First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong: Part Five

Triggering that almost metaphysical transformation was a turbulent confluence of dramatic geopolitical events in the spring of 1961 that undermined respect for the fledgling presidency of John F. Kennedy and provoked Kennedy into making his astonishing commitment to a manned Moon landing.

Facing intense criticism for what many around the world called an indefensible exercise in intervention, the Kennedy administration could do little but agonize over its complicity in the misguided attack.

Though Kennedy’s reticent record on space dated back to his days in the U.S. Senate, the president saw in NASA and its astronauts a means to a political end.

With these historic words, expressed before a joint session of Congress on Thursday morning, May 25, 1961, the dynamic forty-three-year-old president threw down the gauntlet...

NASA felt that its new astronauts with little experience with the sophistications of orbital mechanics or the differences between aircraft and spacecraft needed a quick primer.

In Operations Familiarization, they toured all pertinent launch facilities and studied the rigorous prelaunch procedures at Cape Canaveral and the new Mission Control Center in Houston.

Contingency Training involved not only desert and jungle survival schools but also learning how to use ejection seats and parachutes.

“That is really understandable,” Armstrong modestly explains, “because simulators were in their infancy in those times. Up until the time I got to Edwards, the only simulator experience I had—and perhaps the same with a lot of my contemporaries—was in the Link trainer where you learned to fly instruments. That was a very rudimentary, primitive state..."

In that one day, Neil made five presentations. Exhausted by the incessant gladhanding and social conversation much more so than by giving his technical talks, he flew back to Houston from Des Moines early the next morning.

“Neil wasn’t an expansive guy,” Bill Anders offered.

You mostly had to wait for Neil to make a decision and often you wouldn’t have a clue as to what was going on in his head in the meantime. You just couldn’t see through him. But even that opaque quality helped make him a great commander.

Because Al Shepard suffered from a chronic inner-ear problem known as Meniere’s syndrome that caused episodic vertigo (diagnosed back in August 1963), Slayton moved Grissom from backup to prime commander, and Gus picked John Young as his new mate.

Slayton’s standard practice was to solicit the commander’s input about potential crew members.

This third round of astronaut selection set a slightly more stringent age requirement (thirty-four years old rather than thirty-five).

Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. had just finished a doctorate in astronautics at MIT. His dissertation on orbital rendezvous concerned an essential maneuver for the Moon landing.

As Mike Collins explains, "'Eight days or bust’ was their motto, and a covered wagon the motif of their crew patch.”

Getting ready for the backup role in Gemini V did not preclude Armstrong from serving in a supporting role in Gemini III, a flight made by Gus Grissom and John Young in the spacecraft Molly Brown, named by Gus Grissom after the heroine of the Broadway play The Unsinkable Molly Brown, in wry deference to Grissom’s own Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, which sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after splashdown in the second manned Mercury flight.

Happily, he played no part in the postflight hubbub provoked by astronaut John Young when he admitted in a news conference that he had smuggled a corned beef sandwich into the spacecraft, one that Wally Schirra had bought for him the night before the launch at Wolfie’s, a local Cape deli.

Apollo flights, with their improved computer capabilities, required crew members to have “a good visual representation” to perform sextant sightings and navigational computations involving all thirty-six stars being used as the basis for NASA’s celestial navigational system.

Previous spacecraft had relied on batteries, which would be too cumbersome and heavy given the amount of electronics the more advanced spacecraft were now carrying.

Also promising to occupy the crew during their scheduled seventy-hour, fifty-five-orbit flight were onboard experiments involving zodiacal light photography, frog egg growth, synoptic terrain photography, nuclear emulsion, and atmospheric cloud spectrophotography.

Also promising to occupy the crew during their scheduled seventy-hour, fifty-five-orbit flight were onboard experiments involving zodiacal light photography, frog egg growth, synoptic terrain photography, nuclear emulsion, and atmospheric cloud spectrophotography.

Its orbit is as follows: 162 nautical miles apogee and 156 miles perigee. This is as close as we could hope with an unmanned vehicle.

Its orbit is as follows: 162 nautical miles apogee and 156 miles perigee. This is as close as we could hope with an unmanned vehicle.

Even with what was then the most current computer technology, it was incumbent on the mission planners to reduce the complexities of rendezvous.

The transfer arc in which Gemini VIII had been moving for the past couple of hours in order to catch up with the Agena had been elliptical, the pathway that was dictated, as Johannes Kepler explained, by the gravitational field of one body.

With the Agena located ten degrees above Gemini VIII, Armstrong needed to align the inertial platform once again, in preparation for one of his last translation maneuvers. In it Neil would pitch up the spacecraft’s nose some thirty degrees and cant the vehicle roughly seventeen degrees to the left.

We had to stay in the same orbit as the Agena, because if we went astray by even just a little bit, the errors propagated.

According to Armstrong, “The rate of rotation kept increasing until it reached the point where the motions began to couple. In other words, the problem became not just a precariously high rate of roll but also the coupling of pitch and yaw,” in engineering terms, the same sort of control dilemma as the inertial roll coupling that had so plagued the design of early supersonic aircraft.

As Gemini VIII came into daylight, “We appeared to be dropping at a prodigious rate,” Neil recalls.

Most NASA people felt that Armstrong and Scott deserved the approbation, though Walt Cunningham would later issue a disgruntled statement: “Of course, Neil and Dave received the usual medals...Scott’s career as the fair-haired boy of the third group of astronauts was unaffected. Both performed well over the remainder of their careers, but at the same time their very progress ignored the fact that their peers—and many others at the space center—felt they had botched their first mission.”

Among the gifts he received during the ceremonies was a small statue of a lion, a leather attaché case, a silver tray, and life memberships in the Elks Lodge and local senior citizens club.

The prodigal son termed the homecoming “magnificent” and repeatedly told the crowds that the reception was “more than I deserve.”

For Viola, the happy outcome of her son’s Gemini VIII flight was, as always, a vindication of her Christian faith.

In its bureaucratic paternalism, NASA equated keeping the wives away from the launch with “protecting” them.

Right in her living room sat a ubiquitous Life magazine photographer.

“Charlie was a very affable fellow,” Neil relates.

According to Neil, “We were looking for property in the area to the east of Clear Lake, down toward Seabrook. I don’t remember who found the lots in El Lago, but Ed White and I both liked the area and we bought three contiguous lots and split the middle one in half so that we each had a lot and a half to build our house on.”

Preferring a site on the water, Elliot See and his wife Marilyn built on Timber Cove, an estuary that separated them from El Lago.

Several of the firemen stayed on for a few more hours, helping to carry anything that was salvageable over to the Whites’ yard and carport.

Privately, Janet and many of the other wives also disliked the patronizing attitude of NASA leadership.

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.

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.

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.

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.