Janet Armstrong feels that the fact that Neil made most of the toasts and did such an outstanding job as the crew’s spokesman exacerbated Buzz’s sense of being aggrieved. “It was hard to follow Neil—he always did so well. Buzz used notes and that bothered Buzz. He was not as comfortable speaking as Neil and Mike were. Neil was not comfortable speaking, either, but he did it, and he did a great job of it,” as the tour continued from Tehran, where the astronauts visited the Shah of Iran, to Tokyo, where they were received by Emperor Hirohito.
Thus ended the astronauts’ Giant Step forty-five-day world tour. After a fuel stop in Anchorage, Alaska, Air Force Two flew directly to the nation’s capital. Shortly before landing at Dulles National, each astronaut received a memo parodying national protocols:
Your next stop is Washington, DC, USA. Here are a few helpful reminders. 1. The water is drinkable, although it is not the most popular native drink. 2. You can always expect student demonstrations. 3. Never turn your back on the President. 4. Never be seen with the Vice President. 5. If you leave your shoes outside the door, they will be stolen. 6. It is unsafe to walk on the street after dark. 7. Do not discuss the following sensitive issues with the natives: Vietnam War, Budget, Foreign Aid, Import-Exports. 8. Rate of exchange is .05 cents per one dollar (American).
On the White House lawn, with the Marine Band playing, President and Mrs. Nixon welcomed them home. That night the astronauts and their wives dined and slept at the White House. “The president was quite nice,” Neil remembers. “He was very interested in everything we had to report about the tour, about the various leaders we had met, what their reaction was and what did they say. He had been trying for years to get a meeting with Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and after leaving the Hornet he was able to get an appointment. President Nixon said something to the effect, ‘That meeting alone paid for everything we spent on the space program.’”
During dinner Nixon asked all three men in turn what they wanted to do next in their lives. Collins said he would like to continue doing goodwill work for the State Department, upon which, right at the table, Nixon instantly phoned Secretary of State William Rogers, asking him to get Mike set up. Aldrin told the president he felt he could contribute more by staying in technical work. When Nixon then asked the commander of Apollo 11 if he wouldn’t like to serve somewhere as a goodwill ambassador, Neil politely said he, too, would be honored to serve as an ambassador, but he was not sure in what kind of role he could serve best. Nixon told him to think it over and requested a personal reply.
During Giant Step, between 100 million and 150 million people were estimated to have seen the astronauts, and as many as 25,000 of these actually shaking hands with them or receiving autographs. In the immediate aftermath of the trip, Armstrong certainly felt like it had done some good. Speaking to an audience at Ohio’s Wittenberg College in November 1969, Neil said, “More can be gained from friendship than from technical knowledge,” quite an admission coming from the devoted aeronautical engineer.
Armstrong next joined Bob Hope’s Christmas 1969 USO tour to entertain the U.S. and allied troops in Vietnam, with stops along the way in Germany, Italy, Turkey, Taiwan, and Guam. Actresses Teresa Graves, Romy Schneider, Connie Stevens, Miss World 1969 (Eva Reuber-Staier), the “Golddiggers” showgirls, and Les Brown and His Band of Renown completed the cast.
Under Hope’s tutelage, Armstrong, decked out in chino pants, a red sport shirt, and a jungle hat, often played the straight man:
In his 1974 memoir The Last Christmas Show, Hope remembered the 1969 tour: “When Neil came out at the end of the shows for a question-and-answer free for all, the GIs wouldn’t let him go. We had mikes set up in the audience and they bombarded him with questions…. Normally, when we finished a show, all the GIs would rush onstage to talk to the girls, get their autographs, and take their pictures. You know the sort of stuff—anything to get to stand next to a girl instead of another GI. Well, this time around, the soldiers rushed the stage to talk with Neil, even after the question-and-answer period. The poor girls just clumped around looking like the losers in a deodorant commercial.” To that assertion by Hope, Neil responds: “I don’t think so! He was always making jokes.”
A few questions posed by the American soldiers tested Neil’s mettle. At the show in Bangkok, where a four-minute standing ovation greeted the First Man, a young helicopter pilot stood up from the second row and demanded, “I wanna know why the U.S. is so interested in the Moon instead of the conflict in Vietnam.” Neil waited patiently for the cheers and whistles to stop. Recalling his experiences as a Korean War veteran, Neil answered, “Well, that’s a…that’s a great question. The American…the nature of the American system is that it works on many levels in many areas to try to build peace on Earth, goodwill to men. And one of the advantages of the space activity is that it has promoted international understanding and enabled cooperative effort between countries on many levels and will continue to do so in the future.”
During a show in Vietnam, another GI asked, “Mr. Armstrong, from your experience on the Moon and the knowledge that you have of it now, do you think it’s possible that one day humans will live on the Moon?”
“Yes, I think they will. We will see a manned scientific base being built on the Moon. It’ll be a scientific station manned by an international crew, very much like the Antarctic station. But there’s a much more important question than whether man will be able to live on the Moon. We have to ask ourselves whether man will be able to live together down here on Earth.”
Armstrong had a serious message for the soldiers: “I tried to use the occasion to have the troops in Vietnam consider increasing their education when they got back home. I tried to make the point that in today’s world that this would be a good time for them to do it—many of them—before they got too many other commitments. That idea seemed to be well received, but in that situation those guys would have welcomed anyone. They were so hungry for news from home and for anything to cheer them up and take their mind away from the situation they were in…. I got a lot of letters.”
The Christmas 1969 tour was spared “any [enemy] fire or even any explosions in the distance. Some of the places were fairly close to combat zones, but I don’t remember any action.” At Lai Khe, the troupe performed for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the war to date. So battle-weary were the soldiers that, when Hope reiterated his personal assurances from President Nixon of a plan for peace, more than a scattering of boos arose, a startling precedent for Bob Hope, whose USO shows dated back to World War II.
For the first time, Neil faced scandalous publicity. Stories appeared in the gossip columns and even in Parade magazine that he and actress Connie Stevens had become romantically involved while on the USO tour, and that Neil had been, after their return, more than once spotted in the audience of Stevens’s Las Vegas act. So rampant did the rumors become that Stevens called Neil to apologize. The truth of the matter was that the thirty-one-year-old singer-actress and the Apollo 11 astronaut had done nothing more intimate on the USO tour than play cards to pass the time. Learning of the rumors, Janet Armstrong anticipated a courtesy call from Stevens, but that never happened. “In retrospect,” says Janet today, “it was probably the best way to handle the whole situation.”
In May 1970, Armstrong traveled to the Soviet Union, as only the second American astronaut to make an official visit. “I was invited to give a paper to the thirteenth annual conference of the International Committee on Space Research.” On May 24 he arrived at the Leningrad airport on a flight from Warsaw. A red carpet awaited him but no crowds, as the Soviet government had not released news of Armstrong’s arrival.
Serving as his hosts were Georgy T. Beregovoy and Konstantin P. Feoktistov, the cosmonauts whose goodwill visit to America came two months after Apollo 11. (Feoktistov had flown the Voskhod I mission in 1964, and Beregovoy made the Soyuz III flight in 1968.) The Western press reported that at COSP
AR he received a “tumultuous welcome from a predominantly Russian audience” and was “mobbed by scientists seeking autographs and wildly applauding when he took the rostrum.”
After five days in Leningrad, he was given permission to visit Moscow. At the Kremlin, he met with Premier Alexei N. Kosygin for an hour. On behalf of President Nixon, Neil presented him with some chips of a Moon rock and a small Soviet flag that had been carried aboard Apollo 11, gifts that prompted Kosygin to lament, “What you have seen is something I’ll never see,” to which Armstrong replied, “Progress is so rapid, you may be surprised.” The sixty-six-year-old Kosygin was insistent, perhaps because he knew far too well the multitude of problems, big and small, that had been keeping the Soviet lunar program so far behind the American: “I am convinced of my ability to predict the spread of human progress, and I still don’t think I’ll get to the Moon.”
“Kosygin shook his finger at me and said, If our two countries are involved in armed conflict, it’s not going to be our fault.”
“The next morning there was a message at the hotel desk that there was a package for me; the security guys said, ‘What do you think it is?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s probably a nice little package of caviar or bottle of vodka or something like that.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ I asked why not. They said, ‘Mr. Kosygin is a temperance man.’ I thought that couldn’t be possible, not in Russia. Well, it was a lovely wooden case—furniture-quality case—with six bottles of cognac and six bottles of vodka!”
The great Russian aircraft designer Andrey N. Tupolev and his son Adrian “took me to the airfield hanger where they kept their supersonic TU-144—the “striking” Concorde lookalike. Apparently I was the first Westerner to see the airplane. The Tupolevs gave me a model of the TU-144, which Andrey Tupolev signed. When I got back, I gave that to the Smithsonian.”
Viewing a display of czarist Russia’s crown jewels at the Kremlin’s Armory Museum, Armstrong’s cosmonaut host Beregovoy joked that Neil had brought parts of a Moon rock to Russia and now it was time to reciprocate. “Pick one,” the cosmonaut said. Armstrong pointed at one of the most dazzling. “Fine,” said Georgy, “that will cost you $300 million.” Replied Neil, “I think I’ll wait until they sell it at half price.”
Besides Beregovoy and Feoktistov, Armstrong met several other Soviet astronauts. In a secluded forest outside of Moscow, he spent the day at the Cosmonaut Training Center, which was part of the space complex of Zvezdyny Gorodok (“Star City”), Russia’s version of Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center. His hostess there was Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space. “I had sort of thought of her as a lady wrestler kind of person, but she wasn’t that way at all. She was very small, petite, and charming.” Neil toured their training facilities, simulators, and spacecraft mockups, “which struck me as being functional but a bit Victorian in nature.” Tereshkova also took him to the office of the late Yuri Gagarin, whose personal effects had been preserved as a shrine to the first human space traveler. Neil’s lecture was attended by “many of the cosmonauts. They asked the kinds of questions that pilots would ask.”
Afterward “they brought two ladies up—one was Mrs. Gagarin and the other Mrs. Vladimir Komarov. Because we had left medallions on the lunar surface in their husbands’ honor on the lunar surface, it was kind of a touching little ceremony.” Neil told Soviet media he had been “most emotionally moved” by his meeting with the widows.
“That night the cosmonauts invited me to a dinner. There was much toasting going on. No women—this was a stag affair, so Valentina was not there. They presented me a very nice shotgun inscribed with my name on the stock—a twelve-gauge double-barrel side-by-side that the U.S. government permitted me to keep.
“After dinner, around midnight, Georgy Beregovoy, my host, invited me to his apartment for coffee. At one point Georgy talked a little bit on the phone, then someone called him and he went over and turned on his television set. It was the launch of Soyuz IX. It wasn’t live; it was a tape of the launch that had occurred earlier in the day at Baikonur. And the occupant was Andrian G. Nikolayev, who was Valentina’s husband, as well as Vitaly I. Sevastyanov. So I had spent the whole day with Tereshkova and the whole evening with all the colleagues of the two cosmonauts, and it was never mentioned once that they were having a launch that day. I concluded that Valentina was either awfully good at keeping a secret or she was dreadfully misinformed.”
The launch went well or Neil would never have seen it. Vodka was brought out for toasts. Bergovoy smiled broadly when he told Armstrong, “This launch was in your honor!”
From July 1969 to June 1970, Armstrong traveled the half million miles to the Moon and back followed by nearly 100,000 miles on Earth. Such was his journey from the present to the future.
On May 18, 1970, NASA announced that Neil would be taking over as deputy associate administrator for aeronautics for the Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART). In his new position, Neil would be returning to his first love—airplanes—and “responsible for the coordination and management of overall NASA research and technology work related to aeronautics and coordination between NASA, industry, and other government agencies with respect to aeronautics.”
On July 1, following a three-week vacation, Armstrong raised his right hand and was sworn in by NASA Administrator Paine. A little over a year later, he would resign.
PART EIGHT
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
I think that people should be recognized for their achievements and the value that adds to society’s progress. But it can be easily overdone. I think highly of many people and their accomplishments, but I don’t believe that that should be paramount over the actual achievements themselves. Celebrity shouldn’t supersede the things they’ve accomplished.
—NEIL A. ARMSTRONG TO AUTHOR,CINCINNATI, OH,JUNE 2, 2004
I recognize that I am portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my perspective it doesn’t seem that way, because I do so many things, go so many places. I give so many talks, I write so many papers, that, from my point of view, it seems like I don’t know how I could do more. But I realize that, from another perspective, outside, I’m only able to accept one percent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I’m not doing anything. But I can’t change that.
—NEIL A. ARMSTRONG TO STEPHEN E. AMBROSEAND DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, HOUSTON, TX,SEPTEMBER 19, 2001
CHAPTER 32
Standing Ground
Following the Moon landing, Armstrong recalls, “I never asked the question about returning to spaceflight, but I began to believe that I wouldn’t have another chance, although that never was explicitly stated.” Both George Low and Bob Gilruth “said they would like me to consider going back to aeronautics and take a deputy associate administrator job in Washington. I was not convinced that that was a good thing for me. Probably because of all the time I had worked at the field centers, I more or less looked down at Washington jobs as not being in the real world.”
Private-sector opportunities were plentiful, from business ventures, hotel and restaurant property development, to commercial banking. People suggested he run for political office, as fellow Ohio astronaut John Glenn had done. But Neil wanted to stay in engineering.
“Thinking it over, I concluded that the NASA aeronautics job was something I could do.” Janet felt that Neil was not unhappy with the change: “He was a pilot, and he was always happier when he was flying.” Still she worried, “he was not a desk job person” and that it “was going to be a real adjustment for him.”
Armstrong’s principal contribution to NASA aeronautics during his time in Washington was his support for the new technology of fly-by-wire. Until Neil became deputy associate administrator for aeronautics, no one at NASA Headquarters had given the radical concept of flying an airplane electronically (and with only one of its inputs being the pilot’s controls) much credence. Neil stunned a team of Flight Research Center engineers when they visited his
office in 1970 asking for modest funding to conduct flight research with an airplane installed with an analog fly-by-wire system. As NASA historian Michael H. Gorn has written, “To their surprise, Armstrong objected. Why analog technology?” he asked. Rather than a system of human impulses transmitted by mechanical linkages from the cockpit to the control surfaces, Neil proposed employing a more advanced system, one based on counting—on digital fly-by-wire (DFBW). The FRC engineers knew of no flight-qualified digital computer. “I just went to the Moon and back on one,” said Armstrong. According to Gorn, “The visitors from the Flight Research Center admitted with embarrassment [that] they had not even thought of it.”
Out of this initiative arose NASA’s innovative F-8C Crusader DFBW flight test program, undertaken at Dryden Flight Research Center from 1972 to 1976. Proven reliable, DFBW untied the hands of high-speed aircraft designers, coaxing them to venture forward with radical new aerodynamic configurations, including airplanes possessing absolutely no innate stability of their own minus the computerized control system. DFBW stands as another major contribution to aeronautics, rather than space, that needs always to be associated with the First Man.
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