First Man

by James R. Hansen

A rare quiet moment at home for the Armstrong family—Janet, Neil, Mark, and Rick—during the buildup to the Apollo 11 launch.

  Five days before launch, Neil and Buzz work LM simulations at the Cape.

  During the pre-launch breakfast, Deke Slayton maps recovery ship locations for the early phases of the Apollo 11 mission.

  Neil’s space suit in its lunar surface configuration included a Liquid Cooled Garment (left) and EVA gloves and Moon boots (right).

  Commander Armstrong crosses the swing arm leading to the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the morning of the launch.

  Steve and Viola Armstrong gaze proudly at a scale-model replica of the Saturn V Moon rocket.

  For the July 16, 1969 launch, Kennedy Space Center’s director Dr. Kurt H. Debus issued press credentials depicting the Apollo 11 mission crest, the Moon, and the three astronauts’ helmeted silhouettes.

  The press witnesses Apollo 11/Saturn V clearing the tower at Launch Complex 39.

  Apollo 11 roars upward just after pitchover.

  Janet Armstrong watches the Apollo 11 launch.

  “The Eagle has wings”: Eagle, shortly after its undocking from Columbia.

  Armstrong’s Moonwalk is documented by just five still photographs:

  1. The iconic image of Neil reflected in Buzz’s visor.

  2. Neil’s back and legs visible from his position in front of Buzz.

  3. This underexposed picture of the Ascent Stage shows Neil at the MESA.

  4. Neil’s legs as he stands below the LM porch.

  5. A Hasselblad pan shot by Buzz yields the only full-body view of Neil on the Lunar Surface.

  Mission Control observes the Apollo 11 astronauts’ historic Moonwalk.

  Deployment of the U.S. flag by Armstrong and Aldrin was caught by the sixteen-millimeter film camera mounted in the LM window.

  President Richard M. Nixon telephones his congratulations to the Moonwalkers.

  “Where the guys walked”: a traverse map of the Apollo 11 EVA.

  Back in the LM, Buzz snapped Neil while in his “Snoopy” cap.

  “Spaceship Earth” over the LM on the Sea of Tranquility.

  Eagle approaches Columbia during rendezvous.

  “Task Accomplished…July 1969.” Mission Control celebrates after splashdown.

  Columbia, scarred from the heat of reentry, is recovered by USS Hornet’s navy frogmen.

  During recovery, the astronauts wore Biological Containment Garments (BIGs) designed to save the world from “Moon germs.”

  The slogan “Hornet + 3” adorned the astronauts’ Mobile Quarantine Facility, as well as the tiered cake decorated in their honor.

  Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong parade through New York City, August 13, 1969.

  Collins, Armstrong, and Aldrin with U.S. Postmaster General Winton M. Blount unveiling the commemorative Apollo 11 ten-cent air mail stamp, September 9, 1969.

  The Apollo 11 crew donned panchos and sombreros on the Mexico City leg of the GIANTSTEP goodwill tour, September 29, 1969.

  Professor Armstrong teaching engineering at the University of Cincinnati, 1974.

  Armstrong became the national spokesperson for the Chrysler Corporation, 1979.

  The Apollo 11 crew reunited on the thirtieth anniversary of their mission, 1999.

  Neil, with wife Carol, returns to Launch Pad 39A, this time to observe the launch of Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-83), April 4, 1987.

  Neil, with Carol, maintains his active flight status on a Cessna 421, October 2003.

  * Armstrong family involvement in the French and Indian War, and in the American Revolution, remains incompletely documented, but there is no doubt that some offshoots of the family (and definitely some in-laws) served in military capacities. The husband of John Armstrong’s younger sister Hannah (1742 or 1743–1816), Irish-born John Moore (1741–1818), entered the War for Independence as a private and may have served as a combat surgeon. John Armstrong, with the help of his sons, built along the Monongahela a “strong house” refuge for patriots.

  * According to a volunteer group in Warren, Ohio, that has worked through the early 2000s to turn the Warren airport site into a historical exhibit, the date of Neil’s inaugural flight was July 26, 1936. If that date is correct, Neil was still only five when he experienced his first airplane ride, his sixth birthday not coming for ten more days.

  * Without knowing the scores of the other students in Class 5-49, it is impossible to assess Armstrong’s performance relative to his peers’. With two “Outstandings,” five “Very Goods,” and one “Fair,” it seems that Neil’s scores were above average but not at the very top of the class. It is known that James J. Ashford, a member of Training Class 2-49 who later was killed in action while serving with Armstrong in VF-51, received “Outstandings” in all categories, with a 4.0 in “Character.”

  * On January 3, 1951, divisions of VF-51 flew flak suppression in a concerted attack against heavy gun emplacements protecting a trestle-type railway bridge near Yangdok, west of Wonsan in Green Six. Armstrong was flying CAP that day, but Wam Mackey’s division (Cheshire, Rickelton, and Kramer) was involved, and Mackey remembers the flak being so heavy over the target that “it looked like someone had pulled a circus tent open and all these balloons [of antiaircraft fire] were coming up out of it.” Mackey thought to himself, “Good God! Please say they [the ADs following behind] got it [the bridge] on the first pass!” (WAM to author, Sept. 21, 2002, pp. 22–23). Unfortunately, they did not, “so we had to rendezvous and come back and do it a second time.” Yet not a single plane was lost.

  On January 5, Armstrong was again assigned to CAP. The targets were near the town of Potan, northeast of Pyongyang. A January 8 strike destroyed two bridges, and Neil participated in it as part of Carpenter’s division. So did Bob Kaps as part of Beauchamp’s. In his journal that night, Kaps noted: “Flew FLAK suppression for drop strike. They [the AD pilots] did a good job. Don’t envy any of them” (Kaps journal, Jan. 8, 1952). This particular strike occurred the same day that the squadron heard it would be staying in the Korean theater until March.

  Yet another coordinated bridge attack took out four more bridges in the region around Potan on January 18. It was another day that Neil did not fly. The last big coordinated effort of the fourth tour occurred on January 23. It involved two VF-51 divisions, Mackey’s and Wenzell’s. On that day Armstrong flew a photo escort mission over Tonchon. Locating a number of railway locomotives sitting in a marshaling yard, his mission resulted in two of the locomotives being destroyed.

  * A key parameter in aerodynamics, Reynolds numbers—named after the nineteenth-century English scientist Osborne Reynolds—are a nondimensional parameter representing the ratio of the momentum forces to the viscous forces about a body in a fluid flow. Generally speaking, the higher the Reynolds number, the more realistic are the results of any model tests to actual full-scale performance.

  † “G” (g) is the unit of measurement for bodies undergoing acceleration that is equal to the acceleration of gravity—approximately 32.2 feet per second at sea level.

  * The zooms flown by Armstrong and other NACA pilots in the F-104 were designed primarily to investigate reaction controls. According to Armstrong, “We would accelerate to Mach 2 at about 35,000 feet, pull up to the programmed climb angle, shut down the engine at about 60,000 feet (to prevent engine overheating), then, at 75,000 to 80,000 feet, began a planned control sequence with the reaction control system [a three-axis reaction control system utilizing hydrogen peroxide rockets on the wingtips and in the nose]. The top of the zoom was usually about 90,000” (NAA to author, Nov. 26, 2002, p. 15). “We were the first to do this kind of maneuver,” Armstrong states (NAA: e-mail to author, Jan. 22, 2004). “I am confident that we had the only aircraft so configured and were the first to use reaction controls in this mode.”

  * The most authoritative sources for the suggestion that Yeager “plain screwed up” have been Major Robert W. Smith, a 1956 graduate of the air force’s Tes
t Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards and the primary pilot in the NF-104A program; Colonel William Haynes, one of Smith’s TPS classmates and an officer involved at the time in the air force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar program; and Robert G. Hoey, then the air force’s deputy flight test engineer at Edwards. According to these sources, the stability derivatives from Bob Smith’s previous NF-104A flight of November 1963 had not yet been reduced when Yeager, then the commander of the TPS, decided to take the airplane up for his own assault on the world altitude record (for a ground-launched airplane), a record that Smith had just set at 118,600 feet. Both Smith and Hoey tried to get Yeager to wait until the data was completed. They also strongly encouraged him to spend at least a little time in the NF-104A simulator. But Yeager refused both pieces of advice, insisting that “If Smith can fly it, I can.” If he had trained on the fixed-base simulator, according to Hoey, Yeager would have learned, among other things, the right way to recover the aircraft from a flat spin via deployment of an emergency chute. A pilot’s natural inclination was to do what Yeager did: to push forward gently with the stick, an instinctive move that only accelerated the plane’s nosing up. The best thing to do, as could be learned in only the simulator, was to come full forward on the stick, even though normal pilot experience indicated that action would turn the plane upside down. Yet it was only that counterintuitive use of the stick that could have gotten the NF-104A out of a flat spin using the chute. Yet another Edwards pilot has suggested that Yeager failed to reset the trim tab during the recovery and, because of this, was unable to control the nose pitch-up when the drag chute was jettisoned.

  The real tragedy of Yeager’s rush to fly the NF-104A, in the opinion of these air force insiders, was that, when Yeager failed to recover from the spin and nearly lost his life, the consensus at the TPS was that the NF-104A was too dangerous an aircraft to be flying zooms. So the air force canceled the NF-104A project, Smith said, “thereby depriving the school and its students of a tool that would have allowed real cutting-edge training and development of some crackerjack test pilots.” For a critique of Yeager’s version of what occurred during his December 1963 flight in the NF-104A, see “Yeager’s View, in Review,” at NF104.com. On this Web site, the views of Smith, Haynes, and Hoey are all expressed.

  * In response to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Armstrong has said: “I haven’t read the book critically. I did see the movie. I thought it was very good filmmaking but terrible history: the wrong people working on the wrong projects at the wrong times. It bears no resemblance whatever to what actually was going on.”

  * Besides twice flying the X-1B as part of the reaction-control research, Armstrong sought a possible fix to a problem known as aileron “buzz.” This was a dangerously rapid vibration of an aileron (considered a type of flutter) that occurred especially at transonic speeds. Neil’s X-1B flights involved fitting peculiarly shaped wedges on the ailerons to see if they might solve the buzz problem.

  * Grace Walker, for one, has always wondered whether there might have been an environmental factor involved in the death of Karen Armstrong: “There has been any number of brain tumors out in that valley. There was a family up in the hills near where Janet and Neil lived that had two children die of brain tumors. In 1951, when we came to Edwards, the government was still doing a lot of aboveground atomic testing in Nevada. When it did, a day or so after, we would have these terrible east winds, just blowing dust and dirt. You almost never get an east wind in the desert; it’s usually northwest all the time. I’ve often thought that we probably had atomic fallout lying around on those hills and going into water systems all over. I think someone told me that Antelope Valley Hospital did a study on brain tumors in the area and could not find any connection. But I wouldn’t be surprised.” GWW to author, Reedley, CA, Dec. 14, 2002, transcript, p. 10.

  From its establishment by President Truman in 1951 until its closing in 1992, the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a Rhode Island–sized testing ground northwest of Las Vegas, conducted the majority of America’s nuclear weapons tests. More than nine hundred atomic explosions took place at the NTS, the great majority of them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of the early detonations occurred aboveground and resulted in some devastating health effects on “downwinders.” Due to weather patterns, most of the fallout landed, not to the southwest of the testing ground, in the direction of the Antelope Valley, but to the northeast, in northern Nevada and in western Utah. The NTS was bounded on three sides by Nellis AFB, an airfield into which Armstrong occasionally flew while he worked at Edwards. The influence of any nuclear fallout causing higher cancer rates in the Antelope Valley has never been specifically studied.

  * Forty-six-year-old Rick Armstrong stated in September 2003 that he recalls “very little” about his sister Karen, whose death was “a closed subject.” Asked specifically if Karen’s death was a taboo subject in the family, Rick responded: “It wasn’t stated that way. It just wasn’t addressed.” Was it just too painful to remember? “I think it must be.” Rick Armstrong to author, Cincinnati, OH, Sept. 22, 2003, pp. 4–5.

  * In a letter published in Air & Space Smithsonian in 2003, William G. Cowdin, former program manager for the Dyna-Soar booster rocket maker Aerojet-General in Sacramento, Calif., reported an alleged conversation he had with Armstrong about Dyna-Soar abort procedure: “At that time there was debate as to whether a pilot could react fast enough to prevent a catastrophic event, or whether automatic sensors should be included in the design. Neil’s response to me was ‘Give me a stick and throttle and I will fly the SOB.’” William G. Cowdin, Burbank, Calif., “Hidden Figures of High Society,” Air & Space Smithsonian 17 (Feb./Mar. 2003): 12. When shown this letter to the editor, Armstrong responded: “I am EXTREMELY skeptical about this quote. Dyna-Soar did not have a throttle and I am not prone to make that sort of statement in any circumstance. Perhaps someone else made such a statement.” NAA: e-mail to author, Feb. 18, 2003.

  * Armstrong recalls his X-5 incident: “My checkout pilot was Jack McKay, and he explained that they often had trouble getting the nose gear to lock up. So, after takeoff, when retracting the gear, you were advised to nose over and go to about half a g. That would help get the nose gear up in place, due to less download on the gear. So I attempted to do it, but it didn’t seem to be locking up. In the meantime, I was nosing over, getting in a nose-down position and, of course, the aircraft was speeding up, and I suspect that I actually ‘oversped’ the gear-limit speed, knocking the fairing door off. I never got the indication that the gear was completely retracted, so I put back down and wasn’t able to conduct my flight plan…. I never got a chance to fly the airplane again. They decided it was at the end of its research lifetime.” NAA to author, Cincinnati, OH, Nov. 26, 2002, transcript, p. 7.

  * Even a casual reading of the different versions of the Armstrong story that General Yeager has told over the years shows a number of basic errors and inaccuracies. For example, in his 1985 autobiography, Yeager stated that the incident occurred during the NACA period, which ended in 1958; then in an interview with him conducted by the Academy of Achievement’s Museum of Living History in 1991, Yeager said it took place “around 1965.” Clearly, General Yeager’s sense of time and chronology is not good, as many of the events discussed in his autobiography reveal. Just before the section of the book in which he tells the story of the flight to Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Yeager talks about a conversation with Paul Bikle and Bikle’s reaction to Scott Crossfield’s infamous F-100A collision with a hangar wall at Edwards, which took place in September 1954. The trouble with Yeager’s story—in which he relates that while the sonic wall had been his, the hangar walls were Crossfield’s—is that the incident occurred several years before Bikle came to the Flight Research Center. Bikle arrived at the FRC in September 1959, five years later.

  * Yeager also overlooked the fact that several of the NACA test pilots—Butchart, Walker, McKay, as well as Armstrong—had distinguished combat records.

  * In his autobiographic
al At the Edge of Space, Milt Thompson detailed the findings of the “Nellis Affair” investigation board as they pertained to Armstrong’s original accident and its aftermath: “On initial touchdown, the distance between the two main gear tires was less than it should have been with the gear fully down and locked. As the aircraft continued to settle, the tire tracks began to merge. The weight of the aircraft was forcing the gear down before landing gear green lights came on. [Armstrong] immediately applied power to abort the landing and get airborne. For what must have seemed like hours, the aircraft continued to settle before it began to rise. In this few seconds of actual time, the aircraft continued to settle far enough to allow the ventral fin and landing gear doors to contact the lake bed. The ventral, which contained the radio antenna, was damaged and the door actuator was broken on one door. This allowed the utility hydraulic fluid to escape, deactivating that system. One other result of the ground contact was the release of the emergency arresting gear hook. [Armstrong] managed to get the airplane started uphill before the fuselage struck the lake bed. As [he] struggled into the air, he realized he had damaged the aircraft and was losing hydraulic fluid, so he headed to the nearest airfield, which happened to be Nellis. He attempted to contact Nellis to request landing instructions, but received no response due to the damaged radio antenna. He then entered the traffic pattern and made a pass down the runway wagging his wings to indicate radio failure. He turned downwind and set up for his landing approach not realizing that his arresting hook was down and, as a result, he engaged the arresting gear in an abnormal manner shortly after the touchdown.” At the Edge of Space, p. 115.