First Man

The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

James R. Hansen

The Authorized Biography

ISBN 13-978-0-7432-5631-5

Read: 2007 March 11 through 2008 June

Reviewed: 2008 July 14

One day a couple of years ago, James Hansen came to JPL to promote his new book, the authorized biography of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Although I have plenty of unread books on a “good intentions” stack, this was obviously a “must have.”

This was one of the few books I took to the month with mother for her bi-lateral knee replacement but I didn’t start reading it until the flight home on March 11, 2007.

Much of what is thought important in our world today really isn’t very, but I’m convinced that when the history of the 20^th century is written from the year 3000, the names Gagarin and Armstrong will be among the very few worth keeping in the survey. I’m not sure which of those will be most important, but suspect it might be Armstrong.

Neil Armstrong is possibly the most introverted public figure ever. He makes me look gregarious by comparison. And yet, he was one of the dozen or so men, engineers and pilots, who rated a shot at mankind’s first interplanetary flight. In nine trips with six landings, 24 individuals escaped earth’s gravity, risking certain death from any of a myriad possible unrecoverable equipment malfunctions, and twelve walked on another world. All of them deserve equal celebrity, including a few who did not make it, like Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee who died in what is now called Apollo I. Most of them have biographies and other honors, but, pretty much by luck of the draw as the flight program progressed, Armstrong commanded the first mission to actually land on another world, performed the first landing, and was the First Man to step out on the surface. My own life was and is significantly affected by these events. I work at JPL because it is the closest I can get to going to the other planets. My greatest thrill as a radio amateur is bouncing signals off the moon, and I’m working on going further out. After much self-examination, I just changed jobs to one in which I will help send a scientific mission to the moon.

All of this was in me back in grade school. The only week I enjoyed in first grade was the unit on the planets. In second grade I was conceiving scale models of the solar system and discovering just how big space really is. And in my formative pubescent years, a handful of men traveled to the moon, making the alarmingly risky endeavor look nearly routine… mostly.

To date, to have traveled to the moon, one needs to have been a white male American born in the late 1920s or 1930s. One needs to have been a military pilot then a test pilot during America’s heady early days of missiles and supersonic craft. One needs to have lived through all this excitement. Armstrong was a natural, captivated pilot, like my dad was. He grew up in the Midwest back when a fairly level grass field could be an airport and when the Aeronca Champion was a fairly common airplane to learn to fly. Neil Armstrong learned to fly such an airplane, a tandem tail dragger with a stalling speed barely above 30 knots. I know all this because my dad taught me to fly much the same plane just a few years after Armstrong’s walk on the moon. I had a student pilot’s license but, too young for a driver’s license, had to ride my bike to the airport, so my own legend goes. And so did the First Man. But in the end he did more with his flying career than I did.

Armstrong flew combat in Korea off the Essex and avoided death in those theaters sometimes through luck and sometimes through the skill others. This book details his training in great documentary detail and his work as a naval aviator, to the extent that the information can be recovered or remembered.

This is the source of the naval wisdom, “a good carrier landing is one from which you can walk away. A great carrier landing is one after which you can use the aircraft again.”

Dad told me a zillion times, “A good landing is one that you walk away from” but it was always clear that if you bent up the wheel fairings, the aircraft owner would not be pleased.

Following combat duty, Armstrong got an engineering degree at Purdue and got into high performance flight testing and simulation among the test pilots at Edwards, flying the X-15 several times. There are many legends and stories that the author has gone to some length to clarify or make accurate, for instance, the time that Neil may have nearly buzzed the Rose Bowl in the X-15 or the one time that Chuck Yeager of “first to break the sound barrier” fame and Neil Armstrong flew together and got their plane stuck in the mud and had to be rescued. Yeager and Armstrong tell the story differently, and Hansen dutifully passes along both versions.

Of course, there is a lot of detail about Armstrong’s personal life, his parents, brother and sister, wife, and children. The biographer makes much of Neil’s daughter Karen’s early death at age two. Later, after retiring from NASA and other positions, Neil’s divorce from Janet and later marriage to Carol, and even a heart attack on the ski slopes are also addressed, usually in less detail.

What would interest a space nut would be the detailed descriptions of Neil’s two spaceflights, Gemini VIII with David Scott and Apollo XI with Mike Collins (whose biography I’ve also read, but so long ago that I didn’t review it) and Buzz Aldrin (whom I’ve met!).

Gemini 8 was the first successful rendezvous and docking in the manned march to the moon space program but the mission had to be cut short due to serious tumbling caused by a malfunctioning thruster. Commander Armstrong managed to regain control of the craft by activating the re-entry reaction control system. Flight rules dictated that once that system was activated, recovery had to be as soon as possible. They orbited for a few more hours and were recovered safely in the Pacific off of Japan, but everyone involved in the project was disappointed.

Neil is famous for his lack of usual test-pilot bravado. The story is told that when he ejected from the malfunctioning “flying bedstead” (lunar landing trainer), he was found in the next hour at his desk doing the paperwork, not out at the water cooler boasting to the other fighter jocks about his near-death experience!

Having just this January celebrated the successful launch of Explorer I, America’s first satellite, we will spend the next decade or so having the 50^th anniversaries of many of the seminal achievements of the early space program, in particular, the race to the moon. As it turned out in the flight development program, Apollo XI was the first landing attempt, but any of the men who commanded any of the early Apollo missions basically had a shot at it. Such other famous names as Borman, Lovell, Stafford, Young, or even Al Shepherd, the first American to ride a rocket, could have been first. It just happened that Neil’s flight came up when they thought they were ready to give it a try. Apollo X with Cernan, Stafford, and Young, had gone to the moon, detached the lunar module, and flown down to 50,000 feet, from which terminal descent would begin, proving that everything, apart from the landing itself, could be done successfully. In his talk at JPL, Hansen showed pictures of the men who might have been First Man. He then showed Gus Grissom and discussed how Deke Slayton, grounded astronaut, head of the astronaut office, and the one who made the flight assignments, was close to all of the original seven and may well have had Gus in mind to command the first lunar landing attempt, had he not died in the Apollo I fire.

The crew of Apollo XI is often referred to as “amiable strangers.” They were not close personally as some other crews were, but they worked well together. According to legend, Buzz was something of a problem. Hansen said in his talk (not in the book) that it had been offered to Neil that if he had any trouble, he could have another lunar module pilot. Buzz was known as Dr. Rendezvous and had done his PhD in lunar orbit Rendezvous technique, so in that way he was the best possible choice for the job, but there were personality issues. Neil thought it would be OK to keep Buzz. The irony of this was that it might have been Jim Lovell’s chance to walk on the moon. He is the only astronaut to have gone twice (Apollo’s VIII and XIII) but not land.

I learned something else interesting here. I had always assumed that the Command Module pilot, Collins in this case, was third in command, because the place he was going was less difficult, but of course this was not true. He was second in command of the overall mission, with the Lunar Module pilot, Aldrin in this case, being third. This was because Micheal was left with the Command Module by himself, and would have taken over the mission and returned to earth alone had Neil and Buzz not returned from the surface. In a sense it doesn’t really matter. Success was not possible without all three fully functioning crew members and while the commander was in command, second would hardly have much commanding to do. If Collins had returned alone, his rank would not have mattered.

There was considerable discussion before and after Apollo XI about who would be the first out. Even years after the mission Buzz was still upset about it. From the point of view of this biographer (who refers to but is not writing Aldrin’s own biography) Buzz had a domineering, status-oriented father, leading to ego problems of his own. Hansen deals with this to the extent that he must. Indeed, he deals with many hangers-on from all times in life and other myths about First Man that, of necessity, would have arisen around any person of such import in history. Personally I agree with Collins. Aldrin got to walk on the moon at all. How many can say that?

Ironically, it wasn’t the first steps that even counted to Neil, as they did to the rest of the world. His thoughts about what to say there, the “Small step for a man, giant leap for mankind” words, were not the most important to him. As a former naval aviator, what was important to Neil was the landing. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” That was what he thought carefully about. And a great landing it was.

Reading every detail of the flight, the launch, the trip out, the insertion into lunar orbit, the undocking, the descent, and the final approach down to the last hair raising seconds when, with the gauge on “E” they came down among boulders and flying dust and made a clean landing on the surface, all this was thrilling to me. Questions such as “how did those guys sleep (if they did at all)?” are addressed. Also, it had not occurred to me before how much danger still lay ahead. The lift off and ascent, the rendezvous and docking, the flight back, and recovery. The back story behind the 1201 and 1202 overrides, and a certain pre-flight simulation that may well have saved the mission, are also intriguing.

And there are the oddities. Somehow the flight plan did not include any good pictures of Neil Armstrong on the moon. Some consider this the greatest public relations blunder of the 20^th century. All of the pictures that there are extant are published in this book.

Apollo flights were all magnificent feats of engineering and flight skill. Little things went wrong, but no big ones. Any big ones, like anything going wrong during ascent, would have been fatal and history would have been quite different.

In this context, and having seen a few other documentaries recently, it has occurred to me that the real unsung heroes of Apollo were the crew of Apollo VIII, Boreman, Anders, and Lovell. These were the first men to go to the moon, to escape earth for what could have been forever, to stay there for a day, and to return … safely, though with some sea-sickness.

Like the military, NASA does not prepare for, and is not even conscious of issues of life after fame. Once out of quarantine, the heroes of Apollo XI were on public display nearly continuously from then on. Like John Glenn, Neil could not be flown again. It was too risky to lose such a hero. He was put in charge of a branch of NASA, but soon retired to private life and university teaching, first at Cincinnati. Then there is the “dark side” of the moon. The divorce is, of course mentioned, but not discussed in great detail. His children and second wife are touched upon, appropriately. Armstrong served on the Challenger investigation board, but not the Columbia. The fact that he has to maintain a staff just to handle all the requests for autographs, pictures, things taken to the moon, other such artifacts, and even to deal with moon hoaxers, is, sadly, predictable in our culture.

What is most profound that I’ve picked up from First Man is his attitude about science and engineering, a welcome surprise. At JPL, and elsewhere, there is often an attitude that it’s all about the science and therefore the scientists are most important. Engineers are important too, but only as the means to deliver the science. This is not my personal attitude, but it makes working as an engineer challenging.

When Neil Armstrong was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 (the year I was graduating from Baylor as a piano major), he said something profound which I must internalize, “Science is about what is; engineering is about what can be.” (My emphasis.)

Indeed, the future comes to us through engineering, that is, applied science. Apart from application, what value is there, after all?