly A-to-B flying. So maybe my instrument proficiency was up, but my ability to do test work was probably eroding a bit.” Most of the flying he did in preparation for Gemini V was in the new T-38 aircraft. The Manned Spacecraft Center got a batch of the two-seater jet trainers for its astronauts to fly in August 1964. Their arrival pretty much put an end to any flying of the F-102s that the astronauts had been using previously, though they still occasionally made flights in the old T-33.

  The Original Seven astronauts learned much of their celestial navigation at the domed Morehead Planetarium, built in 1949 on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by alumnus John Motley Morehead III (the inventor of a new process for manufacturing calcium carbide and a founder of Union Carbide). For the Mercury program, a brilliant planetarium director by the name of Tony Jenzano designed and constructed versions of the Link flight trainer that mirrored the view from inside the space capsules. For Gemini, “Tony Jenzano was excellent at helping build up simulations,” Armstrong recalls. From two barber’s chairs within a “spacecraft” constructed from plywood, cloth, foam rubber, and paper, astronauts controlled the movement of a star-field projection that simulated spacecraft pitch and roll. Planetarium technicians even tilted the barber’s chairs slightly from side to side to simulate the action of rocket thrusters that produced left and right yaw.

  “Morehead was a superb facility with a good-sized projector and a large dome, highly realistic.” The monthly calendars leading up to the Gemini V launch record that Armstrong paid three different visits to the Morehead Planetarium, totaling five days. Morehead’s records show that Neil trained at the planetarium a total of eleven different times, lasting a to
tal of twenty days. His last visit came on February 21, 1969, five months before the launch of Apollo 11. No Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo astronaut spent more time studying the stars at Morehead than Armstrong, followed by Pete Conrad, Gordon Cooper, Jim Lovell, and Wally Schirra, with totals of eighteen, seventeen, twelve, and eleven days, respectively.

  “My interests were just from a rank amateur,” Neil admits. “I did know some number of constellations just because I had a curiosity about the subject, but certainly the Morehead experience was excellent in bringing everybody up one order of magnitude in their ability to recognize the stars and constellations,” paramount in the Gemini program for navigational computations and astronomy-related experiments. Apollo flights, with their improved computer capabilities, required crew members to have “a good visual representation” to perform sextant sightings and navigational computations involving all thirty-six stars being used as the basis for NASA’s celestial navigational system.

  Flying cross-country together in T-38s in preparation for their March 1966 Gemini VIII flight, Armstrong and Dave Scott regularly tested each other’s knowledge of the stars. “We would be flying at a high altitude of 40,000 feet and we would turn the lights completely down in the cockpit,” Neil remembers. “You got a wonderful view of the sky and it was a great opportunity to practice.” Asked whether he usually scored better than Scott in the quizzes, Neil answers slyly, “Well, I don’t know.”

  On Apollo 9 in March 1969, Scott performed a lot of excellent star work that kept the onboard guidance and navigation computer properly aligned. Scott, who for his master’s and for his Engineer in Aeronautics and Astronauts (EAA) degrees at MIT in 1962, had written on star-based interplanetary navigation, credits his time practicing with Armstrong: “We didn’t get much Southern Hemisphere practice” flying across America, but they “made up for that in the planetarium.” According to Dave, “We used to pick out remote [fainter] stars and test each other on the constellations. If you can find a star quickly you can align your platform much more quickly than if you have to look at a star chart. You don’t have time for that. You’ve got to know it.”