¹ Armstrong family involvement in the French and Indian War, and in the American Revolution, remains incompletely documented, but there is no doubt that some offshoots of the family (and definitely some in-laws) served in military capacities. The husband of John Armstrong’s younger sister Hannah (1742 or 1743–1816), Irish-born John Moore (1741–1818), entered the War for Independence as a private and may have served as a combat surgeon. John Armstrong, with the help of his sons, built along the Monongahela a “strong house” refuge for patriots.

² According to a volunteer group in Warren, Ohio, that has worked through the early 2000s to turn the Warren airport site into a historical exhibit, the date of Neil’s inaugural flight was July 26, 1936. If that date is correct, Neil was still only five when he experienced his first airplane ride, his sixth birthday not coming for ten more days.

³ Without knowing the scores of the other students in Class 5-49, it is impossible to assess Armstrong’s performance relative to his peers’. With two “Outstandings,” five “Very Goods,” and one “Fair,” it seems that Neil’s scores were above average but not at the very top of the class. It is known that James J. Ashford, a member of Training Class 2-49 who later was killed in action while serving with Armstrong in VF-51, received “Outstandings” in all categories, with a 4.0 in “Character.”

⁴ On January 3, 1951, divisions of VF-51 flew flak suppression in a concerted attack against heavy gun emplacements protecting a trestle-type railway bridge near Yangdok, west of Wonsan in Green Six. Armstrong was flying CAP that day, but Wam Mackey’s division (Cheshire, Rickelton, and Kramer) was involved, and Mackey remembers the flak being so heavy over the target that “it looked like someone had pulled a circus tent open and all these balloons [of antiaircraft fire] were coming up out of it.” Mackey thought to himself, “Good God! Please say they [the ADs following behind] got it [the bridge] on the first pass!” (WAM to author, Sept. 21, 2002, pp. 22–23). Unfortunately, they did not, “so we had to rendezvous and come back and do it a second time.” Yet not a single plane was lost.

On January 5, Armstrong was again assigned to CAP. The targets were near the town of Potan, northeast of Pyongyang. A January 8 strike destroyed two bridges, and Neil participated in it as part of Carpenter’s division. So did Bob Kaps as part of Beauchamp’s. In his journal that night, Kaps noted: “Flew FLAK suppression for drop strike. They [the AD pilots] did a good job. Don’t envy any of them” (Kaps journal, Jan. 8, 1952). This particular strike occurred the same day that the squadron heard it would be staying in the Korean theater until March.

Yet another coordinated bridge attack took out four more bridges in the region around Potan on January 18. It was another day that Neil did not fly. The last big coordinated effort of the fourth tour occurred on January 23. It involved two VF-51 divisions, Mackey’s and Wenzell’s. On that day Armstrong flew a photo escort mission over Tonchon. Locating a number of railway locomotives sitting in a marshaling yard, his mission resulted in two of the locomotives being destroyed.

⁵ A key parameter in aerodynamics, Reynolds numbers—named after the nineteenth-century English scientist Osborne Reynolds—are a nondimensional parameter representing the ratio of the momentum forces to the viscous forces about a body in a fluid flow. Generally speaking, the higher the Reynolds number, the more realistic are the results of any model tests to actual full-scale performance.

⁶ “G” (g) is the unit of measurement for bodies undergoing acceleration that is equal to the acceleration of gravity—approximately 32.2 feet per second per second at sea level.

⁷ The zooms flown by Armstrong and other NACA pilots in the F-104 were designed primarily to investigate reaction controls. According to Armstrong, “We would accelerate to Mach 2 at about 35,000 feet, pull up to the programmed climb angle, shut down the engine at about 60,000 feet (to prevent engine overheating), then, at 75,000 to 80,000 feet, began a planned control sequence with the reaction control system [a three-axis reaction control system utilizing hydrogen peroxide rockets on the wingtips and in the nose]. The top of the zoom was usually about 90,000” (NAA to author, Nov. 26, 2002, p. 15). “We were the first to do this kind of maneuver,” Armstrong states (NAA: e-mail to author, Jan. 22, 2004). “I am confident that we had the only aircraft so configured and were the first to use reaction controls in this mode.”

⁸ The most authoritative sources for the suggestion that Yeager “plain screwed up” have been Major Robert W. Smith, a 1956 graduate of the air force’s Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards and the primary pilot in the NF-104A program; Colonel William Haynes, one of Smith’s TPS classmates and an officer involved at the time in the air force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar program; and Robert G. Hoey, then the air force’s deputy flight test engineer at Edwards. According to these sources, the stability derivatives from Bob Smith’s previous NF-104A flight of November 1963 had not yet been reduced when Yeager, then the commander of the TPS, decided to take the airplane up for his own assault on the world altitude record (for a ground-launched airplane), a record that Smith had just set at 118,600 feet. Both Smith and Hoey tried to get Yeager to wait until the data was completed. They also strongly encouraged him to spend at least a little time in the NF-104A simulator. But Yeager refused both pieces of advice, insisting that “If Smith can fly it, I can.” If he had trained on the fixed-base simulator, according to Hoey, Yeager would have learned, among other things, the right way to recover the aircraft from a flat spin via deployment of an emergency chute. A pilot’s natural inclination was to do what Yeager did: to push forward gently with the stick, an instinctive move that only accelerated the plane’s nosing up. The best thing to do, as could be learned in only the simulator, was to come full forward on the stick, even though normal pilot experience indicated that action would turn the plane upside down. Yet it was only that counterintuitive use of the stick that could have gotten the NF-104A out of a flat spin using the chute. Yet another Edwards pilot has suggested that Yeager failed to reset the trim tab during the recovery and, because of this, was unable to control the nose pitch-up when the drag chute was jettisoned.

The real tragedy of Yeager’s rush to fly the NF-104A, in the opinion of these air force insiders, was that, when Yeager failed to recover from the spin and nearly lost his life, the consensus at the TPS was that the NF-104A was too dangerous an aircraft to be flying zooms. So the air force canceled the NF-104A project, Smith said, “thereby depriving the school and its students of a tool that would have allowed real cutting-edge training and development of some crackerjack test pilots.” For a critique of Yeager’s version of what occurred during his December 1963 flight in the NF-104A, see “Yeager’s View, in Review,” at NF104.com. On this Web site, the views of Smith, Haynes, and Hoey are all expressed.

⁹ In response to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Armstrong has said: “I haven’t read the book critically. I did see the movie. I thought it was very good filmmaking but terrible history: the wrong people working on the wrong projects at the wrong times. It bears no resemblance whatever to what actually was going on.”

¹⁰ Besides twice flying the X-1B as part of the reaction-control research, Armstrong sought a possible fix to a problem known as aileron “buzz.” This was a dangerously rapid vibration of an aileron (considered a type of flutter) that occurred especially at transonic speeds. Neil’s X-1B flights involved fitting peculiarly shaped wedges on the ailerons to see if they might solve the buzz problem.

¹¹ Grace Walker, for one, has always wondered whether there might have been an environmental factor involved in the death of Karen Armstrong: “There has been any number of brain tumors out in that valley. There was a family up in the hills near where Janet and Neil lived that had two children die of brain tumors. In 1951, when we came to Edwards, the government was still doing a lot of aboveground atomic testing in Nevada. When it did, a day or so after, we would have these terrible east winds, just blowing dust and dirt. You almost never get an east wind in the desert; it’s usually northwest all the time. I’ve often thought that we probably had atomic fallout lying around on those hills and going into water systems all over. I think someone told me that Antelope Valley Hospital did a study on brain tumors in the area and could not find any connection. But I wouldn’t be surprised.” GWW to author, Reedley, CA, Dec. 14, 2002, transcript, p. 10.

From its establishment by President Truman in 1951 until its closing in 1992, the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a Rhode Island–sized testing ground northwest of Las Vegas, conducted the majority of America’s nuclear weapons tests. More than nine hundred atomic explosions took place at the NTS, the great majority of them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of the early detonations occurred aboveground and resulted in some devastating health effects on “downwinders.” Due to weather patterns, most of the fallout landed, not to the southwest of the testing ground, in the direction of the Antelope Valley, but to the northeast, in northern Nevada and in western Utah. The NTS was bounded on three sides by Nellis AFB, an airfield into which Armstrong occasionally flew while he worked at Edwards. The influence of any nuclear fallout causing higher cancer rates in the Antelope Valley has never been specifically studied.

¹² Forty-six-year-old Rick Armstrong stated in September 2003 that he recalls “very little” about his sister Karen, whose death was “a closed subject.” Asked specifically if Karen’s death was a taboo subject in the family, Rick responded: “It wasn’t stated that way. It just wasn’t addressed.” Was it just too painful to remember? “I think it must be.” Rick Armstrong to author, Cincinnati, OH, Sept. 22, 2003, pp. 4–5.

¹³ In a letter published in Air & Space Smithsonian in 2003, William G. Cowdin, former program manager for the Dyna-Soar booster rocket maker Aerojet-General in Sacramento, Calif., reported an alleged conversation he had with Armstrong about Dyna-Soar abort procedure: “At that time there was debate as to whether a pilot could react fast enough to prevent a catastrophic event, or whether automatic sensors should be included in the design. Neil’s response to me was ‘Give me a stick and throttle and I will fly the SOB.’ ” William G. Cowdin, Burbank, Calif., “Hidden Figures of High Society,” Air & Space Smithsonian 17 (Feb./Mar. 2003): 12. When shown this letter to the editor, Armstrong responded: “I am EXTREMELY skeptical about this quote. Dyna-Soar did not have a throttle and I am not prone to make that sort of statement in any circumstance. Perhaps someone else made such a statement.” NAA: e-mail to author, Feb. 18, 2003.

¹⁴ Armstrong recalls his X-5 incident: “My checkout pilot was Jack McKay, and he explained that they often had trouble getting the nose gear to lock up. So, after takeoff, when retracting the gear, you were advised to nose over and go to about half a g. That would help get the nose gear up in place, due to less download on the gear. So I attempted to do it, but it didn’t seem to be locking up. In the meantime, I was nosing over, getting in a nose-down position and, of course, the aircraft was speeding up, and I suspect that I actually ‘oversped’ the gear-limit speed, knocking the fairing door off. I never got the indication that the gear was completely retracted, so I put it back down and wasn’t able to conduct my flight plan. . . . I never got a chance to fly the airplane again. They decided it was at the end of its research lifetime.” NAA to author, Cincinnati, OH, Nov. 26, 2002, transcript, p. 7.

¹⁵ Even a casual reading of the different versions of the Armstrong story that General Yeager has told over the years shows a number of basic errors and inaccuracies. For example, in his 1985 autobiography, Yeager stated that the incident occurred during the NACA period, which ended in 1958; then in an interview with him conducted by the Academy of Achievement’s Museum of Living History in 1991, Yeager said it took place “around 1965.” Clearly, General Yeager’s sense of time and chronology is not good, as many of the events discussed in his autobiography reveal. Just before the section of the book in which he tells the story of the flight to Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Yeager talks about a conversation with Paul Bikle and Bikle’s reaction to Scott Crossfield’s infamous F-100A collision with a hangar wall at Edwards, which took place in September 1954. The trouble with Yeager’s story—in which he relates that while the sonic wall had been his, the hangar walls were Crossfield’s—is that the incident occurred several years before Bikle came to the Flight Research Center. Bikle arrived at the FRC in September 1959, five years later.

¹⁶ Yeager also overlooked the fact that several of the NACA test pilots—Butchart, Walker, McKay, as well as Armstrong—had distinguished combat records.

¹⁷ In his autobiographical At the Edge of Space, Milt Thompson detailed the findings of the “Nellis Affair” investigation board as they pertained to Armstrong’s original accident and its aftermath: “On initial touchdown, the distance between the two main gear tires was less than it should have been with the gear fully down and locked. As the aircraft continued to settle, the tire tracks began to merge. The weight of the aircraft was forcing the gear down before landing gear green lights came on. [Armstrong] immediately applied power to abort the landing and get airborne. For what must have seemed like hours, the aircraft continued to settle before it began to rise. In this few seconds of actual time, the aircraft continued to settle far enough to allow the ventral fin and landing gear doors to contact the lake bed. The ventral, which contained the radio antenna, was damaged and the door actuator was broken on one door. This allowed the utility hydraulic fluid to escape, deactivating that system. One other result of the ground contact was the release of the emergency arresting gear hook. [Armstrong] managed to get the airplane started uphill before the fuselage struck the lake bed. As [he] struggled into the air, he realized he had damaged the aircraft and was losing hydraulic fluid, so he headed to the nearest airfield, which happened to be Nellis. He attempted to contact Nellis to request landing instructions, but received no response due to the damaged radio antenna. He then entered the traffic pattern and made a pass down the runway wagging his wings to indicate radio failure. He turned downwind and set up for his landing approach not realizing that his arresting hook was down and, as a result, he engaged the arresting gear in an abnormal manner shortly after the touchdown.” At the Edge of Space, p. 115.

18 What attracted Armstrong to the HP-115 was how its highly swept delta wing configuration, when flown in steep, unpowered, low L/D approaches and landings, could generate data useful in the design of the Dyna-Soar vehicle.

¹⁹ According to Aldrin, “I didn’t see any need to become qualified in flying the bedstead. I appreciated what it was, but I didn’t see any need to risk so many people in the machine. Clearly, Neil had to make up his mind as to what was absolutely needed to make the landing and he felt this training was essential. I agreed with his decision to fly it.” Aldrin to author, Albuquerque, NM, Mar. 17, 2003, p. 19.

²⁰ Buzz Aldrin’s birthplace has frequently been given to be Montclair, New Jersey. In fact, he was born on the Glen Ridge wing of a hospital whose central body rested in Montclair. His birth certificate lists Glen Ridge as his birthplace.

²¹ In his posthumously published 2001 autobiography, Deke!, Slayton states that if Gus Grissom had not been killed in the Apollo fire, he would have chosen Grissom to be the first man on the Moon.

²² Even after Apollo 10, some of the Apollo mission planners were still concerned about the effects of mascons. For example, Howard W. “Bill” Tindall Jr., the chief of Apollo data priority coordination and one of the unsung geniuses at the MSC in Houston, asked two days before the launch of Apollo 11 in one of his highly respected internal memoranda known as “Tindallgrams,” “What do we do if one of those big damn lumps of gold is buried so near the LM that it screws up our gravity alignment on the lunar surface?” If that was the case, Tindall worried, the LM’s alignments could be in error, resulting in the processing of mistaken ground trajectory data during the flight of the LM’s ascent stage back to a docking with the command module in lunar orbit. Just in case “the various far-flung experts,” as Tindall called them, were wrong in their prediction that mascons would have no significant effect on the lunar surface gravity alignments, Tindall recommended a series of measures to ensure that the LM’s two different computer guidance systems, known as AGS (Abort Guidance System) and PNGS (Primary Navigation, Guidance, and Control System, pronounced pings) could be effectively aligned. Howard W. Tindall Jr., Apollo Data Priority Coordination, to [a long list of individuals at the MSC], “Subject: How we will handle the effects of mascons on the LM lunar surface gravity alignments,” July 14, 1969, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, copy in Historical Archives, University of Houston—Clear Lake. There is a CD that contains most of the “Tindallgrams.”

²³ Performing a timed burn with Apollo’s SPS rocket engine could produce a substantial acceleration (or deceleration) if the engine shutoff was not precise. It was critically important to know what these differences in speed, or “residuals,” amounted to, so as correct them. Corrections were made, not by firing the main engine again—that could add to the problem—but by briefly firing (the astronauts called it “tickling”) the spacecraft’s smaller maneuvering thrusters.

²⁴ This transcript excerpt as well as the two that follow in the text were from the onboard recorder and were not transmitted to Earth. The astronauts were careful about uttering profanity when they knew that what they were saying was being transmitted home.

²⁵ Beginning with Apollo 14, the DOI burn was performed with the CSM engine while the LM was still attached. This change was necessitated by the additional weight of the later lunar modules: they had the lunar rover onboard and stored more oxygen and dried food for longer stays on the lunar surface. Using command module fuel for the DOI maneuver also saved some of the LM’s fuel.

²⁶ Armstrong has always discussed the landmark tracking as if he and Aldrin were doing it together, but that was not the case. “I appreciate the ‘we,’ ” Aldrin has commented, “but Neil did the tracking, because I wasn’t looking out the window. I could have cared less about the landmarks. If it wasn’t in the computer displays, I didn’t see it.” Aldrin quoted in “The First Lunar Landing,” Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, ed. Eric M. Jones, p. 13.

²⁷ Experts who have listened many times to the flight recordings cannot make out with certainty what word Aldrin used here. Buzz believes he might have said “Faint shadow,” referring to a fuzzy edge of a shadow on the streaking dust layer. Others suggest it sounds more like “Great shadow.”

²⁸ Armstrong misspoke here, as there were no binoculars on board. Rather, the LM was equipped with a monocular, made from one half of a set of commercial binoculars made by a German company, Leitz, and modified by instrument experts at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Neil and Buzz used the monocular both before and after their EVA. It thus ranks as the first telescopic viewing device (10 × 40 power) used on another celestial body.

²⁹ Because of the Moon’s position relative to the Earth at the moment of Armstrong’s “one small step” statement, the TV downlink used by NASA came from Honeysuckle Station outside Canberra, Australia; previously the Eagle’s TV signal had been coming from the Goldstone tracking station in California. Much of the TV downlink for the remainder of Apollo 11’s EVA came from the big radio astronomy telescope at Parkes, in New South Wales, Australia. The story of the Australian role in the first Moon landing’s navigation and communications has been detailed in Hamish Lindsay’s book Tracking Apollo to the Moon. The story of what happened at Parkes observatory and in the surrounding rural town during the Apollo 11 mission has been marvelously (and humorously) depicted—albeit with a lot of harmless inaccuracy—in the 2001 Australian film The Dish.

³⁰ Only recently, Eric M. Jones, the Australia-based editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, has discovered evidence that, during Armstrong’s historic climb down the ladder, Neil had the Lunar Equipment Conveyor hooked to his suit and that Aldrin was playing it out as a safety tether. (Jones provides the evidence for his conjecture at http://www.nasa.gov/alsj/all/alltether.html.) To Jones, Armstrong has written, “You make a persuasive case about the LEC, but I cannot remember the detail well enough to confirm or dissent.” Eric M. Jones, e-mail to author, Mar. 27, 2005.

³¹ Besides the famous picture that has his reflection in Aldrin’s visor, Armstrong is shown on the lunar surface in pictures 5886, 5895, 5903, and 5916. In all but 5886, Neil is either in deep shadow or only partially shown. Photo 5895 shows Neil’s legs and 5916 shows the back of his suit from close-up (it is a frame from one of Buzz’s pans). Another image, AS11-40-5894, would have provided a good view of Armstrong at the MESA, if only the exposure would have been more appropriate.

³² The man who pushed the use of the ALSCC stereoscopic camera on Apollo 11 was Dr. Thomas “Tommy” Gold (1920–2004), a brilliant Viennese gadfly of an astronomer who taught at Cornell University. “I didn’t know Professor Gold,” relates Armstrong. “He got his device on Apollo 11 pretty much at the last minute. It was an inconvenience and a new addition that we had to work into the timeline, and we felt uncomfortable with the situation. Nevertheless, we took some pictures with his stereo camera. I took some pictures of some small rocks with it that I thought would be of particular interest to him.” NAA to author, Sept. 19, 2003, p. 16.

³³ In the first Armstrong-to-Aldrin camera transfer, Neil put the Hasselblad on the MESA at about 4:14:12:32 as Neil got ready to do the bulk sample. Buzz got the camera off the MESA at about 4:14:25:09. The second Neil-to-Buzz transfer came at 4:44:43:18 and the TV image of it is very inconclusive about how the transfer was made. This appears to have been the moment when Neil handed the camera carefully to Buzz.

³⁴ By the time the first Space Shuttle launched in 1981, NASA was grudgingly accommodating legitimate press requests for PPK manifests, but only after its own people had cleared every item and completed a thorough postflight inventory. Even today, Freedom of Information Act requests for Apollo PPK manifests are fulfilled with a copy of an October 22, 1968, letter from Deke Slayton, who died in 1993, stating that the contents of PPKs were not to be made public. In that memo to NASA Headquarters, Slayton wrote: “The only list of PPK contents is retained by me. I certify to the Mission Director on each mission that the contents meet flammability and toxicity requirements and are noncontroversial in nature. We do not intend to make this list available to anyone else at any time. It is the crew’s prerogative to discuss the contents after the flight if they wish. Since these items are personal in nature, we do not feel that NASA has any other official prerogative on the issue.” Slayton to NASA Headquarters, Attn: Mr. Julian Scheer, Oct. 22, 1968. Carbon copies of this memo were sent to George Mueller, Bob Gilruth, and Alan Shepard.

³⁵ Armstrong had started taking courses while a NACA test pilot, at a night school on Edwards AFB run by the University of Southern California. Under the direction of Professor Ken Springer, he had started his thesis, concerning a method for simulation of hypersonic flight, before he moved to Houston. After Neil left the Apollo program, Springer, still at USC, contacted him and asked if he wanted to finish up the thesis. Springer made it easy for him, “We have concluded,” the professor said, “that, if you would give us a presentation on certain aspects of Apollo, we would consider that an acceptable substitute for finishing the thesis work you have done up to this point.” Neil told him it would, in fact, be difficult to finish the thesis as originally conceived since all of the data had been generated in analog, and analog computers were not much available anymore. “To redo my research in digital would have been a very challenging thing for which I wasn’t really qualified. So anyway, I prepared a paper and they deemed that acceptable for completion.”

³⁶ Armstrong currently holds no less than nineteen honorary doctorates, including (besides the three mentioned above), Ohio State University (1971), University of Notre Dame (1971), University of Maryland–Heidelberg (1971), Butler University (1972), Drake University (1972), University of Dublin–Trinity College (1976), Brown University (1979), University of Cincinnati (1982), Lafayette College (1983), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1986), Weber State University (1988), Cranfield University (1996), Xavier University (1999), College of Mount St. Joseph (2000), Tufts University (2004), and University of Southern California (2005). Twelve of them conferred a Doctor of Science, two a Doctor of Engineering, one a Doctor of Laws, two a Doctor of Humane Letters, one a Doctor of Humanities, and one an LLD.

³⁷ Armstrong’s tax form for 1979 showed that he earned an income of $18,196 from the University of Cincinnati. From his own personal service corporation that year, he earned $168,000. Beyond that, he earned about $50,000 in fees for serving on boards of directors for various companies.

³⁸ Contrary to some published reports, Armstrong did not drive himself, with his severed fingertip, to Cincinnati’s Bethesda North Hospital; he traveled by life squad van. From there he was flown by a friend to the then-world-famous microsurgery unit at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital. Drs. Joseph Kutz, Tse-Min Tsai, and Thomas Wolff performed the delicate surgery. Two major arteries and five veins had to be rejoined. Following the surgery, the finger became fully functional except for the last joint nearest the tip.

³⁹ Three different secretaries worked for Armstrong while he was at the University of Cincinnati: Ruta Bankovikis (1971–73), Luanna Fisher (1974–76), and Elaine Moore (1977–79).

⁴⁰ The Armstrong office on Broadway in downtown Lebanon, Ohio, lasted for roughly six years, until 1986. After that, for a while, the office was at Neil’s farm on Route 123 north of town. Then the office moved briefly to a building on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati. For the last dozen years, the mail has been handled at a Columbus Avenue office back in Lebanon. Letters always came to Armstrong through this entire twenty-five-year period though a Lebanon post office box number.