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

Loquacious Hubert H. Humphrey, the vice president, glibly mingled, whereas Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Averill Harriman, socialized more studiously.

Loquacious Hubert H. Humphrey, the vice president, glibly mingled, whereas Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Averill Harriman, socialized more studiously.

As to why all the brainpower at NASA and in the aerospace industry missed the danger of ground testing the spacecraft in a 100 percent oxygen-rich environment, “Well, it was some bad oversight. We’d been getting away with it for a period of time, as we had tested that way all through the Gemini program, and I guess we just became too complacent.”

The ship leaving for the Moon after Earth orbit rendezvous would be smaller than the battleship-sized Nova, but it would still be a very ponderous stack of machinery to eyeball down to a pinpoint landing.

In the vernacular, people still pronounced the acronym, not as two individual letters, but as if the vowel were still there.

Standing ten feet tall and weighing 3,700 pounds, the LLRV had four aluminum truss legs that spread out across some thirteen feet.

Operating in the lunar mode, the pilot could modulate the angle and thrust of the engine to compensate for aerodynamic drag in all axes.

“The flying volume—180 feet high, 360 feet long, and 42 feet wide—was limiting, but adequate to give pilots a substantive introduction to lunar flight characteristics.”

Armstrong found out just how unforgiving the vexatious machine could be on Monday afternoon, May 6, 1968, just fourteen months before the Apollo 11 landing.

Neil’s reaction to hearing Al Bean’s story is just as circumspect as his behavior in the story itself: “That is true, I did go back to the office. I mean, what are you going to do? It’s one of those sad days when you lose a machine.”

“Gilruth and I were ready to eliminate it completely,” Kraft notes, “but the astronauts were adamant. They wanted the training it offered.”

Gene Matranga puts the capstone on the significance of the landing simulator for the pilot of the first Moon landing: “Psychologically, it didn’t hurt that the LLRV/LLTV was harder to fly than the LM. That pleasant surprise had to bolster any astronaut’s confidence on his way down to the lunar surface.”

Even amid the clamor, criticism, and declining support for the space program, evidenced for more than two years in polling numbers and in congressional votes, the astronauts remained the object of the American public’s adulation.

Also as with Armstrong, the itinerant life of his family did not affect him at all adversely.

By 1956, First Lieutenant Collins was a part of a fighter squadron flying F-86s in Chambley, France, and had gotten to very much like what he was doing. In fighter pilots, he found kindred spirits.

You can be irresponsible and you may get away with it being a fighter pilot; but you most certainly cannot as a test pilot. Fighter pilots can be impetuous; test pilots can’t.

He had served as an aide to General Billy Mitchell, the outspoken and abrasive advocate of a separate U.S. air force who came before army court-martial in 1925.

He even made a few trips by airship, including one memorable crossing of the Atlantic in the famous German zeppelin Hindenburg. (According to Buzz, his father told friends after making the dirigible flight that it was neither safe nor practical.)

Debriefing with the renegade squadron of F-86Fs, something that was customary for a pilot to do after joining up with another formation, Buzz never told anyone else about the foray into Manchuria.

Wrigley, a protégé of Dr. Charles Stark Draper and, like Draper, a specialist on inertial navigation, had serious questions about Buzz’s emphasis on the need for piloting abilities to control spacecraft in precise maneuvers.

Several of his peers started referring to him as “Dr. Rendezvous.” Apt though it was due to his MIT degree, the sobriquet was not meant to be flattering.

As the mission commander, Armstrong began to answer, “I think I can..." then stopped himself in midsentence and turned to Deke Slayton, the director for flight crew operations, and asked plaintively, “You want to take a crack at it?”

Buzz told no one about his preference at the time, other than his wife Joan, because within the astronaut corps declining a flight was “tantamount to sacrilege.”

If Aldrin expected a definitive resolution from Armstrong, he was sadly mistaken. “Neil, who can be enigmatic if he wishes, was just that,” Buzz recalls.

In Return to Earth, Aldrin wrote that Neil, “equivocated a minute or so, then with a coolness I had not known he possessed he said that the decision was quite historical and he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of going first.”

Deke dropped by Buzz’s office to say that it would probably be Neil who would be out first. At least Slayton gave Buzz a more palatable reason for the pecking order.

Neil was also oblivious of any behind-the-scenes campaigning being done on Buzz’s behalf by the intemperate Gene Aldrin.

In his posthumously published 2001 autobiography, Deke!, Slayton states that if Gus Grissom had not been killed in the Apollo fire, he would have chosen Grissom to be the first man on the Moon.

Even if he had known about the behind-the-scenes campaigning by Buzz’s father, “Neil was not the sort that would have gotten into the fray and presented counterarguments. He always rose above internecine warfare of that kind.”

This vital piece of equipment, the EMU, was composed of all the protective apparel and paraphernalia worn during lunar surface work, including suit, helmet, gloves, outer boots, backpack, remote control, hoses, cables, liquid-cooled garment (LCG), outer visor, and so forth.

The assumption was that on the Moon we would encounter tectonic formations principally, or remnants of volcanic and tectonic lava flows, that sort of thing.

“Neil and Buzz continued their discussion far into the night, but the next morning at breakfast neither appeared changed, ruffled, nonplussed, or pissed off, so I assume it was a frank and beneficial discussion, as they say in the State Department. It was the only such outburst in our training cycle.”

Interestingly, this story of the simulation-that-Armstrong-would-not-abort is reminiscent of Neil’s April 1962 flight in the X-15, the one in which his aircraft ballooned up and ended up dangerously over Pasadena. In both cases, Neil was trying to promote technological learning through dialectical experimentation.

Yet the Apollo 11 mission was replete with unknowns, uncertainties, and unexplored risks—some technological, others human.

How would individual astronauts perform in the clutch, during a crisis moment when some instinct or impulse of personality might supersede the rational mind?

Mailer called the restrained jeering at Old Glory “a splash of derision” at the entire Apollo show, already sufficiently American without yet another American flag on display.

That is the objective. There are a number of peripheral secondary objectives including some of those you mentioned early in the question that we hope very highly to achieve in great depth.

We don’t think that’s at all a likely situation. It’s simply a possible one, but at the present time we’re left without recourse should that occur.

It was such seemingly passionless answers to questions about the human dimensions of spaceflight and about the historical and existential meanings of going to the Moon that piqued Norman Mailer’s razor-sharp acumen for disdainful insight.

Mailer continued his dogged pursuit of the puzzle-that-was-Armstrong into the press conference organized exclusively for the magazine writers and beyond that into the studio where NBC filmed its interview of the astronauts.

As the journalists kept pushing hard for the crew of Apollo 11 to disclose personal feelings and emotions, Mailer watched and listened as Armstrong entrenched himself ever deeper in his engineer’s protective cloak, the armor of “a shining knight of technology.”

Neil left them with very few opportunities for discursive follow-ups.

Mailer had read Hamblin’s story when it appeared but dismissed its importance until he heard Armstrong, after a day filled with Neil’s engineer-speak, corroborate that, indeed, as a boy, he had such dreams.

On the one hand, consciously, Armstrong, the archetypal astronaut-engineer, was grounded in the “conventional,” the “practical,” the “technical,” and the “hardworking.”

Yet Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity.