Even before he completed his debriefings on the Gemini VIII flight in late March 1966, Armstrong was named backup commander for Gemini XI. So quickly and thoroughly did he get into his training for the new role that he was not even able to stay overnight with his family in Wapakoneta the April day that his hometown staged its gala celebration in his honor.
The Gemini IX and Gemini X missions took place within a span of seven weeks in June and July 1966, repeating the pattern of a relatively easy rendezvous followed by a problematic docking. The Agena intended for Gemini IX never made it into space. It spiraled deep into the Atlantic Ocean after its Atlas booster failed shortly after launch. Astronauts Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan waited for another day, but on June 3, 1966, what they got as their target vehicle was not a second Agena but the barebones “augmented target docking adapter” once considered for Gemini VIII. After completing their rendezvous, Stafford and Cernan discovered that the ATDA’s shroud had not jettisoned. That made docking impossible. The crew of Gemini IX instead performed a number of different rendezvous maneuvers.
For the Gemini X flight of July 18 to 21, 1966, Armstrong served as a CapCom in Houston. This time the docking worked, as commander John Young nestled his machine to a solid hookup with a brand-new Agena. This was the first time that a manned spacecraft had fully embraced a target vehicle since Armstrong’s Gemini VIII flight and the first time it ever stayed embraced. Later in the mission, pilot Mike Collins performed a remarkable EVA lasting an hour and a half. Given the variety of significant problems that had been plaguing all previous American space walks, Collins’s successful EVA came as an extremely welcome result.
For Armstrong, training as the backup commander for Gemini XI was more about teaching than learning. “This was my third run-through: Gemini V, VIII, and now XI. On the other hand, I had a new right-seat guy with me. Bill Anders was my pilot on the backup crew, and he had not been through any of this before, so everything was new to him. I probably still did quite a few of those basic things so Bill would get up to speed.”
What most interested and concerned Armstrong about Gemini XI were those untested aspects of the mission, particularly regarding pilot maneuvers. Rendezvous with the Agena was supposed to occur on the spacecraft’s very first revolution about the planet, a maneuver that simulated the type of rendezvous that might be used by a lunar module with a command module after the LM returned from the surface of the Moon. Some of the mission planners called it a “brute force” technique, since the spacecraft would be approaching the target vehicle at very high speed, whereas all earlier rendezvous flights had closed in on the target rather leisurely, waiting until the start of the fourth orbit before beginning to station keep.
“There was a lot of concern that it wasn’t going to be successful,” Gemini XI pilot Dick Gordon remembers. “For the Apollo application, the desire was to rendezvous as rapidly as possible because the lifetime of the LM’s ascent stage was quite limited in terms of its fuel supply. It was a dynamic situation all the way. We had only a two-second launch window, the shortest launch window ever, because we had to launch just when the Agena was overhead. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to do it in the first orbit. Then the rendezvous calculations had to be made much more rapidly. As the backup commander, Neil supported all of the work that went into that very, very well.”
The other major novelty in Gemini XI was the experimental tethering of the Gemini spacecraft with the Agena via a nearly 100-foot Dacron cord. One goal of the tether experiment, according to Armstrong, was to “find out if you could keep two vehicles in formation without any fuel input or control action.” Another goal was to see whether tethering enhanced the stability of two rendezvousing spacecraft, thereby lessening the risk of their bumping into each other.
In the summer leading up to the launch in September 1966, Armstrong and Anders helped Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, the prime crew, work on the techniques required to carry out all the aspects of the Gemini XI mission. Much of that time, the four men spent together in a beach house on the Cape. According to Neil, “Kennedy Space Center had been built on a big piece of ground, some of which had gone through condemnation proceedings to allow government acquisition of the land. There were some private homes in various places that became government property. Several houses ran along the beach north of the Apollo launchpad. One of them NASA maintained for the astronauts. In our training for Gemini XI, the four of us found this to be a convenient place to go to discuss problems. We’d go out on the beach and work out trajectory procedures and rendezvous procedures by drawing diagrams on the sand and walking around our drawings and essentially acting out the procedure and working out the difficult parts that we didn’t quite understand. This was a very relaxing but a useful endeavor. Sometimes we’d have our cook from the regular astronaut quarters put together a picnic lunch and we’d take it out there with us, spend a few hours, with no telephone to bother us, and we’d really concentrate on something. That was really good.”
Gemini XI launched on September 12, 1966. In the words of Mike Collins, it turned out to be “a very nice flight, indeed.” The brute-force rendezvous technique worked well. The spacecraft shattered the 475-mile-high world altitude record set just two months before by John Young and Collins in Gemini X when it rose to an orbital apogee of some 850 miles. In the process, Conrad and Gordon snapped some truly spectacular color photographs of the planet and its curvature, including one astonishing picture of the entire Persian Gulf region.
The tether exercise caused several nervous moments. Dick Gordon’s connecting the tether from the Gemini to the Agena during his first EVA turned into a major athletic contest. “Ride ’em, cowboy!” Conrad shouted to his partner at one point, as Gordon, nearly blind from sweat, sat perched upon the nose of the spacecraft trying to connect the tether to the target vehicle to which it was docked. Conrad ordered Dick to come back in after being out for only 30 of the EVA’s planned 107 minutes, so tired and overheated did Gordon appear to become during the exercise. Even releasing the 100-foot tether from its stowage container on the Agena proved to be a chore, as the Dacron line got hung up on a patch of Velcro. Linked between the two orbiting spacecraft, the line rotated oddly, occasionally causing such oscillations that Conrad needed to steady the vehicle with his controls. As Armstrong remembers, the astronauts had “a lot of difficulty achieving stable orientations while tethered, though they were eventually able to get stable situations while in the spin-up mode.” After being hogtied to the Agena for three hours, Conrad and Gordon happily put an end to the puzzling experiment by jettisoning the docking bar. On Gemini XII Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell successfully completed the tether experiment and proved that the differential gravity between two orbiting vehicles tethered at slightly different altitudes permitted stationkeeping without the use of fuel.
Neil followed the Gemini XI mission from the CapCom station at Mission Control in Houston. With the flight’s successful conclusion on September 15, 1966, and following his participation in several of the debriefings, Neil’s responsibilities in the Gemini program came to an end.
There was one last Gemini flight, Gemini XII, from November 11 to 15, 1966. Jim Lovell, the commander, and Buzz Aldrin, the pilot, put a great finishing touch to the proud Gemini program by carrying out an impressive rendezvous and docking flight involving fifty-nine revolutions of the planet. The most notable achievement of the flight was Aldrin’s very successful EVA informed by simulated EVA experience in a large water tank at the Manned Spacecraft Center. For over five hours Buzz made what earlier space walker Mike Collins called “a cool and methodical demonstration” of how an effective space walk should be made by making proper use of new handholds, footrests, and other anchoring devices that NASA had newly installed on the Gemini and Agena spacecraft.
Armstrong has always sided with the majority of U.S. space program analysts who have believed that Gemini was a vital bridge between Mercury and Apollo. “I believe that Gemini was timely and synergistic,” Armstrong asserts. “It provided millions of hours of real experience in the preparation of space vehicles for flight and the processing of those vehicles through the apparatus at Cape Kennedy. Further, the Gemini experience required the development of the procedures required for the launch of multiple vehicles—the Gemini plus the Agena. It provided the flight experiences—especially for rendezvous—that were critical for us to understand. Gemini allowed us to work out communications procedures with multiple craft and gave us innumerable opportunities to increase the knowledge, experience, and confidence level of people throughout the space program. Gemini was just a wonderful spacecraft. I was a strong booster of Gemini.”
Indeed, all of the specified goals of Gemini had been achieved, and then some: demonstration of the ability to rendezvous and dock with a target vehicle; demonstration of the value of a manned spacecraft for scientific and technological experiments; performance of work by astronauts in space; use of a powered, fueled satellite to provide primary and secondary propulsion for a docked spacecraft; long-duration spaceflights without extraordinary ill effects on the astronauts; and precision landing of a spacecraft. Major records set during the Gemini program included the longest manned spaceflight (330 hours and 35 minutes), the highest altitude (851 miles), and the longest total EVA time for one astronaut (5 hours and 28 minutes, compiled by Aldrin on his three separate EVAs during Gemini XII). By the time Lovell and Aldrin reentered the atmosphere, bringing Gemini XII and the entire program to a close, time spent in space by a piloted U.S. spacecraft stood at 1,993 hours.
It chagrined Neil Armstrong to know that his abbreviated Gemini VIII flight accounted for only some ten hours of them.
• • •
Such disappointment was trivial to the tragic personal losses that Neil and Janet continued to suffer. On June 8, 1966, two days after the splashdown of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan in Gemini IX, Neil’s boss and best friend from his days back at Edwards, Joe Walker, was killed in a freak midair collision over the Mojave. It happened when Walker’s F-104N Starfighter inexplicably flew too close to a plane with which he was flying in formation—the XB-70A Valkyrie, a $500 million experimental bomber that North American Aviation had designed for Mach 3–plus speeds—and became caught in the mammoth plane’s extraordinarily powerful wingtip vortex. Walker died instantly. One of the Valkyrie pilots, air force major Carl S. Cross, died in the wreckage of the bomber. The other XB-70A pilot, Al White, a test pilot for North American, survived via the plane’s ejection capsule, but not without some serious injuries. Magnifying the tragedy was that the deaths came during what amounted to a publicity shoot for General Electric.
In Houston, Armstrong got a phone call from Edwards shortly after the accident happened. It had only been three months since the fatal crash in St. Louis that had killed his good friend Elliot See in the company of Charlie Bassett. Squeezed between those two fatal airplane accidents, Neil had survived his own near-disaster in the dizzying whirligig otherwise known as Gemini VIII. Returning to Lancaster to attend yet another emotionally charged funeral was almost too much to bear, but Neil and Janet were among the 700 persons who attended Walker’s memorial service and burial. “All my adult life had been interrupted by the loss of friends,” Neil remarks.
• • •
By the autumn of 1966, the Armstrongs were definitely in need of a vacation. At the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, they got one the likes of which no astronaut couple could ever forget.
In early October 1966, prior to the flight of Lovell and Aldrin in Gemini XII, Neil and Janet took off in a Convair 580 transport on a twenty-four-day goodwill tour of Latin America. Touring with Armstrong was Dick Gordon, just off his Gemini XI flight, and Dr. George Low, the former deputy director for manned spaceflight at NASA Headquarters who a few months earlier had become head of Apollo Applications at MSC. Joining them was Janet, Gordon’s wife, Barbara, and Low’s wife, Mary R., and Dr. George Armstrong (no relation to Neil), chief of MSC’s Space Physiology Branch. Representatives from sponsor agencies included Ashley Hewitt and Gerry Whittington (protocol, State Department); Brian Duff and Fred Asselin (public affairs, NASA); and Si Bourgin, Harry Caicedo, Skip Lambert, and Joe Santos (United States Information Agency).
The entourage traveled 15,000 miles through eleven countries and made appearances in fourteen major cities. Everywhere the astronauts went, throngs of humanity lined the streets. Crowds rushed them. Throughout Latin America, they found the people “spontaneous, friendly, and extremely warm.”
This trip was Neil’s first brush with the iconic staus that would later change his life so dramatically. In Colombia, the second country visited, “the reception was overwhelming,” George Low wrote in his journal. In Quito, the capital of Ecuador, the people “were not satisfied to stay on the sidewalks” and gave the motorcade “just barely enough room for the cars to pass through.” In São Paolo, Brazil, the entourage saw people hanging out of nearly every window. In Santiago, Chile, little old ladies clapped their hands overhead and yelled “Viva!” More than 2,500 guests showed up at a formal dinner reception in Rio de Janeiro, each one of whom expected to shake hands with the astronauts. At the University of Brasilia, 1,500 people crowded into a 500-seat auditorium to hear the astronauts speak. Over the course of the three-and-a-half-week journey, untold millions got a look at the visiting American astronauts. “Whenever possible,” Low wrote, “Neil and Dick were out of their cars shaking hands, signing autographs, and fostering a very personal relationship.” All over South America, the tour made front-page headlines and national television, as when the president of Venezuela, Raul Leoni, and his children welcomed the Americans at La Casona, the presidential palace on the outskirts of Caracas.
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia mounted heavy security precautions. In La Paz, Bolivia, armed troops stood every quarter mile from the airport to the center of town. In Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, there was almost no military security, but a police escort performed crowd control. In a few places, like Buenos Aires, crowds overwhelmed the visiting Americans. In several instances, the men from the State Department, USIA, and NASA were forced to handle security.
Other than being mobbed regularly by autograph seekers, there were surprisingly few incidents. During the astronauts’ presentation at the University of Brasilia, eleven days into the tour, a group of students raised a banner: “Peace on earth first, leave Vietnam.” Low wrote about the experience, “Here we were quite concerned as to whether we would get out in one piece, but it turned out that the crowd was very well behaved.”
The tour first ran into organized antagonism in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country that prided itself on possessing the most democratic form of government in South America. Every city block or two, somebody rushed the motorcade, yelling, “Murderers, get out of Vietnam!” or some similar slogan. Interpreter Fernando Van Reigersberg felt quite sure that the hostilities were part of an “organized campaign to embarrass us.”
In Panama City, the last stop, “People lined the streets,” Low wrote, “but the reception was very cool. There was no applause; there were generally only cold stares. It may be the general feeling hanging over from the difficulties of Panama two years ago [in 1964, when a diplomatic squabble over the flying of both the U.S. and Panamanian flags in the Canal Zone deteriorated into a riot]; or it may be the fact that every rooftop along the motorcade route was covered with armed soldiers.” Ironically, the only place the Americans found “the usual warm greetings” was in the Canal Zone, at Balboa High School, where all the trouble had started in early 1964.
For the government Convair turboprop, trouble surfaced en route from Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC, to Caracas, Venezuela. Violent turbulence threw Dick Gordon, among others, to the ceiling, disturbed much of the luggage, and splashed a passenger’s Bloody Mary all over the cabin. That inauspicious beginning was nothing compared to the wild ride into Asunción, Paraguay. “The pilots were on the radio,” Armstrong relates, “‘Well, the weather at Asunción is getting a little iffy.’ Two hours went by and we were still in the clouds. We were coming down lower and lower trying to get a visual. Finally we broke down out of the clouds, and the mountains were all around us. We had a Paraguayan fellow traveling with us from São Paolo to help orient us culturally. But he wasn’t supposed to be there to navigate the airplane! Looking out of the window, he saw a lake that he recognized and he said, ‘I know that place!’ The crew used him to help direct us in.”
Armstrong proceeded to greet local dignitaries with a few words in their native Guarani, an ancient language of tribal peoples. The words that Neil uttered sounded like “Ro-voo-ah ro-zhoo-a-guari para-guay-pay,” meaning simply, “We are happy to be in Paraguay.”
Armstrong’s burgeoning talent for language impressed all of his traveling companions, including fellow astronaut Dick Gordon, who knew no Spanish other than “Quiero presentarle a mi esposa,” which he learned to introduce his wife, or “escotch y agua,” to ask for the occasional scotch and water. As soon as Neil heard that he would be making the Latin America trip, he had enrolled in a Spanish conversation class, as had Gordon’s wife Barbara. Aboard the Convair, Neil conversed with Fernando Van Reigersberg. “Fernando was Dutch,” Armstrong explains, “but he had lived in Algeria as a boy. He had been President Kennedy’s interpreter when he went to Latin America.” Although Armstrong cited Van Reigersberg for laying “the groundwork for everything we needed to know in all the different [eleven] countries,” Neil, before embarking on the tour, had spent many evenings with a set of encyclopedias.
Armstrong peppered his speeches with references to South American heroes such as Simón Bolívar and especially to the continent’s aviation pioneers. Neil knew that, in the view of most Brazilians, their countryman Alberto Santos-Dumont was the true Father of Aviation, not the Wright brothers. Neil’s rather detailed knowledge of the career of the great Brazilian aviator (most of whose flying was done in Europe) informed his gracious remarks during the welcoming ceremony at the Santos-Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro.
At the Venezuelan Science Academy, Columbian Association of Engineers, Centro Columbo Americano, Peruvian Instituto Geofisica, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and Argentine Commission for Space Research, the astronauts narrated a film outlining key elements of their Gemini missions. In a subsequent slide show, they illustrated rendezvous, docking, EVA, the burn out of orbit, and reentry. Even these technical audiences were stirred by high-orbit perspectives of the Earth’s surface, especially shots of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, the Andes in Ecuador, an avalanche in Peru, and the mouth of the Amazon River. Dr. George Armstrong then summarized the medical results of the Gemini flights, followed by George Low offering a final series of slides outlining the upcoming Apollo program.
Over and over again, Gordon responded to questions about how it felt to be outside the spacecraft and why his visor fogged up during his EVA. Regular questions for Neil included: “Did you fear death during your spaceflight?” “Did flying in space change your belief in God or your view of the world?” Typical for Neil, he gave brief, cryptic responses to this sort of broad questioning, preferring to focus on the engineering, technology, and science of his time in space.
Armstrong’s successful presentations were not what most impressed George Low about Neil. Prior to the trip, Armstrong and Low had barely known each other. Low had been a research engineer at NACA Lewis in Cleveland, where Neil had started his career as a test pilot, and “we had crossed paths occasionally.” When Neil did get to know him better in Houston, Armstrong thought Low’s abilities were “really very strong. He was thoughtful but pragmatic, and he had many creative ideas of his own. He was not an immovable type. He listened.”
The admiration was mutual. “Neil had a knack of making short little speeches in response to toasts and when getting medals, in response to questions of any kind,” Low recalled. “He never failed to choose the right words.” In his travel journal Low concluded, “All I can say is that I am impressed. Neil also made a very significant effort in learning Spanish, and even learning Guarani for Paraguay, and this, of course, made a tremendous hit with the people.”
Given the important role that George Low would come to play in future discussions about Apollo crew assignments, and in the spring of 1969 about which astronaut should be the first to step down off the LM and onto the Moon’s surface, it is clear that his extremely positive evaluation of Armstrong cannot be overlooked as an influential factor in Neil’s subsequent fortunes as an astronaut.
Low was not the only person in a leadership position to view Armstrong as the right sort of individual to represent America, at home and abroad. Inside the State Department, USIA, and NASA, politically minded officials felt that the goodwill tour through Latin America had struck a blow for “the American way.” Low had it on authority that, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin toured Latin America in 1962, Gagarin had come off as a space hero but as nothing more. “Our visit was looked upon as an official visit by a team of scientists as well as space heroes,” Low reported to friends back in Houston and Washington. “Perhaps this made little difference to the population in general, but it was noted by the officials we met, by the scientific community, and by the press.” An important factor in this sentiment was due “to the astronauts’ complete ability to answer all questions, and the realization that they were engineers and scientists as well as test pilots. . . . [It is] a powerful tool that the United States can use in our international relations, pursued for the purpose of peace.”