In Houston, Armstrong got a phone call from Edwards shortly after the accident happened. It had only been three months since the fatal crash in St. Louis that had killed his good friend Elliot See in the company of Charlie Bassett. Squeezed between those two fatal airplane accidents, Neil had survived his own near-disaster in the dizzying whirligig otherwise known as Gemini VIII. Returning to Lancaster to attend yet another emotionally charged funeral was almost too much to bear, but Neil and Janet were among the 700 persons who attended Walker’s memorial service and burial. “All my adult life had been interrupted by the loss of friends,” Neil remarks.
By the autumn of 1966, the Armstrongs were definitely in need of a vacation. At the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, they got one the likes of which no astronaut couple could ever forget.
In early October 1966, prior to the flight of Lovell and Aldrin in Gemini XII, Neil and Janet took off in a Convair 580 transport on a twenty-four-day goodwill tour of Latin America. Touring with Armstrong was Dick Gordon, just off his Gemini XI flight, and Dr. George Low, the former deputy director for manned spaceflight at NASA Headquarters who a few months earlier had become head of Apollo Applications at MSC. Joining them was Janet, Gordon’s wife, Barbara, and Low’s wife, Mary R., and Dr. George Armstrong (no relation to Neil), chief of MSC’s Space Physiology Branch. Representatives from sponsor agencies included Ashley Hewitt and Gerry Whittington (protocol, State Department); Brian Duff and Fred Asselin (public affairs, NASA); and Si Bourgin, Harry Caicedo, Skip Lambert, and Joe Santos (United States Information Agency).
The entourage traveled 15,000 miles through eleven countries and made appearances in fourteen major cities. Everywhere the astronauts went, throngs of humanity lined the streets. Crowds rushed them. Throughout Latin America, they found the people “spontaneous, friendly, and extremely warm.”
This trip was Neil’s first brush with the iconic staus that would later change his life so dramatically. In Colombia, the second country visited, “the reception was overwhelming,” George Low wrote in his journal. In Quito, the capital of Ecuador, the people “were not satisfied to stay on the sidewalks” and gave the motorcade “just barely enough room for the cars to pass through.” In São Paolo, Brazil, the entourage saw people hanging out of nearly every window. In Santiago, Chile, little old ladies clapped their hands overhead and yelled “Viva!” More than 2,500 guests showed up at a formal dinner reception in Rio de Janeiro, each one of whom expected to shake hands with the astronauts. At the University of Brasilia, 1,500 people crowded into a 500-seat auditorium to hear the astronauts speak. Over the course of the three-and-a-half-week journey, untold millions got a look at the visiting American astronauts. “Whenever possible,” Low wrote, “Neil and Dick were out of their cars shaking hands, signing autographs, and fostering a very personal relationship.” All over South America, the tour made front-page headlines and national television, as when the president of Venezuela, Raul Leoni, and his children welcomed the Americans at La Casona, the presidential palace on the outskirts of Caracas.
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia mounted heavy security precautions. In La Paz, Bolivia, armed troops stood every quarter mile from the airport to the center of town. In Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, there was almost no military security, but a police escort performed crowd control. In a few places, like Buenos Aires, crowds overwhelmed the visiting Americans. In several instances, the men from the State Department, USIA, and NASA were forced to handle security.
Other than being mobbed regularly by autograph seekers, there were surprisingly few incidents. During the astronauts’ presentation at the University of Brasilia, eleven days into the tour, a group of students raised a banner: “Peace on earth first, leave Vietnam.” Low wrote about the experience, “Here we were quite concerned as to whether we would get out in one piece, but it turned out that the crowd was very well behaved.”
The tour first ran into organized antagonism in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country that prided itself on possessing the most democratic form of government in South America. Every city block or two, somebody rushed the motorcade, yelling, “Murderers, get out of Vietnam!” or some similar slogan. Interpreter Fernando Van Reigersberg felt quite sure that the hostilities were part of an “organized campaign to embarrass us.”
In Panama City, the last stop, “People lined the streets,” Low wrote, “but the reception was very cool. There was no applause; there were generally only cold stares. It may be the general feeling hanging over from the difficulties of Panama two years ago [in 1964, when a diplomatic squabble over the flying of both the U.S. and Panamanian flags in the Canal Zone deteriorated into a riot]; or it may be the fact that every rooftop along the motorcade route was covered with armed soldiers.” Ironically, the only place the Americans found “the usual warm greetings” was in the Canal Zone, at Balboa High School, where all the trouble had started in early 1964.
For the government Convair turboprop, trouble surfaced en route from Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC, to Caracas, Venezuela. Violent turbulence threw Dick Gordon, among others, to the ceiling, disturbed much of the luggage, and splashed a passenger’s Bloody Mary all over the cabin. That inauspicious beginning was nothing compared to the wild ride into Asunción, Paraguay. “The pilots were on the radio,” Armstrong relates, “‘Well, the weather at Asunción is getting a little iffy.’ Two hours went by and we were still in the clouds. We were coming down lower and lower trying to get a visual. Finally we broke down out of the clouds, and the mountains were all around us. We had a Paraguayan fellow traveling with us from São Paolo to help orient us culturally. But he wasn’t supposed to be there to navigate the airplane! Looking out of the window, he saw a lake that he recognized and he said, ‘I know that place!’ The crew used him to help direct us in.”
Armstrong proceeded to greet local dignitaries with a few words in their native Guarani, an ancient language of tribal peoples. The words that Neil uttered sounded like “Ro-voo-ah ro-zhoo-a-guari para-guay-pay,” meaning simply, “We are happy to be in Paraguay.”
Armstrong’s burgeoning talent for language impressed all of his traveling companions, including fellow astronaut Dick Gordon, who knew no Spanish other than “Quiero presentarle a mi esposa,” which he learned to introduce his wife, or “escotch y agua,” to ask for the occasional scotch and water. As soon as Neil heard that he would be making the Latin America trip, he had enrolled in a Spanish conversation class, as had Gordon’s wife Barbara. Aboard the Convair, Neil conversed with Fernando Van Reigersberg. “Fernando was Dutch,” Armstrong explains, “but he had lived in Algeria as a boy. He had been President Kennedy’s interpreter when he went to Latin America.” Although Armstrong cited Van Reigersberg for laying “the groundwork for everything we needed to know in all the different [eleven] countries,” Neil, before embarking on the tour, had spent many evenings with a set of encyclopedias.
Armstrong peppered his speeches with references to South American heroes such as Simón Bolívar and especially to the continent’s aviation pioneers. Neil knew that, in the view of most Brazilians, their countryman Alberto Santos-Dumont was the true Father of Aviation, not the Wright brothers. Neil’s rather detailed knowledge of the career of the great Brazilian aviator (most of whose flying was done in Europe) informed his gracious remarks during the welcoming ceremony at the Santos-Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro.
At the Venezuelan Science Academy, Columbian Association of Engineers, Centro Columbo Americano, Peruvian Instituto Geofisica, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and Argentine Commission for Space Research, the astronauts narrated a film outlining key elements of their Gemini missions. In a subsequent slide show, they illustrated rendezvous, docking, EVA, the burn out of orbit, and reentry. Even these technical audiences were stirred by high-orbit perspectives of the Earth’s surface, especially shots of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, the Andes in Ecuador, an avalanche in Peru, and the mouth of the Amazon River. Dr. George Armstrong then summarize
d the medical results of the Gemini flights, followed by George Low offering a final series of slides outlining the upcoming Apollo program.
Over and over again, Gordon responded to questions about how it felt to be outside the spacecraft and why his visor fogged up during his EVA. Regular questions for Neil included: “Did you fear death during your spaceflight?” “Did flying in space change your belief in God or your view of the world?” Typical for Neil, he gave brief, cryptic responses to this sort of broad questioning, preferring to focus on the engineering, technology, and science of his time in space.
Armstrong’s successful presentations were not what most impressed George Low about Neil. Prior to the trip, Armstrong and Low had barely known each other. Low had been a research engineer at NACA Lewis in Cleveland, where Neil had started his career as a test pilot, and “we had crossed paths occasionally.” When Neil did get to know him better in Houston, Armstrong thought Low’s abilities were “really very strong. He was thoughtful but pragmatic, and he had many creative ideas of his own. He was not an immovable type. He listened.”
The admiration was mutual. “Neil had a knack of making short little speeches in response to toasts and when getting medals, in response to questions of any kind,” Low recalled. “He never failed to choose the right words.” In his travel journal Low concluded, “All I can say is that I am impressed. Neil also made a very significant effort in learning Spanish, and even learning Guarani for Paraguay, and this, of course, made a tremendous hit with the people.”
Given the important role that George Low would come to play in future discussions about Apollo crew assignments, and in the spring of 1969 about which astronaut should be the first to step down off the LM and onto the Moon’s surface, it is clear that his extremely positive evaluation of Armstrong cannot be overlooked as an influential factor in Neil’s subsequent fortunes as an astronaut.
Low was not the only person in a leadership position to view Armstrong as the right sort of individual to represent America, at home and abroad. Inside the State Department, USIA, and NASA, politically minded officials felt that the goodwill tour through Latin America had struck a blow for “the American way.” Low had it on authority that, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin toured Latin America in 1962, Gagarin had come off as a space hero but as nothing more. “Our visit was looked upon as an official visit by a team of scientists as well as space heroes,” Low reported to friends back in Houston and Washington. “Perhaps this made little difference to the population in general, but it was noted by the officials we met, by the scientific community, and by the press.” An important factor in this sentiment was due “to the astronauts’ complete ability to answer all questions, and the realization that they were engineers and scientists as well as test pilots…. [It is] a powerful tool that the United States can use in our international relations, pursued for the purpose of peace.”
PART SIX
APOLLO
As the day clock was ticking for takeoff, would you every night, or most nights, just go out quietly and look at the Moon? I mean did it become something like “my goodness”?
No, I never did that.
—NEIL ARMSTRONG IN RESPONSE TO QUESTION POSED BY HISTORIAN DOUGLAS BRINKLEY DURING AN INTERVIEW IN HOUSTON, TEXAS, SEPTEMBER 19, 2001
CHAPTER 22
Out of the Ashes
By New Year’s Day 1967, many observers of the U.S. manned space program believed that President Kennedy’s “by the end of the decade” deadline for landing a man on the Moon might be achieved a couple of years ahead of schedule. The reasons for optimism were very good ones. The Gemini program had finished on a roll. Most of the Apollo spacecraft hardware was well on its way to being built. The powerful Saturn rocket that was to boost the Apollo spacecraft on its way to the Moon was getting closer and closer to being operational. True, a few astronauts had died in airplane crashes, but nothing about the space program itself had been at fault in the unfortunate deaths. Everything about the program appeared to be proceeding. Beating the Russians to the Moon seemed a safer and safer bet. Then, not a full month into 1967, a devastating accident occurred at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The tragedy made it abundantly clear just how dear a price had to be paid to pursue such a bold adventure into the unknown.
The accident occurred in the twilight of what had been a gorgeous Friday, January 27, 1967. Between 6:31 and 6:32 P.M. EST, a fire flashed through the Apollo Block I command module as it sat atop its uprated Saturn IB rocket on Pad 34. In the cockpit were Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White, the Armstrongs’ neighbor. The crew was going through a dress rehearsal for a launch that was not scheduled to occur for three more weeks, when a stray spark erupted into an inferno. Seconds later, all three men were dead. Upon hearing the news, it must have seemed to Neil and Janet Armstrong that nothing good ever happened at this time of year. When the clock struck midnight a few hours after the carnage, it was the couple’s eleventh wedding anniversary, a day forever etched in their consciousness as the day Muffie died.
The immediate cause of the launchpad fire was just as mundane and trivial as the nail-in-the-paneling problem that had caused the Armstrongs’ home to burn down less than three years earlier. An electrical wire on the floor of the spacecraft’s lower equipment bay became frayed, probably due to the procession of technicians in and out of the spacecraft in the days before the test. A spark from the frayed wire jumped into some combustible material, likely foam padding or Velcro patches. In the 100 percent oxygen atmosphere, even a momentary flicker—which in the open air would have ignited only into a small and easily controllable flame—became a firebomb. In the choking white heat, the three astronauts died from asphyxiation in a matter of seconds, their respiratory systems not waiting for their bodies to be incinerated in the 2,500-degree F. furnace.
For Ed White and his confreres, there was no chance for escape. For a brief, horrible moment, the astronauts surely realized what was happening to them. Roger Chaffee, a navy aviator who had flown photoreconnaissance missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, yelled first through his radio, “Fire in the spacecraft!” followed by White’s “Fire in the cockpit!” and then again by Chaffee’s “We’re on fire! Get us out of here!”
Fifteen seconds after Chaffee’s first words, the Apollo 1 command module blew apart from the pressure of the intense heat. The explosion was so forceful that members of the launchpad crew who were stationed up on gantry level eight got blasted off their feet. NASA systems technicians, even after donning gas masks and extinguishing part of the blaze, could not see through the smoke and flames to make their way through the ripped-apart spacecraft to the astronauts. Their only choice was to force open the spacecraft’s complicated hatch. A primitive design, the Block I hatch amounted to two hatches pressure-sealed and attached by several dozen bolts.
It took the technicians several minutes to pry open the bolted-down hatch even partway. Rescuers initially thought that the astronauts had been cremated until pad leader Donald Babbitt shined his flashlight onto the remains of the three men. Two of the astronauts, Grissom and White, were clearly reaching in desperation for the hatch. Amazingly, Chaffee was still sitting almost in repose in his couch. The highly trained team of astronauts, to the bitter end, had done things by the book. Procedures for the emergency escape drill called for Chaffee, the junior crewman, to stay in his seat while the commander and pilot undid the hatch.
Armstrong was away from home when the Apollo fire occurred. He was at the White House as part of a delegation of astronauts that included Gordon Cooper, Dick Gordon, Jim Lovell, and Scott Carpenter to witness the signing of an international agreement known by the complicated title Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space. The astronauts called it the “non-staking-a-claim treaty” because it precluded land claims on the Moon, Mars, or any other heavenly body. The treaty—signed simultaneously in Washington, London, and Moscow and still in effe
ct today—outlawed the militarization of space. Its Article Five assured the safe and cordial return of any astronauts (or cosmonauts) making an unexpected landing within the legal domain of another country, as had nearly occurred during two American space missions: Scott Carpenter’s May 1962 Mercury 7 flight; and Gemini VIII, when Neil had thought the spacecraft’s emergency trajectory might bring himself and Scott down in China.
Following the signing of the Outer Space Treaty was a reception in the Green Room of the White House. Among the dignitaries in attendance were ambassadors Anatoly Dobrynin of the Soviet Union, Patrick Dean of Great Britain, and Kurt Waldheim of Austria. Most of Washington’s political heavyweights were there, including Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, and Democratic senators Eugene McCarthy, Albert Gore Sr., and Walter Mondale. (In the weeks ahead, Mondale would lead the criticism of NASA in the congressional investigation of the Apollo fire.) President Johnson and wife Lady Bird hosted the event; it was the first time that Armstrong had seen LBJ in person since Neil had demonstrated the low L/D landing approach in an F5D at Edwards in 1962, when Johnson was still vice president. Loquacious Hubert H. Humphrey, the vice president, glibly mingled, whereas Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Averill Harriman, socialized more studiously.
The five astronauts actively “worked the crowd,” as per NASA directive. Armstrong remembers that the event ended precisely at 6:45 P.M., and that he and the other astronauts (except for Carpenter, who left immediately for the airport) took taxis to the Georgetown Inn on Wisconsin Avenue, where they had already checked in before heading to the White House.
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