Armstrong has never related his decision to become an astronaut to his daughter’s death: “It was a hard decision for me to make, to leave what I was doing, which I liked very much, to go to Houston. You don’t have to be in any particular program or wear a particular color of shirt to find research questions that need answering. . . . But by 1962 Mercury was on its way, the future programs were well designed, and the lunar mission was going to become a reality. I decided that if I wanted to get out of the atmospheric fringes and into deep space work, that was the way to go.”
Looked at in this way, Armstrong’s views about his future began to evolve on October 4, 1957. On that day, the Soviet Union launched into orbit the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, a stunning technological achievement that put a new sense of value and urgency on everything that the American aerospace community had been doing to prepare for flight outside the atmosphere. Previous to Sputnik, “space” had been a dirty word in the American political arena. When NACA official Ira H. Abbott in the mid-1950s mentioned the possibilities of spaceflight to a U.S. House subcommittee, one congressman accused Abbott of talking “science fiction.” Armstrong acknowledges, “Spaceflight was not generally regarded as a realistic objective. It was a bit of pie in the sky. So although we were working toward that end, it was not something we acknowledged much publicly. Not necessarily for fear of ridicule, but probably somewhat.”
The day Sputnik launched, Armstrong was in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots: “What was happening in the test-flight world was a very hard sell to the press, and it became completely impossible once Sputnik came across the sky.
“Sputnik did change our world. It absolutely changed our country’s view of what was happening, the potential of space. I’m not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead. President Eisenhower was saying something like, ‘What’s the worry? It’s just one small ball.’ But I’m sure that was a façade behind which he had substantial concerns, because if they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United States.”
The Sputnik crisis quickly led to, among other things, the formal abolition of the NACA and its amelioration by NASA, from the start a much higher-profile organization. NASA’s first priority was to place a man in space through a program known as Mercury. “We were certainly aware of Mercury,” Armstrong notes, “from our colleagues in the military, friends and people we flew with daily, some of whom had been invited to consider applying for the astronaut program.” Of all the pilots who became the first astronauts—Gordon Cooper, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton from the air force; Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Alan Shepard from the navy; and John Glenn from the marines—Neil knew only Schirra well, from working with him at Patuxent River on the navy’s preliminary evaluation of the McDonnell XF-4H, which later became the F-4, a principal fighter for both the navy and the air force. With a few of the others, he had sat in occasional technical meetings and had seen them in the air or at the Edwards’s officers’ club.
Unlike Chuck Yeager and other like-minded test pilots, Armstrong did not denigrate the Mercury astronauts as “Spam in a can”: “I didn’t have that feeling at all—the Yeager criticism of the whole idea of the way they were approaching space. At the time the Mercury program was started, it might have well gone that way. In a sense it did, in that they had a lot of chimpanzee flights. But the Mercury crewmen insisted on making their spacecraft an airplane-like device, with the same conventions as normal airplanes, so that their normal instincts would be proper. So I think that was a great contribution on the part of the Mercury guys. . . . I always felt that ‘form follows function,’ that engineering would decide the best way to go. I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.”
This is not to say that Armstrong did not continue to prefer a winged pathway into space, via transatmospheric vehicles like the X-15 and X-20 Dyna-Soar. Even after the first suborbital Mercury flights in 1961, Armstrong thought “we were far more involved in spaceflight research than the Mercury people.
“I always felt that the risks we had in the space side of the program were probably less than we had back in flying at Edwards or the general flight-test community. The reason is that we were exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits. That isn’t to say that we didn’t expect risks in the space program. But we felt pretty comfortable because we had so much technical backup and we didn’t go nearly as close to the limits as much as we did back in the old flight-test days.”
A significantly higher rate of fatalities in the world of flight test supports Armstrong’s contention. Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White died in January 1967 when a fire broke out in their Block I spacecraft during a routine test while sitting on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy, and astronauts Theodore C. Freeman (in 1964), Charles A. Bassett and Elliot M. See Jr. (in 1966), and Clifton C. “C. C.” Williams (in 1967), died in crashes of airplanes they were piloting; but not a single American astronaut was lost in an actual space flight until the loss of the seven members of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew in 1986. In contrast, the flight-test community buried many of its members. In 1948 alone, at Edwards alone, thirteen test pilots were killed. One of them was the air base’s namesake, young Captain Glen Edwards; another was Howard C. Lilly, the first NACA test pilot to be killed during a research flight. In the next ten years, many test pilots lost their lives at Edwards. In the year 1952 alone, sixty-two pilots died there in the span of thirty-six weeks, an astonishing rate of nearly two pilots per week, many of them involving flight test. The navy’s test-flight mortality rate was just as disturbing. At Patuxent River, Lieutenant Pete Conrad, in the words of author Tom Wolfe, wore “his great dark sepulchral bridge coat” to more funerals than most members of his Princeton graduating class of 1953 wore their tuxedos.
Armstrong might very well have chosen to remain in the challenging world of test flying. The X-15 program had hardly seen its last days. Neil’s final X-15 flight occurred on July 26, 1962. Though it was the sixty-fourth flight in the program, there were still 135 more X-15 flights to follow in the next six years, before the program ended in October 1968. Between the time of Neil’s first X-15 flight in November 1960 and his last in July 1962, the X-15 made thirty-five test flights; Neil flew seven, or one-fifth, of them. It has always been Neil’s understanding that, if he had stayed on at Edwards, he would likely have become the X-15 program’s chief test pilot. In that capacity, he would have flown the X-15 even more frequently, likely at a rate of one every four flights. “I liked the people I worked with at Edwards,” Armstrong recollects. “There was no reason to try to change things to get into a new field. Staying with the X-15, that was very attractive. It was a real project. It was good. I enjoyed it.” In the end, he just did not decide to do it.
In November 1960, NASA named Armstrong a member of the air force/NASA Dyna-Soar “pilot consultant group.” Although the air force eventually complicated—some say, ruined—Dyna-Soar by trying to make it operational, the original intent of the Round Three vehicle was research. Its objective was demonstrating controlled lifting reentry, a technique (not unrelated to the lifting-body concept) that created enough aerodynamic lift to give a transatmospheric vehicle the cross-range necessary to maneuver down to established runways, as the Space Shuttle would later do. Lifting reentry provided a flexibility that the nonlifting, blunt-body ballistic capsules sorely lacked. Because it pushed technology so fast and so hard in so many areas (notably high-speed aerodynamics, high-temperature structural materials, and reentry protection concepts), Dyna-Soar, even more than the other X-series programs before it, served as a critical focal point for a wide range of future-oriented aerospace R&D.
Although NASA engineers at Dryden had considered the possibility of air-launching the X-20 from a B-52 or B-70 mother ship, the plan that NASA and the air force adopted was to loft the Sänger-like boost-glider into orbit on top of a Titan III. This raised the problem of how to rescue the X-20 and its crew if some emergency, like a fire or booster failure, occurred on the launchpad. Such a nightmare scenario almost happened in the Gemini program, when, in December 1965, Wally Schirra in Gemini VI-A came awfully close to yanking the seat ejection ring between his legs and blowing himself and fellow astronaut Tom Stafford up and off their Titan. Because Dyna-Soar was a winged vehicle capable (unlike Schirra’s Gemini capsule) of real flying, a pilot inside the X-20, once blasted clear of his Titan booster, could perhaps fly the vehicle down safely to a runway landing.
Armstrong (who had published a technical report on his low L/D testing in delta-wing aircraft using an F-102) conceived of a way to test the rescue concept. “That was our thing at Edwards,” Armstrong explains, “doing power-off landings.” The small escape rocket being planned for Dyna-Soar shot the X-20 up several thousand feet and it occurred to Armstrong that “maybe we could duplicate that. So I set about finding out if we could and see if we could get an airplane for it.”13
The F-104 might have been used again if not for the fact that two F5D-1 Skylancers had just become available to NASA. The F5D was an experimental fighter built by Douglas that the navy had decided not to produce. Only four of the aircraft were ever built, with two of the prototypes given to NASA in late 1960 essentially as castaways. Armstrong flew one of the F5Ds on September 26, 1960, during a visit to NASA Ames. Neil realized immediately that the F5D could serve particularly well in a study of Dyna-Soar abort procedures because its wing planform was a good match for the X-20’s slender delta-shaped wing. Armstrong knew it took a plane like the F5D whose gear could extend out fully and safely at high speed, over 300 knots (345 mph): “So I went out and fiddled with the airplane to see what initial conditions I could get, what airspeed I could match, and how soon could I get the gear down to produce the drag for the L/D that I needed.”
Armstrong began flight tests in the F5D in July 1961, just shortly after Karen Anne’s illness was diagnosed. While he and Janet were initiating what became the little girl’s first round of X-ray treatment, Neil occupied his mind with the problem of figuring out what kind of separation flight path and landing approach would best bring the X-20 down safely: “I fiddled with that. I think other guys also did it later, but I confirmed that it could be doable.”
Between July 7 and November 1, 1961, Armstrong made no fewer than ten test flights in the F5D. By early October, he had developed an effective maneuver for the abort. Neil simulated the act of being shot away by the escape rocket by making a steep vertical climb in the F5D to 7,000 feet. At that point, he pulled on his control column until the “X-20” lay on its back. Rolling the craft upright, he initiated the low L/D approach. Landing came on a specially marked area on Rogers Dry Lake, a parcel that simulated the 10,000-foot landing strip at Cape Canaveral.
Late in the summer of 1961, NASA installed a Cinerama camera into the nose of the F5D to film the abort procedure. On Tuesday, October 3, 1961, Armstrong demonstrated the Dyna-Soar rescue during a special visit of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Edwards. Two days later, Neil repeated the show for an audience that included Marvin Miles, the aerospace editor for the Los Angeles Times, who detailed the technique in a long feature.
Armstrong handled the F5D research flawlessly. Much of the flying that he performed for Dyna-Soar came during the troubled times following the diagnosis of Karen’s tumor.
It was six weeks after Karen’s death, on March 15, 1962, that the air force and NASA jointly named Armstrong as one of the six “pilot-engineers” for Dyna-Soar. The only other NASA pilot named was Milt Thompson, so the selection was quite an honor for Armstrong. The air force designees, all age thirty-two, were Captain Pete Knight, Captain Russell L. Rogers, Captain Henry C. Gordon, and Major James W. Wood. At thirty-one, Armstrong was the youngest of the group. “We were the pilots that were to do the development work, the simulator work, consulting on the aircraft, sitting in them, arguing through all the points,” Armstrong recalls. If a small fleet of X-20s actually got built, the sextet would be the prime contenders for first flying the X-20 when it came on line, then scheduled for 1964.
As Armstrong looked into his professional future following his daughter’s death, he saw three choices: “I could have kept flying the X-15. The X-15 was real. You knew it was real. . . . I was also working on the Dyna-Soar. That was still an on-paper airplane, but it was a possibility. Then there was this other project down at Houston, the Apollo program. Project Gemini had not been really much identified yet at that point. Recognize, that in this world of aerospace R&D, we constantly see projects come and go. For example, I never flew the D-558 Skyrocket, although I was assigned to that project for a long time. I never got to that goal. I can’t tell you now just why in the end I made the decision I did, but I consider it fortuitous that I happened to pick one that was a winning horse. . . . I don’t think there was a Eureka moment. . . . Apollo was just so overpoweringly exciting that I decided to give up these other opportunities to pursue it, even though I knew it may never happen.”
Armstrong admits that the growing excitement surrounding Project Mercury may have had something to do with his decision. On February 20, 1962, three weeks after Karen’s funeral, Mercury astronaut and fellow Ohioan John H. Glenn orbited the Earth three times in Friendship 7. No celebration since that for Armstrong’s hero Charles A. Lindbergh in 1927 matched the national outpouring in honor of America’s newest hero. If ever there was a time to entice a pilot out of his airplane and into a spacecraft, this was it. “Astronaut Glenn” appeared on the cover of countless newspapers and magazines in the winter and spring of 1962. Life put Glenn in his space helmet on its cover a full two weeks before he even made his Mercury flight; a ten-page, highly illustrated feature story entitled “Making of a Brave Man” called Glenn “a man marked to do great things.”
Armstrong deliberated between four and five months over his decision to apply for astronaut selection. All the while, he continued to grieve for his daughter—and he continued to fly.
Armstrong himself claims there were no noticeable ill effects on his work at Edwards, but the picture appears more complicated. In the months immediately following Karen’s death, Armstrong was involved in a series of flying mishaps at Edwards, an uncharacteristic stretch of “problem flights.” His peers and superiors at Edwards came to worry that Neil had become, in their words, “accident prone.”
Even the very best pilot commits the occasional error and experiences the random mishap in the course of routine flying. In his first years at Edwards, Armstrong likewise had a few minor incidents. In his first and only flight in the Bell X-5 in October 1955, shortly after beginning his job at the HSFS, the landing gear door fell off during takeoff. In part it was Neil’s fault, because, in his attempt to get his landing gear fully retracted, he oversped the plane’s gear limit.14 Then, in August 1957, in an incident previously mentioned, he cracked the nose-gear wheel of the X-1B when the airplane began porpoising after touchdown on Rogers Dry Lake. In yet another mishap, he hurt his thumb badly when he accidentally shut the canopy of the YRF-84F on his hand as he was doing his final pre-takeoff checklist. Other than those few incidents, the record of Armstrong’s flying at Edwards was remarkably unblemished. Even after Karen’s hospitalization, Neil’s flying showed no indication that his performance was suffering.
The same can be said about Armstrong’s continued involvement in the X-15 program. Twice during Karen’s illness—on December 20, 1961, and January 17, 1962—Armstrong piloted the rocket plane, his third and fourth of seven X-15 flights overall. Both flights came off without any hitch, at least not in Armstrong’s performance.
Preparing for an X-15 flight took high intensity from everyone involved, but no one felt the pressure like the pilot. Furthermore, the X-15 flight scheduled for December 1961 with Armstrong at the helm was to be the first run of the number-three aircraft. Already the X-15-3—or more precisely, the plane’s powerful new XLR-99 rocket engine—had a checkered history. On June 8, 1960, during what was supposed to be a final ground test by the contractor, the XLR-99 exploded on its test stand. “It was the biggest bang I’d ever heard,” said North American pilot Scott Crossfield. “Fortunately for me and the airplane, the explosion blew the forward section—the tanks and the cockpit—out of the major part of the blaze. The firemen were right on their toes and they moved in to blanket the tanks and the fire area with foam.” At first everyone thought the rocket engine had blown. As is often the case, the first impression was wrong. As soon as all the scattered parts could be found and cooled down enough to touch, a disenchanted group of engineers mostly from North American began a thorough investigation into what caused the explosion. Eventually the investigators determined that a frozen regulator, a faulty relief valve, and a rapid buildup of back pressure caused the center structure of the X-15’s ammonia tank to ram and smash open the control system’s hydrogen peroxide sphere. Not until the entire pressurizing and pressure release systems were thoroughly analyzed, redesigned, tested, and retested could another pilot step into the X-15 cockpit. By the time Armstrong got into the plane in mid-December 1962, the first flight of X-15-3 had been delayed by sixteen months, at a cost of $4 million.
The long delay and extra cost heightened anxiety over Armstrong’s flight. “There’s always concern about whether there had been damage that you didn’t recognize,” Armstrong admits, “but the engine went back to the plant and got torn apart and reassembled.” Following a new round of engine ground testing, Neil had every reason to think that the X-15-3’s problems, at least those causing the June 1960 explosion, had been solved.
Rebuilding the aircraft gave North American the opportunity to update the newest X-15 airplane’s research equipment and outfit it with the MH-96 “black box” that Armstrong had been helping Minneapolis-Honeywell to develop for the program. Flight testing the innovative adaptive control system became the primary purpose of Neil’s December 1961 flight.
The flight was scheduled to launch on December 19 but was aborted when instrumentation involving the X-15’s ball nose did not read correctly, so it got pushed back to the next day. The flight (number 3-1-2 and the forty-sixth in the program) was not without problems. Immediately upon being dropped by Major Jack Allavie from his B-52 over Silver Lake east of Death Valley, all three axes of the new stability augmentation system on the MH-96 disengaged and “a severe right roll occurred with accompanying yaw and pitch excursions.”
Armstrong recalls that the failure did not cause him much trouble: “One of the aspects of the MH-96 was its reliability. It was a system designed to run for 76,000 hours between failures.” As it turned out, the system experienced a blip a lot sooner—at the very start of Neil’s flight. Armstrong managed to reset the system on the first try, “so it wasn’t really a problem” once he recovered from the strong right roll. “That was a medium-speed flight,” Neil explains. “I think it was faster than I had ever flown before, though,” up to a speed of Mach 3.76, or 3,670 mph. “The flight followed a carefully programmed order, principally to check out the operation of the MH-96, and I’m sure no one wanted to go to extreme flight conditions, extreme loadings, on the system on the first flight.”
Armstrong observed that the MH-96 system produced at least one unconventional flight characteristic: “Most airplanes have what is called ‘speed stability,’ that is, you set it at 250 knots, it tends to stay at 250 knots. But with the MH-96 flight control system, which was a rate-command, attitude-hold system, it had no affinity for staying at a particular speed. It tended to stay at its particular angle, but if the thrust did not match the drag, the plane would either speed up or slow down, whichever was appropriate, without any apparent signal to the operator.”
Air-launched at 14:45:50 Pacific time, Armstrong landed the X-15 a little less than ten and a half minutes later, after flying a distance of 150.9 miles. The highest altitude reached was 81,000 feet, which was not as high as Armstrong had gotten in several of his F-104 zooms. With Major Daniels, LCDR Petersen, and Major Rushworth flying chase, Armstrong brought the X-15-3 down gingerly onto Rogers Dry Lake just southwest of Boron. “Although skid contact seemed quite gentle,” Armstrong wrote in his pilot’s report, “nose wheel touchdown and impact seemed to be somewhat harder than that of previous flights in #1 airplane. [Neil never flew X-15-2.] It was attempted to keep the runout along the painted right hand stripe of the runway. With a light to moderate left cross wind, the airplane finally veered to the right of the painted stripe and could not be returned.”
Armstrong’s next X-15 flight came on Wednesday, January 17, 1962, a week and a half before Karen Anne’s death. The flight was again to evaluate the MH-96 system and was the first time for Armstrong past Mach 5. It was also the first time he ever flew above 100,000 feet. In fact, he surpassed both marks, with a speed of Mach 5.51 and an altitude of 133,500 feet.
“I think it went pretty much on plan,” Neil relates. Launched by a B-52, this time over Mud Lake to the north of Edwards, the X-15-3 traveled a distance of 223.5 miles in a little less than eleven minutes before touching down safely on Rogers Dry Lake at 12:11:01 in the afternoon. Throughout the flight, Armstrong gave the X-15’s sidestick quite a workout. Flying chase with Petersen and Rushworth were Captain Henry C. “Hank” Gordon, one of the air force pilots later to be named along with Neil for the Dyna-Soar program, and Captain James McDivitt, future commander of the Gemini IV and Apollo 9 space missions.
His X-15 flight on January 17, 1962, was Armstrong’s last flight of any kind until a week after Karen’s funeral, when on February 6 he took an F5D up over Edwards for a low L/D approach. In the entire month of February, Neil flew only three other days, on the twelfth, thirteenth, and sixteenth. The first two of these days involved flights in an F-104, one for “pilot proficiency,” and the last another low L/D approach in an F5D. Armstrong worked on Dyna-Soar in Seattle from February 26 to March 20.
Upon returning to work at Edwards on Monday, March 23, Armstrong immediately began to prepare for his next X-15 flight (flight 3-3-4), scheduled for five days later. Most of his flying leading up to the twenty-eighth involved “touch-and-go” landings in an F-104. These flights amounted to practice landings of the X-15. When the day for the actual X-15 flight arrived, clouds and hazy overcast limited visibility, pushing the schedule back one day. On March 29, the X-15’s stable platform heat exchanger iced up, and a faulty fire detector caused the plane’s fire warning light to pulse intermittently. The following day, the launch panel in the B-52 showed a potential problem involving the rocket engine’s cooling gas, leading to a stressful abort at zero seconds in the countdown. The day after that, the MH-96 analyzer failed during a preflight check.
Not until the morning of Wednesday, April 5, did Armstrong manage to make the flight (flight 3-3-7). Then, just as he was being dropped at altitude above Hidden Hills north of Death Valley (across the Nevada line), his rocket engine did not ignite. “Before lighting the engine, or attempting to light the engine, I’m sure that some malfunction lights lit up,” Armstrong recalled in his postflight debriefing later that day, “but I did not see any light. All I saw was the igniter pressure go to zero and silence.”
In an X-15, there was only time enough for one relight. The remaining time until touchdown was required to complete the jettison of the propellants. If a second relight was attempted, the X-15 would still have some propellants in the tanks at landing, which, in Armstrong’s words, “was not desirable.” He recalls what “sure seems like a long time the second time for that engine to light up.”
Accelerating to a top speed of Mach 4.12, Neil thundered up to 180,000 feet. It was the first time he had reached a high enough altitude to fully integrate the MH-96 reaction controls. The test flight spanned 181.7 miles in a little over eleven minutes before landing at Rogers Dry Lake.
The airplane still had not been flown to the point of testing the MH-96 system limit, or “g limiter,” in part designed by Armstrong, to prevent the pilot from exceeding 5 g’s, and he “felt the obligation to demonstrate every component and aspect of the MH-96.”
It was this commitment that led to Armstrong’s making what some came to feel was his biggest pilot error in the X-15 program.
Flight 3-4-8 occurred on Friday, April 20, 1962. Armstrong remembers, “It was the highest I’d ever gone”—to 207,500 feet, an altitude that remained his highest until Gemini VIII. “The views were spectacular. The system ran pretty well up there. The reaction control systems were operating satisfactorily ‘across the top.’ It kept a good attitude reference. Everything worked well. It was well outside the atmosphere so that we were flying completely on reaction controls. Aerodynamic controls were completely ineffective, like flying in a vacuum.”
Coming down from peak altitude, part of the flight plan was to check out the g limiter. Armstrong explains, “I thought I got the g’s high enough, but it was not kicking in. That was my job, to check out that system.”
Armstrong let the X-15 nose up just a little, causing it to balloon to a high enough altitude—roughly 140,000 feet—where “the airplane returned to the wings-level attitude with essentially no sideslip. At about fifteen or sixteen degrees angle of attack and four g, I elected to leave the angle of attack in that mode and I was hoping that I would see the g limiting in action. We had seen g limiting on the simulator operation at levels approximately four g to four and a half g and it wasn’t obvious that we were not having any g limiting, so I left it at this four-g level for quite a long time hoping that this g limiting might show up. It did not, and apparently this is where we got into the ballooning situation.”
Over the radio, “NASA 1” back at the main flight control center told Neil rather emphatically, “We show you ballooning, not turning. Hard left turn, Neil! Hard left turn!” “Of course I’m trying to turn,” Neil explains forty years after the flight, “but nothing’s happening. I’m just on a ballistic path and I get over on to a very steep bank angle trying to pull down into the atmosphere. But the aerodynamics are not doing anything. The plane’s going to go where it’s going to go. It’s on a ballistic path. They’re telling me on the ground to ‘Turn!’ but that’s not any help to me. They could see on the instruments that my servos are at full stabilizer turning position. I rolled over and tried to drop back into the atmosphere, but the aircraft wasn’t going down because there was no air to bite into.
“I had no reason to suspect that ballooning would cause any trouble, because I had fiddled around with this lots of times in the simulator and never, never had any kind of problem with bouncing out like that.”
Eventually the X-15 fell back down into the atmosphere where Armstrong was able to start making the turn. But by that time, Neil recalls, the airplane had gone “sailing merrily by the field”—at a speed of Mach 3! By the time he rolled into a bank, pulled up the angle of attack, and started to turn back in a northeasterly direction toward Edwards, Armstrong found himself approaching Pasadena. Neil was forty-five miles south of Edwards and still above 100,000 feet. (Subsequent Edwards lore suggesting that Neil flew the X-15 as far south as the Rose Bowl seems an exaggeration, since forty miles south of Edwards is substantially north of the Rose Bowl. Downward visibility was very limited for the X-15 pilot, so Neil did not know how far south he got.)
“It wasn’t clear at the time I made the turn whether I would be able to get back to Edwards. That wasn’t a great concern to me because there were other dry lakes available. I did not want to go into another one, but I certainly would if I had needed to. My easiest choice was to land at a lake called El Mirage, and I could easily get there. The only other alternative at that point would have been Palmdale municipal airport, and I didn’t want to get into their traffic pattern.” So Armstrong committed himself to trying for Edwards: “After I got on the track—the northbound track for Edwards—it was clear that I was going to be able to try to go in. I’d have to make a ‘straight in.’ ”
Neil: I have the home base in sight, Joe [Walker].
NASA 1: What is your visual estimate of the location?
Neil: Looks like I’m pretty, in pretty bad shape for the south lake bed.
NASA 1: You’re at eight degrees alpha [angle of attack].
Neil: Affirmative. And I’m going to jettison [auxiliary fuel] now.
Chase: What altitude, Neil?
Neil: Got 47,000.
NASA 1: Yes, we check that. Have you decided what your landing runway is yet?
Neil: Let me get up here a little closer. I can definitely . . . see the base now.
NASA 1: Yep.
Neil: Check head bumper [at the top of the ejection seat]. I’m 41,000 feet.
NASA 1: We’re 26 miles to the south lake and have you at 40,000.
Neil: Okay.
NASA 1: Stop jettison on the peroxide.
Neil: Rog. Okay, the landing will be on runway 35, south lake and will be [a] straight-in approach. I’m at 32,000, going to use some brakes to make it. Okay, I’m about, approaching, pretty hard to tell from here. [At this point Armstrong is using speed brakes to reduce energy, which in retrospect confirms that his return to South Base could not have been as close a call as some people at Edwards later suggested.]
Chase: Okay, I’ve got you now. I’m one o’clock to you.
Neil: Okay.
Chase: Don’t know if I will be with you, though. [The chase was not sure he could rendezvous before Neil landed, since he had been in position to join up for a landing on the north, rather than south, lake bed.]
Neil: Okay, going to use some brakes to get in. Okay, the ventral is armed and the brakes are in. [At the rear end of the X-15 were vertical stabilizers placed above and below the fuselage; these were the ventral and dorsal fins. Prior to landing, the ventral fin needed to be jettisoned by triggering explosive bolts. Had Armstrong jettisoned the ventral even earlier, he would have reduced the drag and extended his glide time.] I’m landing on 35 and I’m about fifteen miles out from the end now. Peroxide-low light is out, on again, source is 1,600 pounds. I’m 290 knots.
Chase: Coming up on your left.
Neil: Okay, I haven’t got hold of you yet. And a little brakes here. I’m going back to pressurize. Going to land in sort of the middle of the south lake bed. Brakes are in again, 280 [knots].
Chase: Henry [Gordon], I’ll take the left side if you want me to.
Chase: Rog.
Neil: You want to call the ventral jettison, Henry?
Chase: Okay.
Neil: Little shorter than I thought.
Chase: You can punch it [the ventral] off any time you want to, Neil, for drag.
Neil: Oh, I should have done that before, shouldn’t I?
Chase: Yep. Start your flaps down now. Off. Okay, you’re well in, go ahead and put her down. Very nice, Neil.
NASA 1: The posse will get there shortly.
Chase: In about thirty minutes! [A sarcastic reference to the fact that all the recovery vehicles were up at the original landing site on the north lake bed.]
H-21 [helicopter]: We’ll be there, Neil.
Armstrong’s X-15 flight of April 20, 1962, established X-15 program records for the longest endurance (12:28:07) and for longest distance (350 miles, ground track). Local Edwards lore still relates that Armstrong was trekking right down amid the Joshua trees as he made his landing on the southern tip of Rogers Dry Lake; in fact, the jest was that the Joshua trees were passing by above Neil. But that was a gross exaggeration devised by the boys in the chase planes, the only ones close enough to Neil’s set-down point to know exactly where it occured.
Fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson was situated on the north lake bed waiting to send up locator flares. “Neil was supposed to land on runway 18 [“18” was short for 180-degrees heading] on the north lake bed,” Peterson relates. “Then I heard on the radio that he was going to go to the south lake, so I got in my vehicle and I must have been doing a hundred miles per hour, racing down that lake bed to see if I could get to the south lake bed and throw some flares. I watched him come in and looking across the lake, you can’t see relative distances. But I knew he was close to the edge of the lake.”
One of the engineers who monitored the flight, John McTigue, remembers “later kicking myself in the backside because I didn’t tell Neil to get rid of the lower ventral, because that would have reduced the drag some. But it was the only airplane that the little old lady in Pasadena had ever seen come roaring above her, the X-15!” Though he did not see Neil’s landing, McTigue heard that Armstrong barely made it back to South Base. Gathering for the postflight debriefing, McTigue heard Joe Vensel, the head of FRC flight operations, ask pilot Forrest Petersen, “How far was Neil from the Joshua trees?” Petersen thought for a moment and said, “Oh, probably a 150 feet or so.” A wry smile coming to his face, Vensel asked, “Were the trees to his right or left?!”
People who were not even at Edwards on April 20 came to believe that Armstrong made it back by the skin of his teeth. NASA pilot Bill Dana, who was to fly the X-15 sixteen times, had taken an F-104 to Albuquerque, New Mexico, that day, “but I sure heard about it when I got back! Neil just barely made it back to the dry lake bed. And that isn’t exaggerated; it was close.” Air force test pilot Pete Knight did not see any of the flight, either, but “oh, yes, I heard about it” when fellow pilots started teasing Neil for his “record cross-country flight.” “We thought it was rather funny at the time,” Knight recalls, “to bounce back up and get into the thin air where you can’t turn. It’s not too bright.” Major Bob White, who was flying chase for Armstrong in an F-100, admits that he “kind of giggled over it a little bit” and “never did discuss the overshoot with Neil because it might have been a little bit embarrassing.”
A number of people felt that Armstrong made some sort of mistake or such a long overshoot could not have occurred. Before his death in 2004 Pete Knight extrapolated: “I think it was a lax condition, not doing something wrong, but not paying attention to what was going on. Because certainly after you reenter the atmosphere, you can, if you don’t get the nose down and keep the airplane from climbing again, you can climb pretty fast and get back out into where you can’t turn too well. You can pull all you want, but you’ve got nothing to pull against. So, yes, it was a mistake. I think it was just a laxity, not in Neil’s ability or dedication, but just in his focus.”
Knight was not the only person who came to this conclusion. More important, it was an opinion held by D. Brainerd Holmes, the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. According to Armstrong, “when the report went to Washington, Brainerd Holmes was fairly . . . I’m not going to say ‘critical,’ but it sounded like a screwup to him . . . But I just assumed that was because he didn’t really understand. He didn’t have any technical knowledge of the problem involved.”
Today, Armstrong admits, “in this case, it might have been well advised for me to think, ‘Well, if the g-limiting isn’t kicking in, I’m not going to push it. I’ll leave that to the next flight and try it again.’ ”
The inherent problem was lack of accuracy in the simulator. According to early NASA simulation expert Gene Waltman, “maybe after the pilots had flown a while they would begin to recognize some differences between the way the plane behaved and the way the simulator acted. But it was not a case where the pilots went out and flew the X-15 every day to get really well familiar with it. There were definite limitations, on the order of one hundred volts for every 4,000 to 5,000 feet.” Fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson relates, “I made the first flight of the HL-10 lifting body in 1966 and it was almost unflyable. None of that did we pick up on in the simulator.”
Whether Armstrong could have pulled the necessary g’s to get the g limiter to kick in without getting off his flight profile, no one can be sure. “There were ways to do the test he did without going to Pasadena,” suggests NASA test pilot Bill Dana. “But that’s kind of second-guessing. He just didn’t realize how far up the nose had gone.”
Typically, Armstrong regards his infamous “overshoot to Pasadena” as “a learning thing.” Bill Dana concurs: “Neil was doing what he thought was the right thing. And if it won him a trip to Pasadena, why, he would not be doing that again! Probably nobody ever zoomed out of the atmosphere again on the X-15, because the pilots were all trained on the danger of that action based on what happened to Neil.”
“He wasn’t a screwup and he wasn’t accident prone,” declares Roger Barnicki, a technician in the FRC’s Research Pilots Branch who was responsible for Armstrong’s and other test pilots’ personal flight equipment. “This guy was by the numbers, not fanatical, but by the numbers.”
• • •
Just four days after his X-15 overshoot, Armstrong was involved in a second incident testing the notion that Karen Anne’s death may have been temporarily affecting his job performance. On Tuesday, April 24, 1962, Armstrong and Chuck Yeager made their only-ever flight together.
The X-15 flight plan necessitated emergency landing sites all along the trajectory. One of the farthest flung was Smith Ranch Dry Lake, located some 380 miles due north of Edwards, and east of Reno, Nevada.
Conditions on a dry lake bed needed to be carefully checked out, especially during the wet winter season. Employing a crude but effective method, teams of inspectors would walk the lake bed, dropping six-inch-diameter lead balls from a height of five feet. Measuring the diameter of the depressions made by the balls and comparing them to measurements that had been made on a firm, usable lake bed, the inspectors determined whether the lake bed would support the fifteen-ton weight of the X-15.
The winter of 1962 was a particularly wet one in the western desert. On the weekend prior to Karen Armstrong’s death, Rogers Dry Lake became a real lake of measurable depth. Many roads leading to and from Edwards were closed and very little flying took place.
On Monday, April 23, NASA’s Joe Walker took an F-104 up to Smith Ranch Dry Lake to check it out for possible emergency use, not by the X-15-2, which air force major Bob White was scheduled to fly the next day (because White’s flight was to be the first-ever launched from Delamar Dry Lake, in eastern Nevada), but by X-15-1, which Walker himself was scheduled to fly down from Mud Lake on April 25 (poor weather delayed the launch until April 30). The NASA R4D Gooneybird, flown by Jack McKay and Bruce Peterson, reported that day that Smith Ranch might be sufficiently dry to support a landing by the time of Walker’s launch on the twenty-seventh.
Paul Bikle, the head of the FRC, wanted to be absolutely sure of the condition of Smith Ranch Dry Lake for Walker’s flight. On the twenty-fourth, after White’s X-15-2 flight was canceled due to clouds, Bikle made a phone call to the air force side of the base. Bikle talked to Colonel Chuck Yeager, the new commander of the Aerospace Research Pilots School at Edwards—and who also, incidentally, had been copiloting the launch B-52 just that morning when White’s flight was aborted due to clouds. Bikle and Yeager had served together postwar at Wright Field in Ohio, where Bikle, in Yeager’s view, had been one of those conservative flight test engineers “who thought the X-1 was doomed.” Still, Bikle agreed with Yeager’s self-assessment that the colonel’s firsthand knowledge of the dry lakes was “like the back of my hand.” In Yeager’s version, the conversation between the two men went like this:
Bikle: What do you think about Smith’s Ranch Lake?
Yeager: I was just up there yesterday in a B-57 looking at it, and it’s wet.
Bikle: Well, my guys were over there today and they say it isn’t wet.
Yeager: Well, then, be my guest!
Bikle: Would you go up there and land on it?
Yeager: No, I won’t. It’s wet.
Bikle: Would you fly Armstrong up there and attempt a landing?
Yeager: No way.
Bikle: Would you do it in a [NASA] airplane?
Yeager: Hell, no! I wouldn’t do it in any airplane because it just won’t work.
Bikle: Would you go up there if Neil flew?
Yeager: Yeah, as long as I’m not responsible for anything that happens. I’ll ride in the backseat.
Pairing a NASA pilot and an air force pilot for such a purpose was unusual, but not unheard of. Earlier that April, NASA’s Joe Vensel had flown with Yeager in a helicopter survey of a number of wet lake beds.
The plane was a T-33. Armstrong sat in the front, Yeager in the back. On this sunny and warm afternoon, both men wore just flying suits and gloves. Even before taking off, according to Yeager’s version:
I tried my damndest to talk Armstrong out of going at all. “Honestly, Neil, that lake bed is in no shape to take the weight of a T-33.” . . . But Neil wouldn’t be budged. He said, “Well, we won’t land. I’ll just test the surface by shooting a touch-and-go”—meaning he’d set down the wheels then immediately hit the throttle and climb back up in the sky. I told him he was crazy. “You’re carrying a passenger and a lot of fuel, and that airplane isn’t overpowered, anyway. The moment you touch down on that soggy lake bed, we’ll be up to our asses in mud. The drag will build up so high, you won’t be able to get off the ground again.” He said, “No sweat, Chuck. I’ll just touch and go.”
According to Yeager, Armstrong managed the first half of that:
He touched, but we sure as hell didn’t go. The wheels sank in the mud and we sat there, engine screaming, wide open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck on flypaper. I said from the back, “Neil, why don’t you turn off the sumbitch, it ain’t doin’ nuthin’ for you.” He turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. Not a word for a long time. I would’ve given a lot to see that guy’s face.
Yeager’s story portrays Armstrong in unflattering terms, its telling further marred by factual errors.15
“We went up there and looked it over,” Armstrong recalls, “and it looked like it was damp on the west side but pretty dry on the east side. So I said to Chuck, ‘Let’s do a touch-and-go and see how it goes.’ ” At no time on the way up to the Nevada site, according to Armstrong, did Yeager ever try to talk him out of trying to land.
The touch-and-go took place with absolutely no trouble. Neil landed, ran the wheels over the surface, added power, and took off. The problem for Armstrong came next, when Yeager told him, “Let’s go back and try it again, and slow down a little more.”
“Okay, we’ll do that,” Neil agreed. “So we landed a second time and cut the power back and slowed down, and then I could feel it starting to soften a little bit under the wheels so I added some throttle, and then it settled some more, and I added some more throttle. Finally, we were at a full stop, full throttle, and we started to sink in.” In Yeager’s version, what followed was an uncomfortable scene that neither enjoyed. Armstrong relates otherwise: “Chuck started to chuckle. Slowly he got to laughing harder. When we came to a full stop, he was just doubled over with laughter.”
As Armstrong and Yeager got out of the T-33, an air force pickup truck immediately drove up to them, a fact that Yeager never mentions. “The driver came out and he had a chain,” Armstrong remembers. “So we put it around the nose gear and hooked it up to the truck and tried to pull the airplane out of the mud, unsuccessfully. We couldn’t do it, so we just sat there on the wing.” Neil actually took eight-millimeter film of the plane stuck in the mud with an inexpensive little movie camera that he had bought for his family: “I don’t think anyone has ever seen the film. I don’t remember ever showing it, because the image quality was not the best.
“What an air force pickup truck was doing there, I have no idea, in retrospect,” Neil wonders. There was a perimeter road on the east shore of the 5,000-foot-high dry lake, but the nearest town, Austin, Nevada, was several miles away. Could Yeager have arranged for the pickup, possibly from Stead AFB near Reno, in anticipation of the T-33 getting stuck?
The mishap took place at about 3:30 in the afternoon. With the sun dropping behind the high mountains to the west, the temperature fell quickly. For men wearing only thin flying suits, it soon grew cold. “Any ideas?” Yeager claims he asked Armstrong, with Neil grimly shaking his head no. Sometime after 4:00 P.M., they heard the sound of NASA’s Gooneybird approaching. According to Yeager, Bikle sent the plane up to Smith Ranch “because he suspected something might happen.” But the logbooks at the Flight Research Center clearly show that the R4D flight left Edwards with pilots McKay and Dana at the controls before Neil and Yeager even took off for Smith Ranch. Its flight plan indicated a northeasterly route to Ely, Nevada, up and along the X-15’s High Range. Because Edwards had not heard from the T-33, NASA radioed McKay and Dana to fly over to Smith Ranch and take a look.
In Yeager’s story, he got back in the airplane, switched on the battery, and radioed McKay, “We only got one choice. If you land over next to the edge of the lake and keep the airplane rolling, you probably won’t sink, and then we can get back off the ground. Give us some time to walk over to the edge of the lake. Don’t slow the airplane down. Keep the door open and we’ll jump aboard.” If Yeager did actually radio this message to the NASA pilots, he failed to mention how he knew where the Gooneybird “probably wouldn’t sink.” It was because it was on that side of the lake that Armstrong had performed the touch-and-go safely in the first place.
Bill Dana does not remember any of the specific conversation on board the returning airplane, but he does recall the “ribbing” that Neil took from Yeager and that Neil “did not rise to the bait.” It was clear to both Dana and McKay, as it certainly was to Armstrong, that “Yeager took delight in Neil’s embarrassment.” Back at Edwards long past sunset, Yeager remembers, Paul Bikle was still there. “I don’t know what he said in private to Neil Armstrong,” Yeager asserts, “but when Bikle saw me he burst out laughing.” According to Bill Dana, “Bikle felt Yeager was the best test pilot he ever worked with, because Chuck had a total recall. When Yeager came back from a flight, he could say, ‘Yeah, I pushed the left rudder a little bit, it rolled right, and then the nose went to the left. He could just about be a human strip chart.’ ” Too bad Yeager’s detailed memory did not extend to pilots he did not like.
In his autobiography and in subsequent published interviews, Yeager expressed several harsher sentiments toward Armstrong, culminating in this opinion: “Neil Armstrong may have been the first man on the Moon, but he was the last guy at Edwards to take any advice from a military pilot.” To which Neil has only responded wryly, “On this occasion at Smith Ranch, I did take his advice!”
Armstrong and Yeager really did not know each other well. What Yeager was expressing in his dealings with Armstrong were long-standing animosities aimed at the entire civilian, NACA/NASA research pilot culture that had operated at Edwards alongside the military ever since the start of the X-1 program in the mid-1940s.
According to Yeager’s autobiography, the NACA “wasn’t thrilled” with the army’s selection of him as the X-1 test pilot: “The NACA team thought I was a wild man.” One of the stories that NACA old-timers still commonly tell about Yeager concerns why the army air forces selected him to fly the Bell X-1 for the assault on the sound barrier. It was not because Yeager was the most qualified to meet the unknown dangers of the first supersonic flight, they say; it was because AAF leadership considered him “the most expendable” of all their test pilots.
Yeager, who remembers being treated with this sort of condescension, called the NACA pilots “the most arrogant bunch” at Edwards: “There was nothing worthwhile that a military pilot could tell them. . . . I rated them about as high as my shoelaces. I lived balls-out, flew the same way. I had my own standards, and as far as I was concerned there was no room at Edwards for test pilots who couldn’t measure up to the machines they flew. I was harsh in my judgments because a pilot either knew what he was doing or he didn’t. The NACA pilots were probably good engineers who could fly precisely, but they were sorry fighter pilots.” Of course, NACA pilots were not supposed to be fighter pilots; they were supposed to be test pilots. “Neil was a pretty good engineer” has always been Yeager’s backhanded compliment, but “he wasn’t too good an airplane driver.”16
Armstrong assesses, “Yeager was a pilot, and a good one. He had limited understanding of aeronautical engineering and limited educational exposure. He really, I don’t think, understood quite what we were trying to learn. He was very good at flying aircraft and doing aerobatics and loved getting into mock combat situations one-on-one. But he seemed to have less interest in precision and getting information and drawing conclusions from that. He seemed to be impatient—not so much bored—but impatient with the planning and the techniques [of] the NACA.”
• • •
Back at the High-Speed Flight Station, Armstrong seemed to be suffering through a prolonged streak of bad luck. On Monday, May 21, Neil returned to work following his family vacation in Ohio.
Following a crew briefing for an X-15 flight scheduled for Major Bob Rushworth the next day, Joe Vensel told Armstrong to fly up and inspect Delamar Lake, about ninety miles north of Las Vegas. After a half-hour flight in an F-104, Neil set up an approach that would allow him to practice his dead-stick landings. “I did it just like we always did,” he recalls. “We made our flare and came down steeply just like the X-15, simulating putting the gear down in the middle of the flare, touching down, and then adding power and taking off. On this occasion I was doing that, but I was looking into the sun and the glare was very difficult.”
Very few of the intermediate lake beds benefited from painted stripes and other markings, as did the regular runways on the big dry lakes near Edwards. From one lake bed to another, the texture of a surface could vary dramatically as could the surface cracks in its clay crust. Every experienced desert pilot knew that landing on a dry lake was like trying to judge height above glassy water. It was a problem in photo optics not dissimilar to what Armstrong and others at NASA studied so carefully in preparation for the lunar landings.
Two factors contributed to the “accident” that happened. First, Armstrong failed to judge his height precisely enough. Second, he failed to realize that, when he extended his landing gear during the flare, the gear did not extend fully and lock in place, causing the fuselage to smack into the lake bed. “So I lost hydraulic pressure,” Armstrong explains. “I wanted to leave the gear down; I couldn’t pick it up, anyway. I couldn’t make it back to Edwards on the fuel I had. It was quite a ways away. I decided to go to Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, which was a lot closer.”
His radio antenna gone, Armstrong could not communicate: “So I had to make a no-radio approach where you go over the field and waggle your wings, and the people in the tower, they’re supposed to see you and realize that you’re making a no-radio approach.”
What Armstrong did not know was the loss of hydraulic pressure had triggered the release of his emergency arresting hook. If Armstrong had known his arresting hook was down, his landing at Nellis AFB would have come off trouble-free; after all, he was a naval aviator with loads of experience making tailhook landings. The Nellis arresting gear consisted of a steel cable attached to a long length of ship’s anchor chain, each link weighing over thirty pounds.
“There was a good jolt when I hit it,” Armstrong relates, “and it was completely unexpected because I didn’t even think about the hook being down, because I couldn’t see exactly what my situation was.” Down the runway for hundreds of feet, this way and that, links of heavy, broken anchor chain went careening like desert tumbleweeds. The F-104 stopped dead in its tracks.
It took the air force thirty minutes to clear the runway and considerably longer to rig a makeshift, interim arresting gear. Driven to the building where the base operations officer was on duty, Armstrong took off his gear, explained what happened to the perturbed base ops officer, and mustered his nerve to telephone back to NASA to report his accident.
By then everyone at NASA had been fearing the worst. When more than thirty minutes passed from Neil’s last check-in, Della Mae Bowling, the flight ops secretary, tried contacting him but got no answer. Then another fifteen minutes passed, still with no word. For the next hour, Della Mae tried calling Neil every four or five minutes. The Edwards control tower had no information. A few minutes later the tower reported that Neil had encountered a problem but had landed safely at Nellis.
Soon, Armstrong was on the phone with Joe Walker, who told NASA test pilot Milt Thompson to go pick him up. The only two-seat aircraft available was an F-104B, which Thompson had not been checked out in. But Joe Vensel insisted, citing “no significant difference” between the B model (which had tip tanks) and the F-104A, which Thompson had flown many times. As soon he left the ground, Thompson knew Vensel “had stretched the truth a bit.” “All over the sky” after takeoff, Thompson could not crank it around tight enough to line up with the runway at Nellis. On his second go-around, a strong crosswind caught Thompson’s airplane, forcing him to plunk down hard enough to blow the left main tire. Chunks of rubber tumbled across the runway where thirty-pound links of steel chain had just been. A fire truck and base ops vehicle quickly joined Thompson’s crippled airplane as he parked it off the center taxiway. The only person who felt worse than Thompson at this moment was Armstrong as he watched the base ops officer shut down the runway for the second time that afternoon thanks to the questionable performance of a NASA pilot.
The “Nellis Affair,” as it came to be known in the unwritten annals of Mojave Desert aviation, did not end there. NASA now had two stranded pilots. It had no choice but to send a third plane to Nellis. Unfortunately, the Gooneybird was up at NASA Ames. The only available plane was a T-33, another two-seater. But, almost beyond belief, as Bill Dana headed in long and hot, it looked like he was going to overshoot the runway. “Oh no, not again!” lamented the base ops officer, while Neil hid his head in his arm and Thompson watched “transfixed.” Fortunately, Dana got the airplane stopped in time. “Please don’t send another NASA airplane!” the air force officer begged. “I’ll personally find one of you transportation back to Edwards.”
True to his word, when an air force C-47 happened to be passing through Nellis on its way to Los Angeles, the ops officer expedited the refueling to haul Thompson away. For years thereafter, the base ops officer related “the tale of the three hot-shot NASA test pilots” that ruined his runways. Whether the man realized later that one of them turned out to be the first man on the Moon is unknown.
“That was a bad day all around,” Armstrong recalls. “We had a couple bruised airplanes, and we made the officials at Nellis irritated. The air force guys got sick and tired of these NASA guys coming and dumping old airplanes on them.”
The following day, a group from NASA went out to Delamar to examine Armstrong’s tire tracks. The day after that, an accident investigation board convened in Joe Vensel’s office. According to Milt Thompson, the tracks on the lake bed told the whole story.17 Armstrong was not present at the accident investigation board, as he left that day for Seattle and another round of consultation on Dyna-Soar. In his logbook for the day of the Delamar flight, Neil recorded the event as an “inadvertent touchdown.” To him, that indicated that he “put the gear down to simulate the X-15 procedure and drag, but did not intend to touch down.” So “the main cause was my misjudging in that glare situation resulting in an inadvertent touchdown prior to the gear fully extending.”
A few of Armstrong’s colleagues at Edwards believe that Paul Bikle, the FRC director, in his own mind did connect the short string of mishaps in Neil’s flying to Neil’s emotional state following his daughter’s death, temporarily grounding Armstrong after the Nellis mishap. Bikle was known for handling his pilots sternly. “Bikle didn’t diddle around,” Stan Butchart remembers. “He always made a decision right then and there, yes or no. . . . You knew where you stood with him.” Armstrong agrees: “Bikle was very pragmatic. He was good at correcting you when he thought you were off base, but he was never disagreeable in the process. He was a fun-loving guy and he tended to joke more than he talked when he was criticizing you. He’d rather make fun of you than make light of you.”
Armstrong declares that the only times he was ever grounded during his career at Edwards were for medical reasons and that Paul Bikle never grounded him or even talked to him about it. Perhaps Bikle did not have to. The day after the debacle in Nevada, Armstrong left on what turned out to be a two-week trip to Seattle. He flew round-trip on a commercial airliner, returning on June 4. The first two days back at Edwards, Neil stayed at home and did not fly. His first flight following the Nellis Affair came on June 7, when he piloted an F-104 in the company of Bill Dana.
Certainly, Armstrong by this time had decided to apply for astronaut selection. When exactly that happened is not clear. NASA formally announced that applications would be accepted for a new group of astronauts on April 18, 1962. This was two days before Armstrong’s X-15 overshoot flight. Very possibly, Neil knew nothing about NASA’s announcement until April 27. On that day, the FRC’s in-house newsletter, the X-Press, ran a story entitled “NASA Will Select More Astronauts,” specifying an additional five to ten slots. The new pilots would participate in support operations for Project Mercury and then join the Mercury astronauts in piloting the two-man Gemini spacecraft.
The requirements for selection could not have suited Armstrong better if had they been written for him specifically. The successful applicant had to be an experienced jet test pilot—preferably one presently engaged in flying high-performance aircraft. He must have attained experimental flight status through military service, the aircraft industry, or NASA. He had to hold a college degree in the physical or biological sciences or in engineering. He needed to be a U.S. citizen who was under thirty-five years of age (at the time of selection) and six feet or less in height. His parent organization, in this case NASA’s Flight Research Center, had to recommend him for the job.
The director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Robert R. Gilruth, would be accepting applications until Friday, June 1, 1962. Pilots meeting the qualifications were to be interviewed in July. Those who passed a battery of written examinations on their engineering and scientific knowledge were then to be thoroughly examined by a group of medical specialists. The training program for the new astronauts was to include work with design and development engineers, simulator flying, centrifuge training, additional scientific training, and flights in high-performance aircraft. Virtually the entire training syllabus involved activities that Armstrong had already done.
Curiously, the same day as the X-Press report, Life magazine published an issue headlined “Man’s Journey to the Moon: Preview of the Greatest Adventure of All Time.” The cover shot featured a man testing a “Moonsuit.” Inside was a feature entitled “Our Next Goal, Man on the Moon.” Sidebars and captions highlighted “Moonship and Rocket in the Works,” “A Model Menagerie of Moon Vehicles,” “Complex Mysteries to Solve Before Fixing a Flight Plan,” and “The Hunt for Ways to Live There.” Whether Armstrong saw this issue of Life is uncertain, but, even if he did not, its existence in April 1962 suggests just how deeply the idea of the Moon landing had penetrated the American psyche in the year since President Kennedy’s lunar commitment. This deepening public interest in the possibility of a manned Moon landing “before the decade is out” surely played some small role in Armstrong’s thinking about whether to become an astronaut.
So, too, may have his visit to the Seattle World’s Fair. From May 9 to 11, 1962, Armstrong was in the city to attend the Second Annual Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space, an event cosponsored by NASA, the American Astronautical Society, the American Rocket Society, the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots to explore the potential international applications of space science and technology. Armstrong with coauthors and fellow X-15 pilots Joe Walker, Forrest Petersen, and Bob White, all members of the test pilots’ “100,000 Foot Club,” gave a presentation on “The X-15 Flight Program.” Other speakers at the conference included NASA Administrator James E. Webb (“The Role of Government in Scientific Exploration”), Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (“The New World of Space”), director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center Bob Gilruth (“Projects Mercury and Gemini”), NASA’s Director of Spacecraft and Flight Missions George M. Low (“Project Apollo”), and several other notables in space-related fields.
Attendance at this conference and at the conjoining Seattle World’s Fair could not help but impress a person who was thinking seriously about a career in space exploration. The fair, whose theme was “the possibilities of life in the 21st Century,” featured the 605-foot-tall Space Needle and the Monorail, both of which became Seattle landmarks. Festivities began on May 9 when former president Dwight D. Eisenhower started a clock in Seattle that was to count down to the end of the millennium. At the very same instant, President Kennedy, on Easter holiday in Florida, pressed a telegraph key that triggered a radio telescope in Maine that picked up an impulse from a star ten thousand light-years away and then lit up the fairgrounds.
The star attraction on the second day of the World’s Fair was astronaut John Glenn, fresh off his orbital flight for Project Mercury two and half months earlier. “Throngs of awestruck admirers” lined Seattle’s streets to catch a glimpse of the famous red-haired “spaceman.”
Only one person besides Armstrong ever knew that Neil’s application to Houston arrived late. This was Dick Day, the FRC flight simulation expert with whom Armstrong worked closely ever since Neil joined the NACA’s High-Speed Flight Station. In February 1962, Day transferred from Edwards to Houston to become assistant director of the Flight Crew Operations Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center. In this capacity, Day oversaw all astronaut training programs and equipment. Two months after arriving in Houston, Day also found himself, thanks to his former boss at Edwards, Walter Williams, not just a member of the selection panel for the second group of astronauts but the panel’s ad hoc secretary.
According to Day, Armstrong’s application for astronaut selection missed the June 1 deadline. Day explained how and why Neil’s application was processed anyway: “There were several people from Edwards who had gone on to Houston. Walt Williams, for one. Walt had gone on to be the operations director in Houston for the Space Task Group. He wanted Neil to apply, and I wanted Neil to apply. I really don’t know why Neil delayed his application, but he did, and all the applications came to me, since I was the head of flight crew training. Neil’s application came in late, definitely, by about a week. But he had done so many things so well at Edwards. He was so far and away the best qualified, more than any other, certainly as compared to the first group of astronauts. We wanted him in.”
Technically, since Armstrong’s application missed the deadline, NASA should not have accepted it. However, no one but Day and Williams knew the application arrived late. When it came in, Day slipped it into the pile with all the other applications prior to the selection panel’s first meeting. Personally, Day had no concerns whatsoever about Neil’s prospective performance as an astronaut—and Day knew the ups and down of Neil’s flying record at Edwards as well as anyone, except for the details of what had happened since Day left Edwards in February 1962: “I never gave a thought to his personal affairs, and I don’t think Walt Williams or anyone else did, either.”
Armstrong does not remember sending his application in late. Yet he does credit Day, who died in 2004, for his powers of persuasion: “You were responsible for getting me to transfer over to Houston,” Neil wrote Day in a 1997 e-mail.
Except for Monday, May 21—the day of the Nellis Affair—Armstrong did not spend a single day in his office at Edwards from Wednesday, May 9, to his return from Seattle on June 4. Undoubtedly, the application waited for him on his desk. If he completed it soon after returning to Edwards, the timing of its arrival in Houston would fit what Dick Day has indicated, about a week late.
To some at Edwards, Neil’s decision came as a surprise. “He never mentioned anything to anybody,” relates his good friend Stan Butchart. “We never knew that he had applied, unless maybe he had told Joe Walker. But Neil never said anything to me, and we were as close as we could be. The first thing we knew was when it was announced.” Fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson concurs: “I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that Neil wanted to leave Edwards and go into the space program.”
Virtually everyone at Edwards thought that Armstrong was a great choice to become an astronaut, especially when it was announced in early June 1962 that he was to receive the prestigious Octave Chanute Award. Presented by the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, the Chanute Award went to the pilot that the IAS deemed had contributed the most to the aerospace sciences during the previous year. According to Dick Day, Paul Bikle, the director of NASA’s Flight Research Center at Edwards and Day’s own former boss, did not think so positively of Armstrong. Bikle chose not to recommend Armstrong for astronaut selection, because, in his mind, Neil’s immediate past record in the air raised some serious concerns about his performance.
At the end of May 1962 Neil scheduled a two-week trip to Europe to coincide with the 21st Meeting of the Flight Mechanics Panel of the NATO Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development, to be held in Paris from July 6 to 10. On his way to France, where Armstrong would present a paper (coauthored by Robert Rushworth), he was to stop in England in order to fly the new Handley Page HP-115, a very low aspect-ratio (70-degree leading-edge sweep) research airplane built to investigate the low-speed characteristics of the slender delta, the wing form being considered for the British supersonic transport that evolved into the Anglo-French Concorde.18
Paul Bikle pulled the plug on Neil’s British sojourn. In a memorandum sent to NASA Headquarters on May 29, 1962, Bikle wrote, “Due to commitments of Mr. Neil A. Armstrong in relation to the X-15 program, it will be impossible for Armstrong to participate in flights of United Kingdom aircraft” specified for the last week of June.
Whether the accelerating workload in the X-15 program was the only reason for Bikle canceling Armstrong’s visit to England in the summer of 1962 is a question only Paul Bikle can answer, and he is no longer living. Given the series of mishaps in Neil’s flying that spring—culminating in the Nellis Affair on May 21 and the accident investigation board that looked into it on May 23, just five days prior to Bikle sending the memo—and given Bikle’s subsequent refusal to support Neil’s astronaut application, one can only wonder whether Bikle privately did not want Armstrong over in England test-flying one of the RAF’s newest experimental jets. Neil never understood Bikle’s decision as such: “I am confident that Paul’s memo was a form response. There could have been many reasons for his conclusion. We would have to know what the overall workload at the time was and how many FRC pilots were available to handle it.” Forty-two years after Bikle canceled the British trip, Neil does not harbor any disappointment, “but I don’t remember well enough to say I wasn’t.”
Armstrong did eventually have the chance to fly the HP-115, on June 22, 1970, eleven months after his Moon landing.
• • •
No one has ever understood the mentality of test pilots or astronauts better than Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., the original director of NASA’s manned spaceflight operations at Mission Control in Houston. Upon graduating with an aeronautical engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1944, Kraft went to work in the Stability and Control Branch of NACA Langley’s Flight Research Division where he rubbed elbows with such talented flight test engineers as Bob Gilruth, Charles Donlan, and Walt Williams, men who in the summer of 1958, following Sputnik, took Kraft with them into the Space Task Group, which planned and administered Project Mercury.
Kraft did not serve on the selection panel for the second group of astronauts, but he had a lot to do with defining the selection criteria. “Charles Donlan was in charge of that,” Kraft recalls, “and he talked to me about it because he valued the association I was having with the first seven astronauts. I emphasized that we should go talk to the people who know the candidates, know their character, and know their capabilities. . . . People like Gilruth, Williams, and myself were looking for qualified test pilots.
“I hardly knew Armstrong out at Edwards,” Kraft continues. “I didn’t know about his daughter’s death. I did know that he had had a few accidents—what pilot hasn’t—but I never associated them with any psychological event. What I knew was that Walt Williams thought he was first rate. Certainly, based on what we knew about him, and what we saw when we met him, Gilruth and I and everybody else felt the same way.”
Given the emphasis that Kraft, Donlan, and others placed on background and verbal checks, it is surprising that individuals in leadership positions in Houston did not know about Neil’s personal situation—not that it would have changed their thinking about the strength of his credentials for astronaut selection one iota. Today Kraft believes there was “absolutely no way” Armstrong’s piloting performance wasn’t affected in the short term by the tragedy. “The human brain is no different than any other computer. It’s a better computer, but it’s got to have those kinds of faults in it. The pilot won’t even be aware of it. The pilot is probably doing [the flying] to try to get away from it. He wants to go back and get in the fray. I think any good flight surgeon would not have let him fly for a while. But back at Edwards at that time, the only thing that a flight surgeon would have been doing is qualifying him physically every ‘x’ number of days. The chief test pilot up there [Joe Walker] should have been aware of the problem and kept him from flying. . . . Knowing Neil and knowing Janet, too, as I got to do, they might not have known how they were coping with it. They’re both of the personality that would try to bury that.”
Neil himself should be given the last word. “Were you concerned at all about how your personal situation could have been affecting your job performance, especially your flying, in late 1961 and early 1962?”
“I’d have to think that [my] performance was somewhat affected by the situation.”
“Did Karen’s death play any role in your decision to leave Edwards and become an astronaut?”
“I don’t remember any factors from Karen’s loss that influenced my work. Personally, it was a trying time. It might have affected my concentration on my work to some extent at the time, because we’d be going into the hospital and to the doctor. You know, a lot of families have these kinds of problems that they have to deal with. It’s not that unusual, unfortunately, but you just have to deal with those kinds of things. We did.”
Whether Neil and Janet Armstrong handled “those kinds of things” together as constructively as they might have is another question.