First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Janet wanted both of her sons to have an appreciation of what their father was doing and of the remarkable events going on around them but worried, “I think I try a little extra hard to make sure they understand what is happening, and in so doing I have probably antagonized the whole situation. Instead of just letting them be!”

  Both Janet and Neil worked hard to keep their boys grounded: “You don’t want your children to go around with their thumbs under their armpits and saying, ‘I’m an astronaut’s son.’ For this reason we try to make everything we do very common and everyday. We feel that is very important for them not to be favored by their classmates. We want them to grow up and have a regular life—a normal life. Kids are kids, and you want them to be kids, and yet this program has demanded an awful lot of our children. When you put your children in public, they really have to be very sophisticated children.”

  As she anticipated in the early months of 1969 what all the family would be going through for Apollo 11, she recorded for Dodie Hamblin her extended reflections of the Armstrong family’s frenetic pace of life:

  Something that occurred to me the other day when I was driving the car made me think of the compelling force that I have spoken to you about….I was in a hurry and found myself pushing the speed limit as I was going down the freeway. I found that when I came to a red light, another car, whichI had passed long ago, ended up at the same red light that I did. Here we were, two people—one person in a tremendous hurry, the other person not pushing the speed limit—and here we were together…. I couldn’t help feelthat this is just a small example of how we feel before a flight, or at least the way I feel before a flight.

  Janet’s mantra became, “Living in the present is most important. We take our lives day by day. As for planning and organizing for the future, it is very difficult in our lives—in my life, at least—because I find I have a husband whose schedule is changing day by day, sometimes minute by minute, and I never know whether he’s coming or going, particularly during flight time when he’s on a crew. It’s very difficult for the wife to try and keep up.

  “I think it’s of prime importance that you are able to understand yourself,” Janet concluded, underscoring her ongoing quest during the second half of the 1960s to carve out and maintain her own identity:

  Trying to maintain one’s own identity as a wife, I feel, is very healthy for family situations. I think the wife needs a challenge—at least I, as a wife, need to be challenged. If I’m not challenged, I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’d like to feel that ninety percent of the time I am accomplishing something, whether it be with the children or with my own interests. I feel that I am a better person for it…. I feel I can be a better personto my children, to my husband, and to my community.

  The pressure on all the astronauts’ wives was extraordinary. Each bore a heavy burden, trying as they did to appear before the public as Mrs. Astronaut and the All-American Mother. They knew what NASA and even the White House expected of them. For an astronaut’s wife, deciding what to wear was about much more than just a woman’s sense of style or even her vanity. It was about maintaining the wholesome and sanctified image of the entire U.S. space program, and of America itself.

  Some of the women delighted in the role. They enjoyed primping for the reporters. They loved attending all the parties and charity balls, the ones validated by the presence of the astronauts and only incidentally by their wives. Others, like Janet Armstrong, disliked social trappings to the point of avoidance.

  Privately, Janet and many of the other wives also disliked the patronizing attitude of NASA leadership. For example, Deputy Administrator Dr. George Mueller occasionally came down to Houston for special meetings to which all the astronauts’ wives were “invited.” “It would be like a coffee,” relates Janet. “We would meet over in the NASA auditorium. We would get all dressed up and we would have to put our gloves on to get, what I felt was, lectured: ‘Keep a stiff upper lip, girls.’ How else were you going to ‘win’ this unless you are ‘proud, thrilled, and happy’? By the time we got to the Apollo program that’s how it was. Well, it wasn’t a joke, but what were we going to say? ‘We were proud, we were thrilled, and we were happy.’ Another successful flight had happened on the way to a goal.

  “Our lives were dedicated to a cause, to try to reach the goal of putting a man on the Moon by the end of 1969. It was an all-out effort on everyone’s agenda. It wasn’t just our astronaut families that had put our lives on hold; thousand of families were in the same mode.”

  As for the notion of speaking more honestly to the press about her being barred from Mission Control during the Gemini VIII crisis or about anything else that troubled her about NASA and the space program back in the 1960s, Janet never felt inclined to do it. “That was none of their business,” she expresses today. “What advantage would there have been in that? The press would have not understood and would have blown things all out of proportion.”

  NASA might have been wise to have established early on a formal counseling program for its astronauts’ families. Given that thirteen of the twenty-one marriages involving astronauts who were married when they went to the Moon later ended in divorce or separation, it seems obvious that a number of couples could have benefited.

  Sadly, some husbands did not recognize their own wife’s anxiety or general unhappiness with her personal situation—or they chose not to recognize it. In his extremely candid autobiography, Gene Cernan, the veteran of three spaceflights (Gemini IX, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17), regretfully admitted that many years passed before he learned that his wife Barbara had been so frightened by staying home alone early on during their time in Houston that she stayed up half the night crying. According to Cernan, “There is no doubt that I was so overwhelmed and excited, caught up with being an astronaut, that when I came home for a weekend, all I wanted to talk about was our training and the program. It was, ‘My God, let me tell you what I did,’ rather than asking, ‘What did you do this week?’ Looking back now, I realize my family suffered because of my tunnel vision.”

  Cernan blames himself for failing to pay closer attention to the needs of his wife, but notes that “while everything had been planned in detail for the new astronauts, NASA did not have a survival handbook for our wives. That was a dreadful oversight, and one for which our families paid a heavy price. I guess NASA thought that since we were mostly military families, we were used to the long separations and tightly structured environment of service life, and that wives historically learned to make do with the hardships. They were wrong.” Gene and Barbara’s marriage survived from their wedding in 1961 through the entirety of Cernan’s years in the space program, but in 1980, when their only child, daughter Tracy, turned seventeen, the couple separated. The following summer, they divorced.

  Janet never actively participated in any wives’ clubs, not even when Neil was with the NACA in California. She had never been a military wife, as Neil was already a reserve officer by the time they had married, and he had resigned his commission shortly thereafter. Janet was more of a loner, as Neil was.

  In the coming years, Janet’s struggle for identity would only intensify, because, after Apollo 11, she was no longer just any astronaut’s wife, she was forever more the wife of the first man on the Moon.

  The wonder is not that Janet and Neil eventually divorced. It is that she survived as Mrs. Neil Armstrong as long as she did, until a divorce that she initiated ended in 1994 a marriage that had lasted thirty-eight years.

  CHAPTER 21

  For All America

  Even before he completed his debriefings on the Gemini VIII flight in late March 1966, Armstrong was named backup commander for Gemini XI. So quickly and thoroughly did he get into his training for the new role that he was not even able to stay overnight with his family in Wapakoneta the April day that his hometown staged its gala celebration in his honor.

  The Gemini IX and Gemini X missions took place within a span of seven weeks in June and July
1966, repeating the pattern of a relatively easy rendezvous followed by a problematic docking. The Agena intended for Gemini IX never made it into space. It spiraled deep into the Atlantic Ocean after its Atlas booster failed shortly after launch. Astronauts Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan waited for another day, but on June 3, 1966, what they got as their target vehicle was not a second Agena but the barebones “augmented target docking adapter” once considered for Gemini VIII. After completing their rendezvous, Stafford and Cernan discovered that the ATDA’s shroud had not jettisoned. That made docking impossible. The crew of Gemini IX instead performed a number of different rendezvous maneuvers.

  For the Gemini X flight of July 18 to 21, 1966, Armstrong served as a CapCom in Houston. This time the docking worked, as commander John Young nestled his machine to a solid hookup with a brand-new Agena. This was the first time that a manned spacecraft had fully embraced a target vehicle since Armstrong’s Gemini VIII flight and the first time it ever stayed embraced. Later in the mission, pilot Mike Collins performed a remarkable EVA lasting an hour and a half. Given the variety of significant problems that had been plaguing all previous American space walks, Collins’s successful EVA came as an extremely welcome result.

  For Armstrong, training as the backup commander for Gemini XI was more about teaching than learning. “This was my third run-through: Gemini V, VIII, and now XI. On the other hand, I had a new right-seat guy with me. Bill Anders was my pilot on the backup crew, and he had not been through any of this before, so everything was new to him. I probably still did quite a few of those basic things so Bill would get up to speed.”

  What most interested and concerned Armstrong about Gemini XI were those untested aspects of the mission, particularly regarding pilot maneuvers. Rendezvous with the Agena was supposed to occur on the spacecraft’s very first revolution about the planet, a maneuver that simulated the type of rendezvous that might be used by a lunar module with a command module after the LM returned from the surface of the Moon. Some of the mission planners called it a “brute force” technique, since the spacecraft would be approaching the target vehicle at very high speed, whereas all earlier rendezvous flights had closed in on the target rather leisurely, waiting until the start of the fourth orbit before beginning to station keep.

  “There was a lot of concern that it wasn’t going to be successful,” Gemini XI pilot Dick Gordon remembers. “For the Apollo application, the desire was to rendezvous as rapidly as possible because the lifetime of the LM’s ascent stage was quite limited in terms of its fuel supply. It was a dynamic situation all the way. We had only a two-second launch window, the shortest launch window ever, because we had to launch just when the Agena was overhead. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to do it in the first orbit. Then the rendezvous calculations had to be made much more rapidly. As the backup commander, Neil supported all of the work that went into that very, very well.”

  The other major novelty in Gemini XI was the experimental tethering of the Gemini spacecraft with the Agena via a nearly 100-foot Dacron cord. One goal of the tether experiment, according to Armstrong, was to “find out if you could keep two vehicles in formation without any fuel input or control action.” Another goal was to see whether tethering enhanced the stability of two rendezvousing spacecraft, thereby lessening the risk of their bumping into each other.

  In the summer leading up to the launch in September 1966, Armstrong and Anders helped Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, the prime crew, work on the techniques required to carry out all the aspects of the Gemini XI mission. Much of that time, the four men spent together in a beach house on the Cape. According to Neil, “Kennedy Space Center had been built on a big piece of ground, some of which had gone through condemnation proceedings to allow government acquisition of the land. There were some private homes in various places that became government property. Several houses ran along the beach north of the Apollo launchpad. One of them NASA maintained for the astronauts. In our training for Gemini XI, the four of us found this to be a convenient place to go to discuss problems. We’d go out on the beach and work out trajectory procedures and rendezvous procedures by drawing diagrams on the sand and walking around our drawings and essentially acting out the procedure and working out the difficult parts that we didn’t quite understand. This was a very relaxing but a useful endeavor. Sometimes we’d have our cook from the regular astronaut quarters put together a picnic lunch and we’d take it out there with us, spend a few hours, with no telephone to bother us, and we’d really concentrate on something. That was really good.”

  Gemini XI launched on September 12, 1966. In the words of Mike Collins, it turned out to be “a very nice flight, indeed.” The brute-force rendezvous technique worked well. The spacecraft shattered the 475-mile-high world altitude record set just two months before by John Young and Collins in Gemini X when it rose to an orbital apogee of some 850 miles. In the process, Conrad and Gordon snapped some truly spectacular color photographs of the planet and its curvature, including one astonishing picture of the entire Persian Gulf region.

  The tether exercise caused several nervous moments. Dick Gordon’s connecting the tether from the Gemini to the Agena during his first EVA turned into a major athletic contest. “Ride ’em, cowboy!” Conrad shouted to his partner at one point, as Gordon, nearly blind from sweat, sat perched upon the nose of the spacecraft trying to connect the tether to the target vehicle to which it was docked. Conrad ordered Dick to come back in after being out for only 30 of the EVA’s planned 107 minutes, so tired and overheated did Gordon appear to become during the exercise. Even releasing the 100-foot tether from its stowage container inside the Gemini spacecraft proved to be a chore, as the Dacron line got hung up on a patch of Velcro. Linked between the two orbiting spacecraft, the line rotated oddly, occasionally causing such oscillations that Conrad needed to steady the vehicle with his controls. As Armstrong remembers, the astronauts had “a lot of difficulty achieving stable orientations while tethered, though they were eventually able to get stable situations while in the spin-up mode.” After being hogtied to the Agena for three hours, Conrad and Gordon happily put an end to the puzzling experiment by jettisoning the docking bar. The tether was not tried on any subsequent flights.

  Neil followed the Gemini XI mission from the CapCom station at Mission Control in Houston. With the flight’s successful conclusion on September 15, 1966, and following his participation in several of the debriefings, Neil’s responsibilities in the Gemini program came to an end.

  There was one last Gemini flight, Gemini XII, from November 11 to 15,1966. Jim Lovell, the commander, and Buzz Aldrin, the pilot, put a great finishing touch to the proud Gemini program by carrying out an impressive rendezvous and docking flight involving fifty-nine revolutions of the planet. The most notable achievement of the flight was Aldrin’s very successful EVA informed by simulated EVA experience in a large water tank at the Manned Spacecraft Center. For over five hours Buzz made what earlier space walker Mike Collins called “a cool and methodical demonstration” of how an effective space walk should be made by making proper use of new handholds, footrests, and other anchoring devices that NASA had newly installed on the Gemini and Agena spacecraft.

  Armstrong has always sided with the majority of U.S. space program analysts who have believed that Gemini was a vital bridge between Mercury and Apollo. “I believe that Gemini was timely and synergistic,” Armstrong asserts. “It provided millions of hours of real experience in the preparation of space vehicles for flight and the processing of those vehicles through the apparatus at Cape Kennedy. Further, the Gemini experience required the development of the procedures required for the launch of multiple vehicles—the Gemini plus the Agena. It provided the flight experiences—especially for rendezvous—that were critical for us to understand. Gemini allowed us to work out communications procedures with multiple craft and gave us innumerable opportunities to increase the knowledge, experience, and confidence level of people throughout the space program.
Gemini was just a wonderful spacecraft. I was a strong booster of Gemini.”

  Indeed, all of the specified goals of Gemini had been achieved, and then some: demonstration of the ability to rendezvous and dock with a target vehicle; demonstration of the value of a manned spacecraft for scientific and technological experiments; performance of work by astronauts in space; use of a powered, fueled satellite to provide primary and secondary propulsion for a docked spacecraft; long-duration spaceflights without extraordinary ill effects on the astronauts; and precision landing of a spacecraft. Major records set during the Gemini program included the longest manned spaceflight (330 hours and 35 minutes), the highest altitude (851 miles), and the longest EVA (5 hours and 28 minutes). By the time Lovell and Aldrin reentered the atmosphere, bringing Gemini XII and the entire program to a close, time spent in space by a piloted U.S. spacecraft stood at 1,993 hours.

  It chagrined Neil Armstrong to know that his abbreviated Gemini VIII flight accounted for only some ten hours of them.

  Such disappointment was trivial to the tragic personal losses that Neil and Janet continued to suffer. On June 8, 1966, two days after the splashdown of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan in Gemini IX, Neil’s boss and best friend from his days back at Edwards, Joe Walker, was killed in a freak midair collision over the Mojave. It happened when Walker’s F-104N Starfighter inexplicably flew too close to a plane with which he was flying in formation—the XB-70A Valkyrie, a $500 million experimental bomber that North American Aviation had designed for Mach 3–plus speeds—and became caught in the mammoth plane’s extraordinarily powerful wingtip vortex. Walker died instantly. One of the Valkyrie pilots, air force major Carl S. Cross, died in the wreckage of the bomber. The other XB-70A pilot, Al White, a test pilot for North American, survived via the plane’s ejection capsule, but not without some serious injuries. Magnifying the tragedy was that the deaths came during what amounted to a publicity shoot for General Electric.