Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (2 page)

No TV pictures were being transmitted from the spacecraft so all the flight controllers had to go on was their telemetry. But this didn't explain why Armstrong was taking so long to come down, nor did Buzz's emotionless reading of the instruments.

'3½ down, 220 feet, 13 forward,' said Buzz, reporting on the lunar module's rate of descent, altitude and velocity.

There was no response from Houston.

'11 forward. Coming down nicely.

'200, 4½ down.

'5½ down.

'160, 6 to 6½ down.

'5½ down, 9 forward. That's good.

'120 feet.

'100 feet, 3½ down, 9 forward. Five per cent.

'OK. 75 feet. And it's looking good. Down a half, 6 forward.'

A curt announcement of '60 seconds' from the ground reminded the crew that soon they must land or attempt to abort. To Armstrong, fuel getting low and time running out were mere parts of an equation. There was no need nor time to discuss them with Buzz. Nor did he say much to Houston, only occasionally pressing the switch that would transmit his words. A man with a cool yet agile mind, Neil's ability to conceal much of it from the world was something the world occasionally found frustrating. It barely mattered to Neil that they were now three miles beyond the ideal landing zone, that communications were patchy and that the fuel was low; what mattered as he searched for a safe spot to land was that there were rocks below. The fuel was a concern, but he believed he had enough to do the job.

Supporting Neil with a constant account of their position, Buzz continued to read aloud from the instruments: '4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. OK. Down a half.'

'30 seconds,' called Mission Control.

With their role on this phase of the mission coming to a close, the flight controllers were now no more than spectators, like everybody else. In truth, nothing needed to be said. It was down to Armstrong.

Chapter 1
THE BRIGHT STUFF

Grasping a grey pistol-grip controller with his right hand, Armstrong guided the lunar module down towards his chosen landing point. By manoeuvring the joystick he was able to fire thrusters mounted on the sides of the spacecraft, allowing him to fly in any given direction. But once moving, the lunar module would keep going until the opposite thruster was fired, which meant that maintaining course was a tricky process involving a careful balancing act. After satisfactorily landing the spacecraft, a shirt-sleeved Armstrong casually took off his headset and hopped out of the hatch.

It was Tuesday 15 July 1969, the day before Apollo 11 was due to launch, and Armstrong and Aldrin were taking part in final simulations using a mock-up of the lunar module in the Flight Crew Training Building at the Kennedy Space Center. Equipped with displays showing images of the landing zone, and driven by a battery of computers capable of replicating some of the challenges of space-flight, the simulator at Cape Kennedy
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was the best available. Here, and in other training facilities, Armstrong familiarised himself with the spacecraft's systems including the joystick with which he would fly the lunar module during the final stages of the landing. For a pilot, the hand controller was an unfamiliar device. In an aircraft, a control stick adjusts the angle of the ailerons on the trailing edges of the wings which roll the aeroplane left or right. The stick also raises or lowers the two horizontal elevators on either side of the vertical tail, pitching the aircraft up or down. By pushing against the air, these adjustable surfaces allow an aeroplane to change direction. In space there is nothing to push against, so these surfaces were replaced with small rocket thrusters that were controlled by the sensitive joystick, based on principles developed in NASA's experimental rocket plane, the X-15.

Straight out of a 1950s sci-fi comic, the X-15 was the stuff of legend. Everything about it was extreme. Slung beneath the wing of an adapted B-52 bomber, the aircraft was carried to altitude before the pilot ignited the rocket engine. Reaching record-breaking speeds in excess of 4,000mph, fast enough to strip paint off its airframe, the X-15 would zoom out of the atmosphere towards the edge of space, where the pilot would briefly experience weightlessness. It would then slice its way back into the thinnest layers of air for the flight down to the ground. In climbing to 50 miles and above, the X-15 was in effect the first manned sub-orbital spacecraft; three of its pilots reached altitudes that entitled them to receive NASA astronaut wings. At such heights the atmosphere was too thin to have any impact on conventional control surfaces, forcing the pilot to rely on the small rocket boosters and the prototype hand controller that were tested by, among others, Neil Armstrong, one of only 12 men ever to fly the X-15.
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For Neil, it was not so much a love of flying that took hold of him at an early age, more a fascination with the design and construction of aircraft. Armstrong rarely discusses his personal life, but he revealed in his authorised biography
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private details about his childhood, describing how he came to build model aircraft out of straw, paper and wood. He still possessed many of the models even after becoming an astronaut. Born on 5 August 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio, as a child Neil frequently moved from town to town due to the nature of his father's work in the state auditor's office. Stephen Armstrong had a remote though cordial relationship with his elder child; it was Neil's mother Viola who was to have the greater influence on their son.
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Like many of NASA's pioneering astronauts, Neil grew up in small country towns many of which were slow to recover from the Depression. 'We were not deprived,' he remembered, 'but there was never a great deal of money around.' All 12 men who walked on the Moon were either the first son or an only child. In Neil's case, a sister, June, arrived when he was nearly three, and a younger brother, Dean, joined them a year and a half later. The three children played happily together, but one abiding memory of Neil's places him quietly indulging in his love of books.

When Neil was 14, the family moved back to Wapakoneta where friends remembered him as being confident and capable but also as a boy with little to say. Those who knew him didn't regard him as shy – he played the baritone horn in the school orchestra and took part in plays – but he was seen as someone who didn't feel the need to say much. Neil was 'a person of very few words' who 'thought before he spoke', class-mates said. His tendency to engage with the world somewhat privately found expression in the construction of those model aircraft. 'My focus was more on the building than the flying,' he told his biographer, Dr James Hansen. 'While I was still in elementary school my intention was to be – or hope was to be – an aircraft designer.'
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Unhurried in design projects both at home and at school, Neil came to be known for doing things in his own way without being in any particular rush to set the world alight. He never displayed any 'outer fire', as his brother put it.
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NASA flight director Gene Kranz said he never saw Armstrong argue; nevertheless he 'had the commander mentality ... and didn't have to get angry'. Neil was cool in the old-fashioned sense, in that he tended to keep his distance. His interests weren't confined to model aeroplanes – he once crashed his father's car after the school prom while driving his date back from an all-night diner – but at first glance he was not the kind of person who might expect to find himself in an aircraft flying at five times the speed of sound. Nevertheless, applying his careful (some were to describe it as slow) analytical style of thought to the pursuit of his interest in aircraft design, Neil came to a logical conclusion: 'I went into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane.'
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From the age of 15, Neil joined other local kids hanging around Port Koneta, the town's small airfield. He saved his earnings and managed to pay for flying lessons, which he took to so readily he qualified by the time he was 16, before he'd got his driving licence. Hooked on aircraft, Neil opted to study aeronautical engineering at college, notwithstanding that college was expensive and his family couldn't afford it. A solution was possible through the navy, which was offering four-year scholarships in return for a period of service. Armstrong wasn't particularly interested in a military career but he saw it as a means to an end. In 1947, after receiving a 'wonderful deal' from the navy, he began to attend Purdue University in Indiana. Just a year later, confronted with the prospect of war in Korea, the navy began to recruit extra personnel and Neil, aged 18, was ordered to interrupt his studies and report for duty at Pensacola, Florida. While the air force turned out pilots, the navy produced airmen capable of landing on the deck of a pitching carrier, whom they branded aviators. In August 1950, after 18 months' training, Armstrong joined their ranks.
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On 3 September 1951, Ensign Armstrong was preparing for his twenty-eighth assisted take-off in three months. After lining up his F9F-2 Panther fighter jet aboard the USS
Essex
, a hydraulic catapult hauled his aircraft from a standing start down the length of the short flight-deck and into the air above the freezing waters of the Sea of Japan. Flying with VF-51, the first all-jet squadron in the navy, Armstrong was just beginning this armed reconnaissance mission over North Korea when his unit ran into antiaircraft defences. Streaking in at 350mph he prepared for a low-level attack when at 500 feet his Panther, loaded with bombs, struck an air-defence cable that ripped six feet off his starboard wing. Ejecting would have given him only the slimmest hope of reaching safety as few American pilots had returned after parachuting over enemy territory. After reclaiming limited control of the stricken jet Armstrong nursed it back to South Korea where he could safely eject, coming down virtually unhurt in a rice paddy. At a time when ejection seats were still in their infancy, Armstrong's cool handling of the incident won him much 'favourable notice', as a fellow pilot put it.
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During five tours of combat and 78 missions over enemy territory, Armstrong lost close friends and experienced freezing Korean winters amid a growing realisation that few people in the States knew what the military were doing in Asia. He fired thousands of rounds, suffered engine failure, survived forays into 'MiG Alley' and many times after landing he discovered bullet holes in his aircraft. Compared to civilian flying, combat – as Armstrong put it – ran the risk of 'more consequence to making a bad move'. He also enjoyed periods of leave in Japan, discovering aesthetic influences that were to stay with him for the rest of his life.

In September 1952, Armstrong returned from the war to finish his degree at Purdue, and there he met 18-year-old Janet Shearon, a home economics student. Attractive and vivacious, Janet was the girl he would some day marry, Neil told his roommate after first meeting her, although it would be three years before he got round to asking her out on a date. 'Neil isn't one to rush into anything,' Janet later said. Outgoing and talkative, she regarded him as good-looking and fun to be with.
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When Neil graduated in January 1955, with good though not outstanding grades, he looked for a job as a test pilot. While in Korea his term of service with the navy had officially ended and he had been transferred into the naval reserve, a halfway position between civilian life and the military. For civilians, the most exciting test-flight opportunities were to be found at Edwards Air Force Base, home to a small team from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Initially, Armstrong's application to Edwards was unsuccessful, and although the NACA took him on, he was sent not west but east to Cleveland where he was involved in research into anti-icing systems. Then, just five months later, he was invited to swap the grey clouds of Ohio for the Californian sunshine after the NACA found an opening and sent him to Edwards at last.
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Neil had once believed that nothing could replicate the great days of aviation, when fighter aces raced about the sky in scarlet triplanes, and heroes and heroines set records in epic flights to distant corners of the Earth. 'I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight,' he felt.
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But for an ambitious test pilot, Edwards was the place to be. Here, in 1947, Chuck Yeager first flew faster than the speed of sound, taking the rocket-powered Bell X-1 into a new era of high-speed flights that heralded the dawn of the space age. Edwards was where the first US jet had been tested, as well as many of the experimental X-planes, including the X-3 Stiletto and the X-5 variable geometry 'swing-wing' jet. But it was Yeager's achievement that first put Edwards on the map, prompting scores of young pilots to head west in search of golden opportunities.

After marrying Janet, Neil bought a property 5,000 feet up in the remote Juniper Hills region of the Antelope Valley, not far from the air base. It was a rural cabin with basic plumbing, bare wood floors and no electricity, but Neil slowly set about transforming the place into a home fit for a family. In June 1957 Janet gave birth to Eric, whom they came to call Ricky; two years later he was joined by a baby girl, Karen, and then in 1963 by another boy, Mark. Together the Armstrongs lived in the high desert of California, an untamed corner of America lost under endless blue skies.
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