QUIET CIVILIAN

A year before Robert McNamara finally axed the Dyna-Soar, Neil Alden Armstrong’s test-piloting career took a different turn. . . one that would someday guide him to the lunar surface. Armstrong’s life was one of movement. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, of Scots-Irish and German descent, on 5 August 1930, his father was a government worker and the family moved around the state for many years: from Warren to Jefferson to Moulton to St Mary’s, finally settling permanently in Wapakoneta in 1944. By this time, Armstrong was an active member of his local Boy Scout group and his mind was filled with dreams of flying. ‘‘I began to focus on aviation probably at age eight or nine,’’ he told NASA’s oral history project in 2001, ‘‘and [was] inspired by what I’d read and seen. My intention was to be an aircraft designer. I later went into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane.’’

When Armstrong enrolled at Purdue University in 1947 to begin an aeronautical engineering degree, he became only the second member of the family to undergo higher study and famously had learned to fly before he could drive. (Years later, he recalled first flying solo aged just 16. Alas, his early logbook entries were lost in a fire at his Houston home in 1964.) Under the provisions of the Holloway Plan, Armstrong committed himself to four years of paid education in return for three years of naval service and a final two years at university. He was summoned to active military duty in January 1949, reporting to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for flight training. Over the next 18 months, Armstrong qualified to land aboard the aircraft carriers Cabot and Wright. A few days after his 20th birthday, he was officially classified as a fully-fledged naval aviator.

His initial assignments were to Naval Air Station San Diego, then to Fighter Squadron 51, during which time he made his first flight in an F-9F Panther – “a very solid airplane” – and later landed his first jet on an aircraft carrier. By late summer in 1951, Armstrong had been detailed to the Korean theatre and would fly 78 missions in total. His first taste of action came only days after arrival, whilst serving as an escort for a photographic reconnaissance aircraft over Songjin. Shortly thereafter, whilst making a low-altitude bombing run, his Panther encountered heavy gunfire and snagged an anti-aircraft cable. “If you’re going fast,” he said later, “a cable will make a very good knife.’’ Armstrong somehow managed to nurse his crippled jet back over friendly territory, but the damage was of such severity (a sheared-off wing and a lost aileron) that he could not make a safe landing and had to eject. Instead of a water rescue, high winds forced his ejection seat over land, close to Pohang Airport, and he was picked up by a jeep driven by an old flight school roommate, Goodell Warren.

By the time Armstrong left naval service in August 1952, he had been awarded the Air Medal, a Gold Star and the Korean Service Medal and Engagement Star. For the next eight years, however, he remained a junior lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. After Korea and his departure from the regular Navy, Armstrong completed his degree at Purdue in 1955, gaining coveted admission to the Phi Delta Theta and Kappa Kappa Psi fraternities and meeting his future wife, home economics student Janet Shearon. They were married in January 1956 and their union would endure for almost four decades, producing three children, one of whom – a daughter, Karen – tragically died in her infancy.

Armstrong’s aviation career, meanwhile, expanded into experimental piloting when he joined NACA, the forerunner of NASA, and was initially based at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. Whilst there, he participated in the evaluation of new anti-icing aircraft systems and high-Mach – number heat-transfer measurements, before moving to the High Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base in California to fly chase on drops of experimental aircraft. There, aboard the F-100 Super Sabre, he flew supersonically for the first time. On one occasion, flying with Stan Butchart in a B-29 Stratofortress, Armstrong was directed to airdrop a Douglas-built Skyrocket supersonic research vehicle. Upon reaching altitude, however, one of the B-29’s four engines shut down and its propellor began windmilling in the airstream. Immediately after airdropping the Skyrocket, the propellor disintegrated, its debris effectively disabling two more engines. Butchart and Armstrong were forced to land the behemoth B-29 using the sole remaining engine.

His first flight in a rocket-propelled aircraft came in August 1957 aboard the Bell X-1B, reaching 18.3 km, and three years later he completed the first of seven missions aboard North American’s famous X-15, to the very edge of space. On one of these flights, in April 1962, just a few months before joining NASA’s astronaut corps, he reached an altitude of 63 km. However, during descent, he held up the aircraft’s nose for too long and the X-15 literally ‘bounced’ off the atmosphere and overshot the landing site by some 70 km, but he returned and achieved a safe touchdown. Although he was not one of the handful of X-15 pilots who actually reached space, exceeding 80 km altitude, Armstrong’s abilities in the rocket aircraft have been widely praised. The late NASA research flier Milt Thompson called him ‘‘the most technically capable’’ X-15 pilot.

In November I960, by now flying for NASA as a civilian research pilot, Armstrong was chosen for the Dyna-Soar effort, ultimately leaving the project in the summer of 1962 as the selection process for the second group of astronauts got underway. At around the same time, he last flew the X-15, achieving a peak velocity of Mach 5.74. When his name was announced by NASA in September, he became one of only two civilian astronauts. Although Deke Slayton later wrote that nobody pressured him to hire civilians, fellow selectee Jim Lovell felt that Armstrong’s extensive flying history within NACA and NASA rendered him a likely choice to make the final cut. In fact, Armstrong’s application arrived a week after the 1 June 1962 deadline, but, according to Flight Crew Operations assistant director Dick Day, ‘‘he was so far and away the best qualified… [that] we wanted him in’’.

After admission into the New Nine, Armstrong came to be regarded as by far the quietest and most thoughtful. ‘‘When he said something,’’ recalled Frank Borman, ‘‘it was worth listening to.’’ His Apollo 11 crewmates Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin would both characterise his nature as ‘‘reserved’’ and Dave Scott, the man who would fly with him aboard Gemini VIII, described him as ‘‘cool, calm and energised’’, who never operated in a frantic manner, but who could identify and resolve problems quickly, efficiently and smartly. All of these qualities would prove vital on his first spaceflight, when he would come close to losing his life.