by Jay Barbree
Neil wasn’t aware of how diverting his attention to check the g limiter was becoming a problem.
During the three months since his daughter Karen Anne’s death Neil had seemed out of it to some. His ability to process facts had slowed. Some even believed Neil was becoming accident-prone, and in the flight-control center back at Edwards managers were watching Neil’s performance closely. His primary attention for the moment was on checking the g limiter. He hadn’t been watching his attitude closely, and as he descended through an altitude of about 27 miles, back through building atmospheric pressure, he noticed the X-15’s nose had drifted up slightly. It was causing what was known as ballooning, a condition where the aircraft could skip off and along the top of the atmosphere like one skipping a flat rock across a lake.
In seven years, three months, and four days Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew would be making the most risky penetration of Earth’s atmosphere ever. They would be returning from the moon at 24,000 miles per hour—seven times faster than he had flown this day—and if their Apollo spacecraft did not hit the atmosphere at a precise angle they would skip off into eternity sailing forever across the universe.
Even though his momentary laxness had permitted the X-15’s nose to come up, Neil wasn’t all that worried. “In the process,” he explained, “I got the nose up above the horizon. I was skipping outside the atmosphere again, ballooning, but that wasn’t a particular problem.” He used his reaction-control jets to roll over on his back and he tried a few other tricks but nothing worked. Mission managers in the flight control center were suddenly concerned, and the communicator with the call sign “NASA One” shouted, “Neil, we show you ballooning, not turning. Hard left turn, Neil! Hard left turn!”
“Of course I was trying to turn,” Neil laughed, “but the aircraft was on a ballistic path. It was going to go where it was going to go.”
There was only one thing to do—wait for the X-15 to fall low enough to get a bite of thicker air, and when Neil felt atmosphere, he’d begin his turn. But by this time, he said, “We had gone sailing merrily by the field.”
There were those in flight control already calling Neil’s mistake the biggest pilot error in the X-15 program. They were deeply worried. But not Neil. He knew he had options. He had altitude and he had airspeed and plenty of places to land. He concentrated on only one thing—get self and plane down safely. His years of flying had created in him an unbending drive toward perfection. That this was a state unattainable did not in the least interfere with his drive because Neil answered only to himself. He regarded excuses as a weakness and alibis as worthy only of disgust.
He was about 100,000 feet moving through the Mach 3 region (about 2,300 miles per hour), when suddenly he could see Pasadena. “Wait until Johnny Carson’s ‘little old lady from Pasadena’ gets a look at this big black bullet?” he laughed aloud. “I bet she’s never seen something in the air like us before?”
He checked out his location. Below he could see Lancaster and Palmdale, and the San Gabriel Mountains were straight ahead. His cabin was there. He questioned aloud, “What’s next, the Rose Bowl?”
Neil rolled the X-15 into a bank and headed back toward Edwards where some in the flight-control center were already taking bets on where Neil would have to put the X-15 down. “How about Palmdale,” one laughed. “They have a nice little runway there.”
Later Neil would say, “It wasn’t clear at the time I made the turn if I would be able to get back to Edwards, but it wasn’t a big concern. There were other dry lake beds available.” At the moment, El Mirage was off to his right, and just ahead on his left, was Rosamond dry lake. But, the prize of them all, the largest—Rogers—was dead ahead. It was home, and Neil was fast becoming convinced he could make it.
The boss, chief X-15 test pilot Joe Walker, was flying chase. Neil radioed him, “I have south lake in sight, Joe.”
Joe Walker came back, “What’s your altitude, Neil?”
“Got 47,000.”
NASA One joined in. “Yes, we check that,” confirmed flight control. “Have you decided what your landing runway is yet?”
Neil checked the ground beneath him. All he could see was desert and Saddleback Butte to his right. “Let me get up here a little closer. I can definitely see the base now,” he told the flight center.
Suddenly Neil had his own cheering section. “He’s going to make it,” said one flight controller.
“I’ll bet you a dollar he doesn’t,” said another.
“You’re on.”
“We show you 26 miles to the south lake and have you at 40,000,” NASA One reported.
“Okay,” Neil acknowledged, as he got busy ridding his X-15 of useless things that added weight and cut down his gliding distance. When he was done he keyed his mike and told flight control, “The landing will be on runway 35, south lake, a straight-in approach. I’m at 32,000, going to use some brakes to put her down.”
Using speed brakes to reduce energy confirmed that Neil’s return to south lake could not have been as close a call as some had thought, and the research test pilot, the calmest hand around, lined his X-15 up for a safe touchdown.
“I’m about 15 miles out from the end now,” Neil told the center. “I’m 290 knots.”
Neil opens his X-15’s canopy with a smile. (NASA)
Fellow test pilot Henry Gordon was flying chase, too. He called Neil, “I’m coming up on your right.”
“Okay,” Neil acknowledged Henry. “I’m going to land in sort of the middle of the south lake bed,” he told Gordon. “Brakes are in again, 280.”
“Rog, start your flaps down now,” Henry told him.
Neil’s X-15’s approach was as smooth as an Eagle gliding on mountain currents.
“Okay, you’re well in,” Henry told him. “Go ahead and put her down. The rocket glider made not a sound as it touched desert and Henry said, “Very nice, Neil.”
And it was very nice. Neil Armstrong brought his X-15 in so smoothly its nose wheel barely kissed dry desert before rolling to a textbook stop.
Neil had just racked up the X-15’s longest endurance mission (12 minutes, 28 seconds), and the longest distance flight (350 miles, ground track) a project record.
Could there be any more questions about Neil’s ability to fly?
We think not.
Neil Armstrong ready to be an astronaut. (NASA)
SIX
TRAINING DAYS
Project Mercury moved forward with the launch of Scott Carpenter. It was the project’s second orbital flight, while back at Edwards Neil Armstrong waited. He was staring at the phone when it finally rang.
“Hi, Neil, this is Deke. Are you still interested in the astronaut group?”
“Yes, sir,” he assured NASA’s director of flight crew operations.
Deke was another man of few words. “Well, you have the job, then,” he told Neil. “We’re going to get started right away, so get down here by the sixteenth.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll be there.”
Neil and eight others had been called by Deke. They would be announced as the Gemini Nine. Neil traded in his two cars for a used station wagon. He needed the larger vehicle to haul the family’s personal belongings. He and Janet packed up the big stuff and furniture and shipped it ahead for storage in Houston.
There were still loose ends to be tied up so Janet stayed behind a couple of days.
Neil took Ricky with him in the station wagon, and two days later Janet took a commercial flight. She arrived in Houston the same day as Neil and Ricky and for the next few months the Armstrongs would live in a furnished apartment. They were waiting for their new home to be completed in the El Lago subdivision—a housing project built to attract astronauts. It was only a few minutes from Neil’s new office.
The Gemini Nine were officially announced as NASA’s second group of astronauts September 17, 1962. They were Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Staf
ford, Ed White, and John Young. Some would become legends. Some would give their lives. None would be forgotten.
Neil thought of his group as answering the call for volunteers to fly to the moon. Their predecessors, the Mercury Seven, had been remarkable in converting “Spam in the can” to a successful human space program.
What NASA had in the Gemini Nine were test pilots, well-educated and experienced for the job. What Neil saw was passion, like most early NASA folks who were willing to work their tails off.
Deke Slayton now had fifteen astronauts under his wing. He set the new pilots up for indoctrination and training, and figured the more they saw of the remaining days of Project Mercury the better prepared they’d be for flying the heavier, larger, advanced Gemini. The Nine would be the ones to develop the flight maneuvers and procedures needed for that bridge to the moon.
Then, on October 3, 1962, the rookies gathered at the foot of the Mercury-Atlas launchpad. They watched Wally Schirra and his Sigma 7 spacecraft thunder into orbit. The Nine hung onto every report from Schirra as the Mercury astronaut displayed his skills. The third American to orbit Earth stayed up for six orbits—nine hours—moving through his scientific and engineering checklist with an efficiency that would turn a robot green with envy.
The Gemini Nine were so impressed with Wally’s flight they eagerly jumped into their grueling tour of Gemini’s contractors. They spent weeks getting acquainted with where and how their Gemini spacecraft and Titan II rockets were being built and tested. Once they had an educated feel for the hardware they would fly, they settled in for their individual training program.
The good news was training for the Gemini Nine wouldn’t be anything like that endured by the Mercury Seven.
They wouldn’t have to drop their pants and sit on a block of ice and whistle while eating saltines. They wouldn’t have to be stripped of all noises and sit in a soundproof room hearing only their hearts pounding.
“I don’t think the community of flight medicine and flight physiology knew very much about what they needed at the time,” Neil would tell me, adding, “There were widespread predictions that humans could not survive in space—for all kinds of reasons. I think they tested for everything, missing nothing,” he grinned, asking, “Have you ever felt the need to hold a full enema in your colon for five minutes?”
We laughed and Neil had one more thing to say. “It was not fun.”
* * *
Armstrong was content to spend his astronaut learning days with familiar exercises he’d experienced in naval flight training as long as he could study at night. “NASA felt we should know the difference between an aircraft and spacecraft,” Neil explained, “especially what made you stay in orbit.
“I had studied orbital mechanics at the University of Southern California, and none of us found the new studies a burden.”
They hit the books, and along with academics Neil and his group were called out for a number of other training disciplines.
To make sure they knew how everything worked, the Gemini Nine spent time crawling over and under Cape Canaveral’s launch facilities in Florida. The bosses thought it would be good if they learned how rockets and spacecraft were launched, and how to get off of one of the damn things if there was a problem. They learned that, too, but first they had to learn how not to disturb the rattlesnakes and feral razorbacks that had made much of the launch complexes their home.
Then, when they had launchpad etiquette down, they returned to Mission Control, Houston, to learn how they would be tracked and watched over in flight.
But no sooner than they were used to sleeping in their own beds again, they were off to Johnsville, Pennsylvania, to the Navy’s Acceleration Laboratory to ride the “Wheel.”
The Wheel was a huge centrifuge with a gondola, a mockup of the Gemini cockpit. This is where the astronauts experienced simulated reentries from Earth orbit. During these centrifuge runs, doctors would monitor them on closed-circuit television—one run simulated a G-pulling steep reentry. Neil was ready for this. None had anything close to his experience riding a centrifuge. When Neil felt the force of tremendous deceleration, he was able to keep moving his arms and legs until he approached 10 Gs (ten times his own weight). And as the g-forces mounted, his eyeballs flattened out of focus. When the centrifuge passed 15 Gs, Neil could no longer breathe.
The centrifuge wheel ridden by Armstrong. (Johnsville Centrifuge, NASA)
For jungle survival training in the Panamanian tropical rain forest, Neil and John learn how to build a dry floor for their survival hut. (NASA)
The operators stopped the damn thing and Neil stepped from the gondola. He rechecked all body parts. He wanted to be sure he didn’t leave any on the floor.
* * *
The Nine moved into additional training disciplines where they were taught how to wear pressure suits, and where they were introduced to weightlessness, vibration, and noise—even simulated lunar gravity.
John and Neil tough it out in their self-raised “Choco Hilton” in the Choco Indians’ tropical rain forest in Panama. (NASA)
They also relearned how to use ejection seats and parachutes, and how to keep sharp their piloting skills and judgment by flying an assortment of jets that were based at nearby Ellington Air Force Base.
Then they were sent off with the Mercury Seven astronauts for jungle survival training to Albrook Air Force Base in the Panama Canal Zone.
They were dropped into the Panamanian tropical rain forest in pairs; Neil hit the jackpot. His partner was John Glenn and the two hurried hand-over-hand down a hanging rope from their helicopter into the jungle where they would build lean-tos out of natural materials and forage for food and water.
They were told the area where they’d been left was occupied by the Choco Indians, natives still living as they had always lived. Neil immediately fashioned a welcome sign that read “Choco Hilton.”
“It was anything but a Hilton,” John told me. “We each had a knife and scant provisions, and we fished from a nearby stream.
“We learned immediately not to stick our hands under logs,” he said with emphasis. “That’s where the deadly fer-de-lance snakes live, along with lizards and other strange creatures we may need to cook over open flame—or eat raw.”
Neil flashed one of his big grins. “For taste we topped our lizards and bugs off with a generous helping of worms.”
Yuck!
* * *
Jungle training was the place where Neil and John became lifelong friends. Both told me it wasn’t the best of places—so wet they could never find wood dry enough to make a really hot fire. They spent most of their time shivering and eating jungle delicacies cold, sometimes raw.
Each jokingly offered to trade the other for a woman astronaut. Both thought it would be great to snuggle in the wet cold with a bunkie. What they got were a couple of very ugly men—flight surgeon Bill Douglas and NASA photographer Ed Harrison. Neither came close to resembling a woman. They dropped by to make sure the duo was okay. Harrison took a picture to prove they were alive.
No sooner had Douglas and Harrison left when a painted Choco tribesman showed up with an assortment of trinkets and native doodads to trade.
The native admired their heavy writing pen, the one Neil used to create the welcome sign. He and John used gestures to talk the Choco local out of many of his trinkets before giving him the pen, then smiling and waving farewell.
They were pleased until Neil and John asked themselves: What if the pen runs out of ink before we’re safely out of the area?
They sweated until it was time to walk back to civilization. They wisely followed the stream, cutting their way through jungle when necessary until they reached a river.
There they joined up with the other astronauts, and were ordered to put on their life vests. Some gung-ho survivalist thought they should spend a few hours in the water learning how to float safely down the river.
“What, no life rafts?” some questioned.
; “You have one in your pocket,” barked the survivalist instructor.
Neil and John kept quiet and followed orders. They donned those life vests, jumped in the river, and began floating toward their assigned pickup area.
“What about piranhas,” yelled one concerned astronaut?
“The hell with the piranhas,” yelled another, “what about crocs?”
Neil laughed and signaled John. “Hey, I think I see some piranhas over there,” he said pointing, adding, “Steer clear of that area, John.”
“Yeah,” Glenn answered, “it looks like they’re eating a crocodile.”
Suddenly everyone in the river was quiet, looking, watching with trepidation the water around them. Neil and John smiled knowingly. Both knew the flesh-eating vicious piranhas weren’t commonly found in the rivers of Panama, nor were crocodiles. Poisonous snakes like the large pit viper fer-de-lance, yes, and small alligator-like caimans, along with mosquitoes carrying malaria. But the chance of an astronaut being eaten alive was nil.
Their swim and float lasted three hours with all arriving at the river pickup point in one piece.
Neil logged the river float as one of the highlights of their training before they all parted in different directions. His future in space flight was ahead. John’s was in the rearview mirror. President Kennedy, concerned an American hero of Glenn’s stature might be injured or killed in another spaceflight, ordered him grounded.
* * *
Once back home Neil was suddenly concerned about another flight. The stork arrived April 8, 1963, with Janet and his second son. Of course the other astronauts wondered how Neil found time to get Janet pregnant.
The Armstrongs were all very happy with the arrival of Mark Stephen. Brother Ricky put aside his outgrown ball gloves and toys for the new baby.
Neil felt blessed. He and Janet had a healthy child. Neil was acutely aware that his first job was to make sure Janet and the boys would have everything they needed. Deke and the astronaut office stepped forward with that assurance, and Neil rejoined the Gemini Nine, where he and the group began riding parabolic trajectories in the undignified “Vomit Comet.”
