Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Armstrong had been the backup command pilot on Gemini 5, so, per Deke Slayton’s crew-rotation process, he was duly selected to command Gemini 8. His backup crewmate, Elliot See, the other civilian member of the New Nine, had also been a former navy pilot. It was a good match. The two had shared an office, and they became close—at least, as close as Armstrong ever got to anyone. See was serious and soft-spoken, even gentle, but a fine pilot. Though See was in line to fly with Armstrong on Gemini 8, Slayton had decided See wasn’t physically capable of a potentially strenuous EVA, so he’d picked the muscular Scott, and See actually got a promotion: to the command pilot seat for Gemini 9, scheduled for June.

  See and his Gemini 9 crewmate, Charlie Bassett—See’s opposite, an athletic, friendly extrovert—had been training for several months. On the morning of Monday, February 28, 1966, they flew from Houston to St. Louis for a two-week session on McDonnell’s rendezvous-docking simulator. According to Tom Stafford, who knew See well, he was “a capable pilot, if a little shaky on instruments.” As they approached Lambert Field, he was at the controls of their T-38, the fast but fragile jet trainer astronauts used to fly all over the country. On his second approach, in rain and snow, heavy fog, and limited visibility, See descended quickly from low cloud cover to find he was too far left of the runway. He banked left and dropped altitude to keep the runway in sight, planning on another approach, but a building loomed in front of him; he fired his afterburners, turned right, and tried to pull his plane up. The T-38 was noticeably less responsive at low speeds, and the jet crashed into the roof of the building—the McDonnell plant, where their spacecraft was being assembled—then careered into the parking lot and exploded. Both men died on impact, just five hundred feet from their Gemini spacecraft.

  Their deaths shook up the astronaut community—and the flight schedule. The backup crew for Gemini 9 was Tom Stafford and Eugene Cernan. Per Slayton’s system, they were slated to be the prime crew on Gemini 12, the program’s last mission. Now they were promoted to prime crew for Gemini 9. Their backups on that flight were Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. With no more Gemini missions, it was a dead-end job. Lovell already had a Gemini flight under his belt, but Aldrin, a member of the third class of astronauts and not one of Slayton’s favorites, would still be competing with dozens of others for a crew assignment of any kind, and at best, he’d get one of the later Apollo flights. The crash in St. Louis was tragic, but in practical terms, it didn’t change much, and many of the men were just glad it hadn’t happened during an actual mission; that might have had dire consequences for the program. But it was a lucky break for Aldrin: he and Lovell became Gemini 9’s backup crew and, most likely, Gemini 12’s prime crew, if all went well and no one pulled a Scott Carpenter.

  Two days after their accident, See and Bassett’s Gemini capsule was sent to the Cape for final preparations. They hadn’t been the first astronauts to die. Ted Freeman, one of the third class of astronauts, had crashed his T-38 when a goose flew into his port-side air intake during a landing on October 31, 1964. At the funeral attended by their fellow astronauts, See and Bassett were buried in Arlington National Cemetery, close to each other and near Freeman’s grave. And though Armstrong had been shaken up by See’s death, which happened just sixteen days before Gemini 8 launched, he’d seen many friends and colleagues die during his almost two decades of war and flight research. He knew he had a job to do, and he would be ready to fly by launch day.

  Four years earlier, in 1962, thirty-one-year-old Neil Armstrong had been in an enviable position for a test pilot. There was no more exciting or exacting cutting-edge aircraft than the rocket-powered X-15, based on a concept study by Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s old boss at Peenemünde. Its sleek black body, needle nose, stubby, almost vestigial wings, and thick wedge of a tail fin looked like every boy’s dream of a rocket ship. And it was, to some extent. Designed to explore the limits of an aircraft, and a pilot, at hypersonic speeds and extreme altitudes, it could reach speeds of—well, there was no telling how fast it could go, or how high. When the X-15 rose so high that the air became too thin for the terrestrial laws of aerodynamics to apply and its rudders, elevators, and ailerons became ineffective, small attitude-control thruster rockets on its nose and wingtips supplemented its aerodynamic controls. One pilot had already flown it more than four thousand miles an hour; another, forty-seven miles straight up into the atmosphere. That it could reach the edge of outer space—about sixty-two miles up—seemed entirely possible. An orbital X-15 space-plane had even been considered before Mercury was announced.

  Armstrong was one of the few men chosen to fly the X-15, and he had reason to believe he would eventually become the program’s chief test pilot. He might even fly the air force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar, an even more ambitious space-plane, if it ever became operational. The X-20, which was designed to reach Earth orbit and glide down to a landing, was meant for aerial reconnaissance, satellite maintenance, and enemy-satellite destruction, if need be. An aerospace-engineering super-challenge, the X-20 program was just the kind of project Armstrong loved and had spent most of his life working toward.

  Born August 5, 1930, in a farmhouse near the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, to Stephen Armstrong, and his wife, Viola, Neil Alden Armstrong was of Scots-Irish ancestry on his father’s side and German on his mother’s. From an early age, he was someone who thought before he spoke, and he avoided argument and confrontation. Others thought him shy, though he made friends easily—he had to, since his father’s job, auditing the county books throughout the state, took about a year in each place, which meant a lot of moving around; Neil lived at sixteen different addresses in his first fourteen years. His family finally relocated back to Wapakoneta, 115 miles north of Cincinnati, for good before his sophomore year in high school.

  As a boy, Neil read almost constantly—he was “consumed by learning,” remembered his younger brother. From his mother, he inherited a love of music, and he learned to play the piano and baritone horn. But science became his true passion, one he would never outgrow. When Neil was five, he and his father took a ride in a barnstorming pilot’s Ford Tri-Motor, a durable early airliner that could carry a dozen or so passengers. That sparked a lifelong love of flight and of airplane models, made of anything he could find and usually powered by rubber bands; he also built a small wind tunnel in his basement. He was still in elementary school when he decided to become an aircraft designer. When Armstrong was a teenager, to learn all he could about aeronautics, he began hitchhiking the three miles to Wapakoneta’s small, grassy airfield for flying lessons. Each one was nine dollars, and he worked several jobs after school, sometimes for as much as forty cents an hour, to finance his dream. He earned his student pilot’s license on August 5, 1946, his sixteenth birthday, and soloed a few weeks later, all before he learned to drive a car.

  In October 1947, when he was seventeen, Armstrong entered Purdue University, a few hours’ drive from Wapakoneta, on a four-year navy scholarship. He wasn’t particularly interested in a military career, but his parents didn’t have the money for college. Aeronautical engineering was his field of study. He made time for model-airplane contests, both entering and attending. In the spring of 1949, at the age of eighteen, he reported for three years of military duty, after which he would finish his degree. He spent eighteen months in intensive flight training and then much of the next two years flying a Grumman F9F Panther, one of the first jet fighters, in a ground-attack squadron. The Korean War began in June 1950, and in mid-1951, his unit was sent to the center of the action. He still found time to fashion model airplanes from wood when he wasn’t flying combat missions from carriers off the coast of Korea. He flew seventy-eight, but his seventh, on September 3, 1951, was almost his last.

  He and his squadron primarily worked risky air-to-ground jobs that resulted in heavy casualties from thick antiaircraft fire; “bridge breaking, train stopping, tank shooting and that sort of thing,” recalled Armstrong. While making a low-level bomb run o
ver a hilly area in North Korea, flying at three hundred and fifty miles an hour, Ensign Armstrong’s Panther hit a cable that ripped off six feet of its right wing. He lost aileron control, and his ordnance-heavy craft dropped to within twenty feet of the ground; he would have to bail out soon. Somehow, Armstrong pulled the plane up to fourteen thousand feet and nursed it more than two hundred miles along the Korean peninsula to friendly territory. He ejected just off the coast, but strong winds blew him inland and he came down in a rice paddy; he cracked his tailbone but was otherwise unhurt. A jeep arrived within minutes to whisk him to an American airfield nearby. The driver told him that the explosions audible off the coast were North Korean mines in the bay—right where Armstrong had been aiming to land.

  That would not be the last time that his skill, quick thinking, and coolness under pressure combined with good luck to keep him alive.

  Armstrong left the navy in 1952 and returned to Purdue the next year. He earned his aeronautical engineering degree in January 1955 and signed on with the NACA as a research pilot a few months later. Over the next seven years, mostly at the Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB in California, he flew the newest—and most dangerous—experimental aircraft at supersonic speeds. In 1956, he married Janet Shearon, a smart and lively Purdue student whom he had courted—in the carefully deliberate way he would approach many things in his life—for a few years. She was attracted to the soft-spoken navy veteran for several reasons: “He was a very steadfast person. He was good-looking. He had a good sense of humor. He was fun to be with. He was older.” And although he was quiet, he was not meek; once he’d made up his mind about something, his course was set.

  In his time at Edwards, Armstrong made more than nine hundred flights in dozens of the most advanced aircraft in the world, including the X-15, and he contributed much to their analysis and improvement. He was a skillful pilot and an excellent engineer. Those two attributes would make him very attractive to NASA. But Armstrong was happy where he was, on the cutting edge of aeronautical research.

  On March 22, 1956, Armstrong was copiloting a B-29 mother ship flying over the Mojave Desert, and just seconds after it had released an experimental rocket plane, he felt a jolt and saw a propeller hub whiz by the cockpit. He looked over to see that the number-four propeller had disintegrated, and parts of it had damaged two other engines. The pilot’s controls were gone, but Armstrong’s still worked, barely, and with one engine, he managed to guide the big plane down from thirty thousand feet to a landing on a dry lake bed. Many of his flights were dangerous, but some were more dangerous than others.

  Armstrong and his wife lived in an isolated cabin forty miles south of Edwards in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. There they began raising a family, a boy and a girl. On their sixth wedding anniversary, January 28, 1962, he and his wife suffered the worst loss any parent can. Their two-year-old daughter, Karen—whom Neil had nicknamed Muffie—died after an eight-month struggle with an inoperable brain tumor that was diagnosed soon after a playground fall. Edwards grounded all of its aircraft on the day of her funeral.

  The Armstrongs’ four-year-old son, Rick, was a comfort to them, as were friends and family, and Neil tried to lose himself in his work. But the next few months saw some lapses in judgment. Once, during an X-15 flight, he bounced his plane too high in the thin air twenty-odd miles above the Earth. He couldn’t turn properly, which resulted in his overshooting Edwards by forty-five miles and just barely making it back.

  Early on, Armstrong had been unimpressed with the Mercury program. But soon after John Glenn’s February 20, 1962, orbital flight—just a month after Karen’s death—he realized that participation in NASA’s manned space program would put him “way out at the margins of knowledge.” When NASA announced openings for another group of astronauts, he applied. His application arrived a few days past the June 1 deadline. An NACA employee who had worked closely with Armstrong at Edwards and knew of his strong qualifications had recently transferred to Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center to oversee the astronaut training programs. All the applications came to him. He slipped Armstrong’s late application into the pile with the rest before the selection panel’s first meeting.

  Three months later, after Armstrong had had many interviews and undergone two weeks of measuring, poking, and prodding, Deke Slayton called him with the news that he was now an astronaut.

  The mission started off well. Despite a series of equipment problems in the two weeks before the launch, at 10:41 a.m. on March 16, 1966, Gemini 8 and its crew of Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott lifted off smoothly. After reaching orbit, command pilot Armstrong initiated the first of nine thruster maneuvers—burns—to catch the target, an Agena upper stage launched ninety-five minutes earlier and now in a higher orbit. Both Armstrong and Scott had spent extensive time in the much-improved, full-size Gemini simulator practicing rendezvous and docking with a full-size Agena. They were aided by Gemini’s guidance computer, primitive but effective in determining the locations of the two spacecraft and calculating the best transfer arc. Less than six hours after liftoff, Armstrong braked his ship about a hundred and fifty feet from the silver-and-white, twenty-six-foot-long Agena, shining in the bright sunlight. Rendezvous was accomplished.

  After a half an hour of station-keeping and inspecting the Agena for problems, Armstrong slowly approached to within three feet using the Gemini’s small thruster jets. He received permission to dock, a job that required exquisite timing and a feather-light touch. A few moments later, like a giant shuttlecock nuzzling a huge thermos, his craft’s nose eased into a docking collar in the front of the Agena and latched on. “Flight, we are docked. It’s…really a smoothie,” said Armstrong. In Mission Control, there were cheers, backslapping, and handshakes; even the reporters in the newsroom cheered. Armstrong and Scott had just achieved the first docking in space.

  Flight controllers—and virtually everyone else in NASA—were wary of the Agena and had been even before its explosion five months earlier during the original Gemini 6 mission. They suspected the Agena’s rocket thrusters might be faulty and had instructed Jim Lovell, CapCom at a tracking station on Madagascar, to warn the Gemini 8 crew. Just before they passed out of communications range, Lovell told them, “If you run into trouble and the attitude-control system in the Agena goes wild, just…turn it off and take control with the spacecraft.”

  Armstrong and Scott would soon be incommunicado. They turned up the cockpit lights and pulled out their flight books, then began doing docking chores and checking command links between the two spacecraft. In a little while, they could begin to relax and maybe even get some sleep.

  Gemini 8 had moved into night, and since the lights were on in the cockpit, the crew couldn’t see much through their two small windows. After a couple of hours of taking care of Agena operations and general housekeeping, they’d try to sleep. Scott, especially, needed a good rest. He was scheduled to do a two-hour-plus EVA the next day. While on a twenty-five-foot umbilical and a seventy-five-foot extension tether, he would float over to the Agena using a handheld maneuvering unit. Armstrong would undock and back away, pulling Scott, then move forward and dock again. Other delicate procedures would follow.

  Twenty-seven minutes after uniting with the Agena, Scott looked up at the control panel and noticed that they were in a slow thirty-degree left roll. He told Armstrong, who used thrusters to correct it. After a minute or so, the roll started again. Remembering what Lovell had advised, Armstrong told Scott, who had all the Agena controls on his side, to turn off its attitude-control system. Scott did. The roll stabilized, but a few minutes later it began again, this time at a faster rate—and then even faster. Armstrong ordered Scott to switch the Agena on and then off again in case it was an electrical problem while he fought the motion with his attitude hand controller on the console between them, with little success.

  They were spinning in space while connected to a rocket full of fuel, and they could not call anyone for guidance. This w
as an emergency situation that they had not practiced for and that no one had imagined. Something had to be done and quickly, before the gyrations broke them apart, caused the Agena to rupture or explode, or ripped the Gemini from one or both parts of its adapter section, which carried their power and life-sustaining essentials. Oxygen loss and quick death from asphyxiation would almost certainly follow. To make matters worse, Scott noticed that the fuel in one of their control systems was down to 13 percent.

  Neither of them heard the loud cracking sound that would have meant their own thrusters firing. It had to be the Agena. “We’d better get off,” Scott said to Armstrong.

  “Okay, let me see if we can get the rates of rotation down so we don’t re-contact. You ready?”

  “Stand by.”

  Once they undocked, the Agena would be dead to ground control. Scott set the rocket’s recording devices so a ground tracking station could pick up its data as it passed overhead and learn why it had malfunctioned.

  “Okay, any time,” he said. “We’re ready.”