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

Until Neil became deputy associate administrator for aeronautics, no one at NASA Headquarters had given the radical concept of flying an airplane electronically (and with only one of its inputs being the pilot’s controls) much credence.

The demise of the American SST had no bearing on Neil’s decision, in August 1971, to resign from NASA for a teaching post at the University of Cincinnati.

I didn’t want to leave NASA precipitously, though it was never my intention to be in that bureaucracy job that long.

To some colleagues, including Dr. Ron Houston, the head of the newly organized Institute of Applied Interdisciplinary Research, which subsumed the Institute of Engineering and Medicine in 1978 with Neil as its associate director, Armstrong’s leaving was a mystery: “He didn’t even say why he was leaving.”

In January 1979 Neil, after turning down any number of lucrative promotional offers, agreed to become a national spokesperson for the Chrysler Corporation.

In the Chrysler case, they were under severe attack and in financial difficulty, but they had been perhaps the preeminent engineering leader in automotive products in the United States, just very impressive.

If it had not been for Armstrong’s record of integrity, skeptics may have questioned the propriety of Neil’s joining Thiokol, given that he had served as vice chair of the Rogers Commission that had investigated the Challenger accident.

“We were this fragile entity recovering from the Challenger accident. Just the fact that Neil joined our board and loaned us his good name and reputation did an awful lot of good for our credibility in the marketplace with our customers.”

From 1975 to 1977, he cochaired, with Jimmy Doolittle, the Charles A. Lindbergh Memorial Fund, which by the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic flight, in May 1977, raised over $5 million for an endowment fund supporting young scientists, explorers, and conservationists.

I’m not persuaded that either of our current political parties is very right on the education issue. But it’s not politic to express those views to anyone today.

“Mr. Armstrong does not wish to speak to reporters. He does not give exclusives. He does not give out interviews. It would be indiscreet of me to tell you where he is staying at Cape Kennedy while he watches the Moonshot.”

Sometimes I chastise Neil for being too Lindbergh-like.

When he severed the ring finger of his left hand in a freak accident at his Lebanon farm in November 1978, the injury and successful emergency microsurgery (by a special team at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky) inspired a fresh spate of headlines...

The recommendations of the Paine Commission are not today sitting on everyone’s desk as something we remember and emulate.

With the deaths of the Challenger 7, as they came to be known, representing as they did a microcosm of American society, the U.S. space program entered a deep and prolonged period of crisis and depression, obfuscating the dreams of the Paine Commission.

In choosing Rogers as the chair and Armstrong as vice chair, Reagan girded the panel.

He was of a firm opinion—and I certainly agreed with this—that there ought to be one investigation, and that we had to find ways to placate the other constituencies out there that would like to be doing our job—or at least would like to be catching some of the limelight from it.

There was a metallurgist from the National Transportation and Safety Board, Michael L. Marx, who was a great resource for us because metallurgical failures were involved in the burn-through of the Shuttle’s solid rocket booster.

“Could I ask the source of the ice, what percentage was due to the ambient conditions and what was condensation on the vehicle that froze?”

The success of the endeavor will also be dependent on the degrees to which the aerospace community, government, industry, and academia can coalesce their forces and converge on a common goal.

When Scouts get letters from political potentates that have actually been written by staff members and signed by an autopen, perhaps it impresses the individual getting the award and receiving that message, but it’s the wrong message.

There are tales—some more substantiated than others—of dealers or accumulators discovering that Armstrong would reply through the mail with twenty five or thirty autographed photos when a teacher would request signatures for his/her classroom and thus these ‘bad eggs’ began faking educational affiliations.

According to Pearlman, any of these items—index cards the exception—have sold in the past decade for upwards of $10,000, prior ownership, market venue, and the degree of provenance all being influencing factors.

An even more loathsome legal matter concerned the sale of some of Neil’s hair.

Armstrong’s boots, grating on the crisp, dry surface of the Moon, have announced a new theological watershed.

We were getting such a barrage of information, just inundated with questions about this, predominately from the Islamic world but also from the non-Muslim world, the latter of which was saying, ‘This can’t be true, can it?’

We were getting such a barrage of information, just inundated with questions about this, predominately from the Islamic world but also from the non-Muslim world, the latter of which was saying, ‘This can’t be true, can it?’

In spite of the ease with which the story can be debunked, and in spite of various attempts on the Internet (a search for “Armstrong” and “Gorsky” generates 4,000 hits) to expose it for the urban legend that it has become, the story is funny enough that countless people continue to read it and pass it along, no matter its origin.

Even during the time of Apollo 11, some believed that the Moon landings never really took place—that they were a fraud foisted upon the world for political reasons by the U.S. government.

Subsequently, in 2002, NASA commissioned distinguished space writer and veteran UFO debunker James Oberg to write a 30,000-word monograph refuting the notion that the Apollo program was a hoax.

After news of the plan for Oberg’s book hit the papers, however, NASA quickly reversed course, judging that not even a judicious, well-argued refutation could successfully achieve its intended effect.

In the following weeks, the interloper started putting letters and other things in the Armstrongs’ mailbox.

The few puffy clouds over the ski slopes at Snowmass were a meek harbinger of the major blizzard sweeping toward Aspen’s four snowcapped summits that February day in 1991.

The meeting between Neil and Carol in the summer of 1992 was surreptitiously arranged by mutual friends, Paul and Sally Christiansen, at a pre-golf tournament breakfast at their club in suburban Cincinnati.

“Carol turned out to be the greatest,” related Harry Combs. “A humdinger! The fellows in the Conquistadores del Cielo [an elite aerospace group founded in 1937] were just so delighted in the change we all saw in Neil. She just made a new man out of him!”