Frank Borman and Jim Lovell agreed. Borman, who flew the LLTV only once, on May 6, 1968, called flying it “a hairy deal.” “From my standpoint it was a dicey training aid.” Lovell: “Even though the LLTV and a helicopter operated entirely opposite in terms of controls, they still had you doing all this practicing in helicopters. Add to that all of the different safety factors you had to worry about—the ejection seat, the throttle, how to fly the thing, go up to two hundred feet and have two minutes of fuel and that was it. It made me worry about flying it.”
An important thing to say about Armstrong, in the view of both Anders and Lovell, is that Neil was the kind of experienced engineering test pilot who did an outstanding job thinking through what it took to fly in the unusual lunar environment and not letting his helicopter training dominate his piloting decisions. “Neil’s first experiences in the LLTV were probably not typical of the rest of us,” Anders relates. “It’s not that he had less helicopter time. It’s that Neil always thought these things through. If it required something counterintuitive or otherwise against the grain, he figured it out. The guys who flew more intuitively or who relied too much on their helicopter experience would have tumbled into craters or landed on rocks if they had tried to land on the Moon. In my view, the LLTV was a much undersung hero of the Apollo program.”
Eventually, all prime and backup commanders of Apollo lunar landing missions practiced on the LLTV. As the program went on, there was not enough LLTV time available and the backup commanders were cut short. The commanders usually flew a total of twenty-two flights, the backup commanders maybe a dozen. The astronauts who flew the LLTV besides Armstrong were Borman, Anders, Conrad, Scott, Lovell, Young, Shepard, Cernan, Gordon, and Haise.
Neil’s initial LLTV flight came on March 27, 1967, when the machine first came to Ellington Field; he made two flights in LLTV A1 that day. Algranti and Ream also flew the LLTV that month, but due to a combination of technical problems the machine was not flown for the remainder of the year. (None of the three new LLTVs were ready for flight testing until the summer of 1968.) When the LLTV came back on line, Armstrong was the first to get checked out in the machine (again, LLTV A1), followed by checkouts for Anders, Conrad, and Borman. Neil’s logbooks show that, between March 27, 1968, and April 25, 1968, he made ten flights in the converted LLRV. In Neil’s opinion, “The LLTV proved to be an excellent simulator and was highly regarded by the astronauts as necessary to lunar landing preparation.”
Yet the LLTV was also a highly dangerous machine to fly. “Without wings,” as Buzz Aldrin has noted, “it could not glide to a safe landing if the main engine or the thrusters failed. And to train on it properly, an astronaut had to fly at altitudes up to 500 feet. At that height a glitch could be fatal.” Armstrong found out just how unforgiving the vexatious machine could be on Monday afternoon, May 6, 1968, just fourteen months before the Apollo 11 landing.
“I wouldn’t call it routine, because nothing with an LLTV was routine, but I was making typical landing trajectories during the flight that afternoon, and as I approached the final phase of one of them, in the final 100 feet of descent going into landing, I noted that my control was degrading. Quickly, control was nonexistent. The vehicle began to turn. We had no secondary control system that we could energize—no emergency system with which we could recover control. So it became obvious as the aircraft reached thirty degrees of banking that I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. I had a very limited time left to escape the vehicle, so I ejected, using the rocket-powered seat. The ejection was somewhere over fifty feet of altitude, pretty low, but the rocket propelled me up fairly high. The vehicle crashed first, and I drifted in the parachute away from the flames and dropped successfully in the middle of a patch of weeds out in the center of Ellington Air Force Base.”
During the explosive ejection, the first he had experienced since abandoning his crippled Panther jet over Korea seventeen years earlier, Neil accidentally bit hard into his tongue. That was his only injury, except for a bad case of chiggers from the weeds. “It’s hard to compare against combat when a big shell from an aircraft just misses you. That’s close too, but the LLRV accident was indeed one of the close ones.”
To NASA Headquarters, Houston sent the following priority telegram about the accident:
LLRV #1 CRASHED MAY 6, 1968, AT 1328 CDT AT EAFB, TEXAS. PILOT, NEIL A. ARMSTRONG, NASA. MSC ASTRONAUT, EJECTED AFTER APPARENT LOSS OF CONTROL. ARMSTRONG INCURRED MINOR LACERATION TO TONGUE, VEHICLE WAS ON STANDARD LUNAR LANDING TRAINING MISSION. ESTIMATED ALTITUDE AT TIME OF EJECTION 200 FEET. LLRV #1 TOTAL LOSS—FIRST ESTIMATE $1.5 MILLION. PROBABLE CAUSE—NOT KNOWN AT THIS TIME. PROGRAM DELAY PROBABLE. LLRV #2 WILL NOT COMMENCE FLIGHT STATUS UNTIL ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION HAS BEEN COMPLETED AND CAUSE DETERMINED (LLTV’S HAVE NOT COMPLETED GROUND TEST PHASE AND THEREFORE ARE NOT APPLICABLE). BOARD OF INVESTIGATION APPOINTED BY DIRECTOR MSC.
Chairing the accident investigation board was Joe Algranti. Serving with him were Bill Anders and Pete Conrad, both of whom had also begun to fly the LLTV. (Conrad was a member only temporarily, until replaced by the FRC’s Don Mallick.) The statement in the telegram that Neil’s ejection took place from an estimated height of 200 feet was either in error or purposefully exaggerated to soothe fears in Washington about the dangers of flying the vehicle.
Those who observed the accident or who subsequently heard about it felt that Armstrong was very lucky to be alive. According to Chris Kraft, the frightening films he watched of the accident showed that Neil escaped death by just two-fifths of a second. “Winds were gusting that day,” Kraft describes, “something that can’t happen on the airless Moon, but Armstrong was fully in control for the first five minutes. He took it up several hundred feet and was ready to practice a nearly vertical descent and landing. Then the machine suddenly dropped. He steadied it and climbed back up another two hundred feet. Then the LLTV began to bounce around in the sky. It pitched down, then up, then sideways. Its stabilization had failed and it was clearly out of control. A ground controller radioed Neil to bail out. He activated the ejection seat with only a fractional second of margin. Neil’s parachute opened just before he hit the ground. He wasn’t hurt, but the LLTV was demolished in a fireball.”
Buzz Aldrin was not at Ellington, either, to see the accident, but he, too, understood it to be a near fatality: “When the machine began to wobble and spin during [Neil’s] descent from 210 feet to the runway, he fought to regain control with the thrusters, but the platform sagged badly to one side and lurched into a spin. He had maybe a second to decide. If the trainer had tipped completely over and he had fired his ejection seat, the rocket charge would have propelled him headfirst into the concrete below. Neil held on as long as he could, not wanting to abandon an expensive piece of hardware. At the last possible moment, he realized the thruster system had completely malfunctioned, and he pulled his ejection handles. He was blasted up several hundred feet, and his parachute opened just before he struck the grass at the side of the runway. Neil was shaken up pretty badly, and the LLRV exploded on impact.”
The cause of the accident was a poorly designed thruster system that allowed Armstrong’s propellant to leak out. Loss of helium pressure in the propellant tanks caused the attitude rockets to shut down, producing loss of control. “There was very little time to analyze alternatives at that point,” Neil explains. “It was just because I was so close to the ground. So, again, it was a time when you had to make a quick decision. You ‘departed.’”
The fact that NASA was flying the vehicle in such windy conditions was a major contributing factor. At Edwards, the FRC engineers had put a fifteen-knot limit on wind speed for LLRV flying, but the Houston staff felt they had to raise it to thirty knots in order to be able to use the machine on a regular basis. The FRC’s Gene Matranga feels that this is what really got Neil in trouble: “That afternoon there was a higher wind than we normally dealt with. Neil was using more attitude control fuel than had been budgeted because of the hig
her winds and the attitude rockets were firing much more continuously. The way we had designed the system, the fuel would go down so far, and then there was a standpipe that allowed you to have fuel saved for the lift rockets in case you had to use the lift rockets to recover the vehicle if the jet engine failed. The gentleman at Ellington who was responsible for watching the fuel consumption apparently froze at the switch. Neil should have shut off the lift rockets and saved his fuel for the attitude rockets and go back to the jet engine. Nobody warned Neil of that. What happened was the helium pressure, which sat on the top of the fuel to pressurize the system, was expended very rapidly, and Neil wound up having fuel but no pressurizing gas, because the lift rockets were in the open position. In essence, he had no control. He had to jump out.”
Interestingly, back before the LLRVs came to Houston, Armstrong had been present at Edwards to observe ground tests in which the FRC engineers, in association with technicians from Weber Aircraft, tested the lightweight ejection seat (less than 100 pounds) at different angles. Neil watched as the seat fired a human-sized dummy into the air and then saw that dummy smash hard into the ground after too few swings on its parachute. “Neil didn’t think much of that,” Matranga laughs. “He wasn’t terribly thrilled. But, as it turned out, that seat saved his life.”
After his accident on May 6, 1968, Armstrong behaved, typically, as if absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. Upon returning from a late lunch, astronaut Al Bean returned to the Astronaut Office and saw Neil at work at his desk in the office the two men shared. A little later, Bean went out in the hallway and walked over to a group of colleagues who were talking; he thought he heard them say that somebody had just crashed the LLTV. According to Bean, “I’m saying, ‘What happened?’ and they said, ‘Well, the wind was high and Neil ran out of fuel and bailed out at the last minute and the ejection seat worked and he lived through it.’ I said, ‘When did this happen?’ They said, ‘It just happened an hour ago.’ ‘An hour ago!’ I said, ‘That’s bullshit! I just came out of my office and Neil’s there at his desk. He’s in his flight suit, but he’s in there shuffling some papers.’ And they said, ‘No, it was Neil.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute!’ So I go back in the office. Neil looked up and I said, ‘I just heard the funniest story!’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I heard that you bailed out of the LLTV an hour ago.’ He thought a second and said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I lost control and had to bail out of the darn thing.’”
Bean continues his story: “So, I went back down and told the other guys. Nobody gave a thought to rush down there and ask Neil about it. If it had been Pete Conrad, everybody would have rushed down there, because Pete would have regaled them with a great story. I don’t think it was that Neil was so extraordinarily cooler than the other guys. But, offhand, I can’t think of another person, let alone another astronaut, who would have just gone back to his office after ejecting a fraction of a second before getting killed. He never got up at an all-pilots meeting and told us anything about it. That was an incident that colored my opinion about Neil ever since. He was so different than other people.”
Neil’s reaction to hearing Al Bean’s story is just as circumspect as his behavior in the story itself: “That is true, I did go back to the office. I mean, what are you going to do? It’s one of those sad days when you lose a machine.”
Once more, as had been the case in his Gemini VIII flight, Armstrong rightfully came out of the experience with an enhanced reputation for being able to handle an emergency situation—and this time there was no Monday morning quarterbacking.
“The LLTV was widely regarded—and properly so—as a high-risk vehicle,” Armstrong admits, “and one with which the management felt very uncomfortable. But the pilots universally, although they may have not liked the vehicle or liked flying it, they all agreed that it was the best simulation we had and gave us by far the highest confidence about what it was like to fly in the lunar environment.”
Houston grounded the LLTV pending the findings not only of the MSC’s accident investigation team but also of a special review board appointed by Dr. Thomas O. Paine, the man who succeeded James Webb as NASA administrator in late 1968 following the election of Richard M. Nixon. Chaired by General Samuel C. Phillips, the chief manager of the Apollo program under Dr. George Mueller, the committee at headquarters studied the impact of Armstrong’s crash on the overall Apollo program, particularly the LM. By mid-October 1968, the two reports were out, urging LLTV design and management improvements, yet clearing the program to continue.
Four minutes into a planned six-minute flight on December 8, 1968, MSC chief test pilot Joe Algranti was forced to “punch out” from LLTV 1 when large lateral-control oscillation developed as he descended from a maximum altitude of 550 feet. Ejecting at 200 feet, Algranti, who had flown the LLTV more than thirty times, landed by parachute uninjured, while the $1.8-million vehicle crashed and burned several hundred feet away. Once again, Houston convened an accident investigation board, headed this time by astronaut Wally Schirra.
MSC director Bob Gilruth and MSC’s Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft both felt that it was only a matter of time before an astronaut would be killed in the blasted instrument. “Gilruth and I were ready to eliminate it completely,” Kraft notes, “but the astronauts were adamant. They wanted the training it offered.”
LLTV flying resumed in April 1969, even before Schirra’s accident investigation panel turned in its report. When nothing went wrong in the first few flights involving only MSC test pilots, routine training flights for the astronauts began again. Yet Kraft knew they were pressing their luck. One day in the late spring of 1969, he asked Armstrong to stop by his office, hoping that Neil would give him some tidbit that Kraft could turn into a negative report about the LLTV. Neil did not provide it. “It’s absolutely essential,” the commander of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission told him. “By far the best training for landing on the Moon.” “It’s dangerous, damn it!” Kraft snapped back. “Yes, it is,” said Neil. “I know you’re worried, but I have to support it. It’s just darned good training.”
Kraft gave in, but he didn’t give up. Even after the lunar landings began, either he or Gilruth “grilled every returning astronaut, hoping to find some way to get the LLTV grounded forever.” They lost every time, because the astronauts wanted it. “To a man,” Kraft recalls, “they said it was the best training they received and was essential to landing on the Moon. So with our fingers crossed, we let them keep it.” The last astronaut to fly it was Gene Cernan on November 13, 1972, three weeks before the launch of Apollo 17, the final landing mission.
For three straight days in mid-June 1969, less than a month before the launch of Apollo 11, Armstrong flew one of the new LLTVs while Kraft and other NASA managers held their breath. Over the course of those three days (the fourteenth through the sixteenth), he took the LLTV up for lunar descents eight separate times. In all, he made a grand total of nineteen flights in the converted LLRVs and eight flights in the new LLTVs. No other astronaut before or after Armstrong flew the vehicle so much; for the record, Aldrin never flew the machine.* To observing newsmen after one of his flights, Neil remarked, “We are very pleased with the way it flies. I think it does an excellent job of capturing the handling characteristics. We’re getting a very high level of confidence in the overall landing maneuver.”
To this day, Armstrong remains convinced that the LLTV was “absolutely required to prepare yourself properly for the lunar landing.” If he had not felt this way back in 1968 and 1969, given how contrary and risky he knew the machine was, he would have said, in the best interest of the overall program, “let’s quit it.” Considering his collaboration with his colleagues at Edwards in conceptualizing and developing the original LLRV, “it is human nature to defend the things that you’ve been involved in the creation of. But I really believe that my motivation to recommend using it was always proper.”
Gene Matranga
puts the capstone on the significance of the landing simulator for the pilot of the first Moon landing: “Psychologically, it didn’t hurt that the LLRV/LLTV was harder to fly than the LM. That pleasant surprise had to bolster any astronaut’s confidence on his way down to the lunar surface.”
CHAPTER 24
Amiable Strangers
The trio of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were farther away from home than any human beings had ever been. Gradually slowing from a top speed of approximately 25,000 miles per hour, the crew of Apollo 8 had just passed the invisible milestone where the gravity of the planet and its natural satellite balanced out. The rest of the way Apollo 8 would be “falling” toward the Moon.
It was midafternoon, Monday, December 23, 1968, just following the crew’s live television transmission of a grainy yet very recognizable view of the Earth from over 200,000 miles away, or more than four-fifths of the way to the Moon. In Houston’s Mission Control, a new shift of flight controllers, the so-called Maroon Team under flight director Milton L. Windler, was preparing for the spacecraft to reach the critical point in its trajectory where the astronauts could insert their spacecraft into humankind’s first lunar orbit. If the burn failed, Apollo 8 would by default swing around the Moon on a slingshot path back toward Earth.
Armstrong stood in the back of Mission Control, quietly pondering the upcoming lunar orbit insertion. As the backup commander for Apollo 8, Armstrong had spent every moment of the last two and half days deeply involved with the details of the circumlunar flight. At the Cape on the morning of the launch on December 21, Neil had awakened at 3:00 A.M. so he could eat breakfast with the prime crew. Not much for eating filet mignon and scrambled eggs in the middle of the night, he only had coffee, black and unsugared, like he learned to drink it back in the navy. When breakfast was over and Borman, Lovell, and Anders were painstakingly suiting up, Neil hustled over to Launchpad 39A. It was customary for one or two members of the backup crew to monitor the prelaunch sequence from inside the cockpit and to set and check all the switches.
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