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

Unlike the apocryphal stories told by Wapakonetans Jacob Zint and John Crites—the truthfulness of which Armstrong categorically denies—Neil qualifies his alleged statement to his VF-51 mates.

His second option, and the one he took, was to become an experimental test pilot, as epitomized by the fledgling Society of Experimental Test Pilots, committing in 1955 “to assist in the development of superior aircraft.”

Pinkel could not offer Armstrong much money, but rather promised him the excitement and personal satisfaction inherent in the world of aeronautical research.

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.

“I used to get up there,” Janet remembers, “and watch the early X-15 flights. You could see the X-15 when it dropped because it left a separate contrail [from the B-52 launch aircraft]..."

Cernan met Janet through Smith: “She was a young, attractive coed, very effervescent, very pleasant, very nice....She was a sorority girl. She was all the right things.”

“My philosophy was, ‘Well, I’ll have years to get to know him.’ I thought he was a very steadfast person. He was good-looking. He had a good sense of humor. He was fun to be with. He was older. He had a better sense of maturity than a lot of the boys I dated, and I had dated a lot of boys on campus.”

There were no bedrooms per se, just a room with four bunks.

With Neil flying the plane and Butchart “kind of scratching my head thinking about what was going on,” the maverick propeller came back up to full speed, matching and then even exceeding the rpm’s of the other props.

But in gaining speed by nosing over, the runaway prop spun just that much faster, increasing its likelihood of busting loose according to an altogether predictable law of physics known as centripetal disintegration.

Applying the area rule by pinching the waist of its fuselage measurably improved the F-102’s speed and overall performance even with approximately the same engine thrust.

Besides the F-51 Mustang and the aforementioned Century series fighters, Armstrong logged time in the venerable T-33 “T-Bird,” a two-seater derivative of the F-80 Shooting Star fighter; North American’s F-86E Sabre; McDonnell’s F4H Phantom; Douglas F5D-1 Skylancer; and Boeing’s KC-135 Stratotanker.

Some pilots who weren’t engineers were not nearly as impressed with Armstrong’s flying. Chuck Yeager was the most prominent detractor, joined by William J. “Pete” Knight, Armstrong’s colleague on the X-15.

According to Kraft, key people on the astronaut selection board, notably NACA veterans Robert R. Gilruth, Walter Williams, and Dick Day, felt even more partisan in Armstrong’s favor, especially Williams and Day.

The rarefied conditions into which Armstrong “zoomed” in his sleek fighter jet were far closer to those on the Martian surface than anything down on Earth.

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 for those enthusiasts for whom aeronautics still meant piloted, winged airplanes, the ambition was to design a rocket-powered vehicle to take men and cargo on hyperfast flights across global distances, on trajectories that, at their apex, flew out into space.

In landing the aircraft, his nose landing gear “failed.” According to Neil’s official report, he “inadvertently touched down at 170 KIAS [Knots Indicated Airspeed], nose wheel first.”

On September 17, 1959, less than four years since the project’s inception, Scott Crossfield took the most complicated and radically new aircraft design ever conceived through the paces of its first powered flight.

In June 1959, in the X-15’s very first free flight, Crossfield’s landing was a little touchy due to a pitch damper failure and pilot-induced oscillation.

So we took ergonomic measurements of the motions of the hand, and it turned out that the hinge points for one person won’t be the same for another.

I was involved in the development of this high-speed range, or ‘High Range,’ and the combination of radar, communications, and telemetry that would be required to get data quickly, accurately, and in a minimum amount of time.

Armstrong answered teasingly, “Thanks, Dad,” his humorous moniker for the thirty-nine-year-old Walker, nine years his senior.

Seattle, the state of Washington’s Emerald City, can in early June be downright blissful: fresh air, golden sunshine, azure skies, verdant landscapes.

I wanted to do something overt, but I didn’t feel Neil would consider it acceptable—putting hands on Karen or saying a prayer or something.

Grace Walker also remembered Neil being very stoic and showing little emotion, in contrast to Janet, who was visibly shaken.

Still, one wonders about the lasting effects of Karen’s death upon Neil and Janet Armstrong, both individually and upon their marriage, even though that marriage lasted another thirty-two years, until a divorce (initiated by Janet on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”) sent them on their separate ways in the early 1990s.

The Sputnik crisis quickly led to, among other things, the formal abolition of the NACA and its amelioration by NASA, from the start a much higher-profile organization.

Unlike Chuck Yeager and other like-minded test pilots, Armstrong did not denigrate the Mercury astronauts as “Spam in a can”...

A significantly higher rate of fatalities in the world of flight test supports Armstrong’s contention.

At Patuxent River, Lieutenant Pete Conrad, in the words of author Tom Wolfe, wore “his great dark sepulchral bridge coat” to more funerals than most members of his Princeton graduating class of 1953 wore their tuxedos.

With Major Daniels, LCDR Petersen, and Major Rushworth flying chase, Armstrong brought the X-15-3 down gingerly onto Rogers Dry Lake just southwest of Boron.

“Before lighting the engine, or attempting to light the engine, I’m sure that some malfunction lights lit up,” Armstrong recalled in his postflight debriefing later that day, “but I did not see any light. All I saw was the igniter pressure go to zero and silence.”

Prior to landing, the ventral fin needed to be jettisoned by triggering explosive bolts.

“I think it was a lax condition, not doing something wrong, but not paying attention to what was going on. Because certainly after you reenter the atmosphere, you can, if you don’t get the nose down and keep the airplane from climbing again, you can climb pretty fast and get back out into where you can’t turn too well...I think it was just a laxity, not in Neil’s ability or dedication, but just in his focus.”

Yeager, who remembers being treated with this sort of condescension, called the NACA pilots “the most arrogant bunch” at Edwards...

The “Nellis Affair,” as it came to be known in the unwritten annals of Mojave Desert aviation, did not end there.

“Bikle was very pragmatic. He was good at correcting you when he thought you were off base, but he was never disagreeable in the process. He was a fun-loving guy and he tended to joke more than he talked when he was criticizing you. He’d rather make fun of you than make light of you.”

The day after the debacle in Nevada, Armstrong left on what turned out to be a two-week trip to Seattle.

Two months after arriving in Houston, Day also found himself, thanks to his former boss at Edwards, Walter Williams, not just a member of the selection panel for the second group of astronauts but the panel’s ad hoc secretary.

Given the emphasis that Kraft, Donlan, and others placed on background and verbal checks, it is surprising that individuals in leadership positions in Houston did not know about Neil’s personal situation—not that it would have changed their thinking about the strength of his credentials for astronaut selection one iota.

He wants to go back and get in the fray.

One of the show’s attractions was the sophisticated but playful camaraderie among the contestants and host Garry Moore’s genial and gracious demeanor.

“He came through Wisconsin for a short visit around the Fourth of July,” June recounts, “and he said to me, ‘I’m on my way to Texas. I’m taking a couple tests.’ He was kind of flippant about it, ‘taking a couple tests.’ Next thing, I hear the announcement he’s been chosen as an astronaut!”

He spent the second week of June at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ostensibly taking his annual NASA test pilot’s physical but with the results of certain tests being relayed—unbeknownst to him—back to the Manned Spacecraft Center for evaluation as part of the astronaut selection process.