Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (10 page)

“Let’s take a vote and stand firm,” Scott Carpenter suggested.

They all agreed that standing together would work, and they went to see the boss. “We have three recommendations for chief astronaut,” John Glenn told NASA administrator James Webb. “Deke Slayton, Deke Slayton, and Deke Slayton.”

Webb smiled. The message was clear. He turned a thumbs-up, and Deke became chief astronaut.

*   *   *

Alan Shepard said it was like turning a switch. Deke’s pride was back and first on his list was a new group of astronauts for the Gemini and Apollo projects.

Deke began reading applications and was pleased one was from Neil Armstrong. He smiled. He was going to have the horses he needed to ride to the moon.

Ready for launch, Neil Armstrong’s X-15 hangs beneath its B-52 drop aircraft. (NASA)

FIVE

PASADENA OVERSHOOT

Dressed in his high-flight pressure suit Neil Armstrong was cocooned in his X-15’s cockpit. The hatch had closed down on him to the point of being oppressive. His windshield wrapped his head and shoulders with two almond eyes that were set in a covering of Inconel X, a black-painted nickel alloy to dissipate heat. He felt as if he was wearing the cockpit instead of sitting in it. It was so snug it was difficult to see inside or out as he and his rocket plane hung beneath a drop-and-launch B-52. They were cruising at 45,000 feet—about 8.5 miles above the desert below. It was April 20, 1962, and as he approached his drop, Neil left the puffy white clouds behind, entering a CAVU (Ceilings and Visibility Unlimited) day over the dome of the world—what pilots called the high desert test-flight area.

The previous year Joe Walker, chief pilot for Neil’s group, flew above 60 miles earning him the first set of X-15 astronaut wings. A reporter asked Walker, “How does it feel to be the best test pilot in the world?”

“Hey, I just flew a little higher than the rest,” Joe Walker answered. “You looking for who might be best, keep your eye on young Neil Armstrong.”

Neil had flown the X-15 six times. This was number seven, and like his seventh combat mission over Korea where he had to eject, this number seven would prove equally unlucky.

His flight plan called for him to take his X-15 to the edge of space, about 39 miles up, and test a new control system. They were now at that part of flight where things became tense—exciting—and if Neil Armstrong didn’t know this feeling well, who in the hell did?

A clean and quick drop. (NASA)

The ten-seconds-to-launch light came on.

“Five, four, three, two, one,
launch,
” and the B-52 dropped Neil’s rocket plane, abruptly and with precision.

This X-15, the third in the fleet, had the newest and biggest rocket engine—the XLR-99, and Neil threw the switch. He felt it! The new engine’s kick slammed him back in his seat.

At the family’s mountain cabin Janet had the binoculars out. She could see the wide, sweeping contrails left by the B-52. She held her breath, wondering if Karen Anne’s death would affect Neil’s flying skills.

Janet was not the only one wondering.

Neil and his X-15 are on their way. (NASA)

The X-15 was not the easiest in the sky to fly. It was a nasty 51-foot-long black bullet with stubby wings. Its new, most powerful rocket was pushing it faster and faster from Earth. Neil’s muscles tensed to handle the building G-forces. He was terribly busy, keeping everything under control while watching for the tiniest deviations.

He didn’t have time to notice blue sky turn black, but when his big rocket shut down he knew he was moving—about 3,500 miles per hour, 1,500 miles per hour slower than the speed Alan Shepard had reached to rocket 112 miles into space. He would climb to less than 40 percent of that height. Now he had time to look out.

Neil’s X-15 moves into black sky. (NASA)

The X-15 moved steadily upward on the energy it got from the XLR-99 rocket. This energy would push him through most of the atmosphere to where he could only see black sky above an extremely bright Earth below.

It was all breathtaking and dazzling and Neil could not believe the horizon’s bands of color—colors that began with the deep blackness of space on top, then purple to deep indigo before settling into rich blues and bright whites, capping his planet’s brown earth and blue waters. Neil was on his way still wondering how high is up as he left atmosphere behind and reached a place seen only by few, a place where air was so thin it could not reflect light.

The higher he climbed the less pull of gravity and sense of motion. He was now flying through the upper reaches of the sky—silent and weightless—an experience known only by those few who dared to sail over the top of the world.

“It was the highest I’d ever gone—thirty-nine miles and the views were spectacular,” he later said, adding he was pleased with how well the X-15’s new flight-control system was performing during his moment of weightlessness.

But soon the gravity grabbed him and his plane again, and started pulling them back to Earth. Neil was controlling his X-15’s attitude with tiny hydrogen peroxide jets near his rocket plane’s nose. When needed, he would fire these jets to hold the X-15’s attitude. Then, when he reentered enough atmosphere the X-15’s stubby wings and flight surfaces would again take over the duties of attitude control.

Neil’s X-15 appeared to pass the sun on its way to a height of 39 miles. (NASA)

It was all working well. So much so Neil momentarily diverted his attention to check the g limiter, a system he and other engineers had built to automatically prevent the pilot from exceeding five times his own weight. If it, too, worked, it could keep a flyer from blacking out.

Neil wasn’t aware of how diverting his attention to check the g limiter was becoming a problem.

During the three months since his daughter Karen Anne’s death Neil had seemed out of it to some. His ability to process facts had slowed. Some even believed Neil was becoming accident-prone, and in the flight-control center back at Edwards managers were watching Neil’s performance closely. His primary attention for the moment was on checking the g limiter. He hadn’t been watching his attitude closely, and as he descended through an altitude of about 27 miles, back through building atmospheric pressure, he noticed the X-15’s nose had drifted up slightly. It was causing what was known as ballooning, a condition where the aircraft could skip off and along the top of the atmosphere like one skipping a flat rock across a lake.

In seven years, three months, and four days Neil Armstrong and his
Apollo 11
crew would be making the most risky penetration of Earth’s atmosphere ever. They would be returning from the moon at 24,000 miles per hour—seven times faster than he had flown this day—and if their Apollo spacecraft did not hit the atmosphere at a precise angle they would skip off into eternity sailing forever across the universe.

Even though his momentary laxness had permitted the X-15’s nose to come up, Neil wasn’t all that worried. “In the process,” he explained, “I got the nose up above the horizon. I was skipping outside the atmosphere again, ballooning, but that wasn’t a particular problem.” He used his reaction-control jets to roll over on his back and he tried a few other tricks but nothing worked. Mission managers in the flight control center were suddenly concerned, and the communicator with the call sign “NASA One” shouted, “Neil, we show you ballooning, not turning. Hard left turn, Neil! Hard left turn!”

“Of course I was trying to turn,” Neil laughed, “but the aircraft was on a ballistic path. It was going to go where it was going to go.”

There was only one thing to do—wait for the X-15 to fall low enough to get a bite of thicker air, and when Neil felt atmosphere, he’d begin his turn. But by this time, he said, “We had gone sailing merrily by the field.”

There were those in flight control already calling Neil’s mistake the biggest pilot error in the X-15 program. They were deeply worried. But not Neil. He knew he had options. He had altitude and he had airspeed and plenty of places to land. He concentrated on only one thing—get self and plane down safely. His years of flying had created in him an unbending drive toward perfection. That this was a state unattainable did not in the least interfere with his drive because Neil answered only to himself. He regarded excuses as a weakness and alibis as worthy only of disgust.

He was about 100,000 feet moving through the Mach 3 region (about 2,300 miles per hour), when suddenly he could see Pasadena. “Wait until Johnny Carson’s ‘little old lady from Pasadena’ gets a look at this big black bullet?” he laughed aloud. “I bet she’s never seen something in the air like us before?”

He checked out his location. Below he could see Lancaster and Palmdale, and the San Gabriel Mountains were straight ahead. His cabin was there. He questioned aloud, “What’s next, the Rose Bowl?”

Neil rolled the X-15 into a bank and headed back toward Edwards where some in the flight-control center were already taking bets on where Neil would have to put the X-15 down. “How about Palmdale,” one laughed. “They have a nice little runway there.”

Later Neil would say, “It wasn’t clear at the time I made the turn if I would be able to get back to Edwards, but it wasn’t a big concern. There were other dry lake beds available.” At the moment, El Mirage was off to his right, and just ahead on his left, was Rosamond dry lake. But, the prize of them all, the largest—Rogers—was dead ahead. It was home, and Neil was fast becoming convinced he could make it.