Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

by Jay Barbree

  Neil didn’t know it at the time, but this third group of fourteen astronauts had just brought him Dave Scott, who would be his crewmate for Gemini 8, and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who would fly with him on Apollo 11.

  Late 1964 was also the time this writer really got to know Neil.

  As a member of the Cape Canaveral press corps I had been covering him and the other Gemini astronauts for two years. But beyond a brief hello and a question or two, our association was scant at best until mutual tragedy was the catalyst for a friendship that would last 50 years.

  My wife, Jo, and I had a son born five weeks premature on November 22, 1964. The local hospital failed to take proper precautions. Our baby developed Hyaline Membrane Disease and we did everything we could to help the little fellow develop his underdeveloped lungs.

  I had to keep an appointment with longtime friend John Rivard, and during our conversation I had a mental image of Jo sitting up in her hospital bed, crying. She needed me. “I have to go,” I said, interrupting John. “The boy just died.”

  “I be danged,” John said, adding as I walked away to my car, “If I can help, let me know.”

  There were no cell phones in those days—only landlines and long waits on switchboards and such. I drove as quickly as I could to the hospital, and then ran down the hall into Jo’s room.

  She was just as I had seen her in my mind, sitting up in her bed, her face awash with tears.

  “Scott’s dead, Jay,” she cried.

  “I know,” I said, “I got your message about ten minutes ago.”

  We comforted each other, and Jo remained in the hospital a couple of more days. Our three-year-old daughter Alicia was with Jo’s parents in Orlando.

  The next morning I was having breakfast at a local restaurant when Neil Armstrong walked in. I mumbled a hello and motioned him to sit down.

  He noticed right away that I was down. “Did someone shoot your dog?” he asked.

  “It’s a bad time for me,” I explained, telling him about the death of our son.

  Neil was from a small town of 6,000. I was from one even smaller, 5,000. A child’s death was a tragedy generally shared throughout those small communities.

  Neil told me about losing his daughter Karen Anne, and despite my tragedy I immediately realized that having a child for more than two years, and then losing her, had to be even a heavier burden.

  We both considered ourselves lay members of science, and after a while we were trying to analyze the message I had received that my son was dead. Was it mental telepathy from Jo? Was it imagination? Was it only a coincidence? Was it heaven-sent? Whatever it was, Neil argued, “There is much that cannot be explained today. Not by science. Not by any sound reasoning,” he said as a matter of fact. “Be thankful you had such an experience.”

  * * *

  From that day forward Neil trusted me with information I believe he would not trust with others. It was understood I would not report anything without his permission. I have never knowingly broken that confidence.

  In February 1965, Neil received his first assignment to a flight. He had been doing what he was told and had never lobbied for a mission when Deke Slayton named him Gordon Cooper’s backup commander for Gemini 5.

  The quiet one was quietly pleased.

  Gemini 5’s primary mission was to stay in orbit eight days to prove astronauts would have no problems living in space long enough to fly to the moon and back. “Eight days or bust” was Gemini 5’s motto, and a covered wagon was the motif of their crew patch. Joining Neil as the second member of the backup crew was Elliot See.

  “I was really pleased to be assigned a mission and to fly with Elliot,” Neil said. “Who wouldn’t be pleased to back up Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad?

  “We became a very close team, and for months we spent almost all our time together getting ready. We spent a lot of time at the plant in Saint Louis working on and testing the spacecraft. So we all knew it very well by the time it was shipped to the Cape.

  “We never lost sight of the fact everything was based on beating the Russians and getting there by the end of the decade,” Neil emphasized. “That’s why the schedule was overwhelmingly important.

  “From the competence-building point of view, it was very good because the backup pilots essentially learned everything about that flight so they could not only take that information forward but when the flight was actually under way, they could be useful in Mission Control—not necessarily working as CapCom talking to the crew in flight, but being around and being available to talk to whomever wanted more information about how the crew flying did this thing or that, or whether it would be okay if Mission Control asked them to do this or that. So there was a very useful role for the backups.”

  As for his specific assignment backing up Gordon Cooper, Neil had nothing but praise for Gemini 5’s prime commander. “Gordon and I worked well together,” Neil said flatly, pointing out that he had been assigned as a member of Cooper’s support team for Mercury’s final flight. He had become very impressed with the Oklahoma rancher’s flying abilities—not because he was a small-town boy, too, but because Gordo Cooper had the flying thing nailed.

  The problem was that some NASA bosses didn’t care for Gordo’s pranks, like putting live saltwater trout in Henri Landwirth’s motel pool just so he could catch a fish, or driving race cars at the Daytona Speedway, or joining his friend 1960 Indianapolis 500 winner Jim Rathmann to outsmart and outrun the “Smokies” on Florida’s highways.

  Neil had heard, before the final Mercury flight had been set in concrete, that Operations Director Walt Williams had stopped by Deke’s office and said, “Look, I know besides you Gordo Cooper is the only Mercury guy who hasn’t flown. But maybe it would be a good idea to consider moving Al Shepard into this last Mercury flight.” Then Williams saw Deke Slayton’s face, and felt a definite chill. “Of course, it’s your call, Deke.”

  Deke simmered as he nodded a weak good-bye to Williams.

  Gordon Cooper was too much of a maverick for some bosses in the space agency. His hotshot jet flying and his tendency to bend the rules did not sit well with some. Deke judged Gordo as nothing less than a terrific pilot. He had come up through the ranks—paying his dues all along the way, flying everything from J-3 cubs to F-106s—and he belonged at the stick of the last Mercury. If anyone knew how it felt to have an earned mission yanked from under his feet, it sure as hell was Deke Slayton. He wasn’t about to stand by and see Gordo get the shaft.

  And there was something else that grated Neil Armstrong’s sense of fair play.

  There were these elitists who disapproved of Gordo’s Oklahoma twang. “He’s nothing but a redneck,” laughed some members of the media and NASA’s public affairs office. To them the fact that Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper Jr. was one of the best pilots on Earth was irrelevant. They just didn’t want “trailer park trash” representing America in space.

  Well, as Neil had been told and witnessed for himself, Gordo Cooper met this problem as he did all of his problems: head-on. He grabbed the NASA public affairs officer leading the attack on his heritage and threw him into a hallway wall assuring him he would kick his condescending ass. The man’s only defense was to “hide behind the rules and laws drafted by lesser men” and then to run. Scared out of his wits, the NASA mouthpiece rushed into Deke’s office only to be told, “If Gordo needs any help kicking your ass I’ll help.”

  That was the end of it. The flight was Gordo’s and Neil was delighted. After 19 of 22 planned orbits on Cooper’s Mercury flight most of his spacecraft’s systems rolled over and died, and with only a single battery-supported radio and no power, ace pilot Gordo Cooper flew his ship to a landing within sight of the recovery ship. Neil Armstrong was first to say he knew of no other pilot who could have handled a dead spacecraft as Cooper had done.

  Neil smiled. “If I ever fly combat again, I want Gordo Cooper on my wing.”

  * * *

  The training for t
he Gemini 5 crews was demanding. “The reality of the world in those days is that a lot of testing took place at two o’clock in the morning,” Neil said. “And we were relieving each other when we could.

  “The four of us spent enormous amounts of time together, working out the details.

  “I would not say that we never cracked a joke or talked about something off the project. We were 98 percent focused on the job we had to do, but we did manage to get home, back to the neighborhood occasionally.”

  * * *

  Neil would spend his rare downtime enjoying family, getting to know his toddler Mark and playing catch with Ricky, throwing a couple easy ones for a seven-year-old to hit, and when possible, he would try to steal a few hours for personal flying.

  Neil not only flew machines with motors, he was also an elite glider pilot. He loved being alone high above the flat Texas landscape with only the sound of air rushing past his canopy—wafting on thermal currents, circling in wide arcs.

  “You’re just floating,” Neil told me. “No engines. No artificial propellant. You’re the hawk floating and twisting in the sky.”

  Neil was convinced that along with hang gliding sailplane gliding was about as close as a human could get to truly soaring like a bird, and he loved it. Even though he had flown the fastest jets ever, including the X-15 rocket plane, he still belonged to a local flying club. He still enjoyed slow, single-engine land aircraft as well as gliders.

  One of Armstrong’s flying club buddies was Bob Button, spokesman for the astronauts and a three-time-wounded combat veteran.

  One early evening Button and Neil and Jack Riley, another NASA spokesperson, decided to take a Piper Tri-Pacer up for some night flying. “We wanted to bore some holes in the black sky, and I took the pilot’s seat,” Button said. Can you imagine that? Bob Button putting Neil Armstrong into the copilot’s chair?

  That’s like him replacing Peyton Manning at quarterback. Riley went to sleep in the back.

  The weather was CAVU (Ceilings and Visibility Unlimited) with none of those low cumulus clouds that loved to hover around Houston like fat moths, and Button rolled the Tri-Pacer onto the runway and made a smooth takeoff and climbed into blackness. As they passed through 5,000 feet the three were astonished to see the pure night absorb all light. They were suddenly over the Gulf of Mexico with only an occasional dim light from a shrimp boat below.

  This was the peace the three sought, and they flew silently. No one said a word. They loved the remoteness from the hubbub of the city and welcomed the solitude that went on for about an hour until they could no longer see the lights of Houston.

  Then Neil broke the silence. “Okay, let’s head back.”

  By now, Button had the Tri-Pacer topping ten thousand feet and it was a long way down for the little single-engine land aircraft. No need to let carburetor ice build up and kill the engine Button reminded himself. Carburetor ice could be a problem for small aircraft coasting down from such altitudes, and he reached for the carburetor heat knob and pulled it out.

  Silence!

  Button had pulled the wrong knob! Apparently he pulled the mixture control, and starved the Tri-Pacer’s engine of fuel.

  In front of them the propeller slowed until the slipstream set it windmilling. The small plane responded, pitching its nose downward as it headed for the gulf, headed for the pit of blackness below; the sudden silence woke Jack Riley.

  “Whaaat the hell,” he yelled, springing up from the backseat so fast he almost put his head through the Tri-Pacer’s fabric roof.

  No one answered him. All Riley could see were Button’s frantic hands moving controls, trying to get the fuel mixture back to full rich.

  An unflappable Neil Armstrong sat quietly. He calmly watched Button deal with their impending problem of becoming a Gulf of Mexico submarine.

  Braaaaahh!

  There it was. They welcomed the engine suddenly coming to life again and powering the propeller. Button enriched his fuel mixture and shoved the throttle forward. The propeller bit hard into the gulf’s moist air and as it spun faster and faster, the three souls on board were relieved to see the plane’s nose come up and to feel the Tri-Pacer hauling them upstairs.

  Within seconds the Tri-Pacer was leaving the dark water in its wake, gaining altitude, and they could again see the lights of Houston.

  Neil Armstrong said not a word until Bob Button had all his flying duties under control.

  Then not a scolding from one of NASA’s most experienced test pilots. He only offered a constructive suggestion: “Bob you may wish to keep in mind what they teach in test-pilot school.” Neil smiled. “When you change an airplane’s control in flight, hang onto that control until the airplane does what you want.”

  Button didn’t have to be run over by a truck. He immediately recognized what Neil was telling him: that keeping your hand on anything in life until you achieve the outcome you wish is the quickest way to complete a task. Had he held onto the wrong control he had moved, he could have immediately returned the control to its correct position without harm. Closing the barn door after the horse is out doesn’t get the job done.

  Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov takes humankind’s first walk in space. (Russian Federal Space Agency)

  EIGHT

  THE GEMINI TWINS ARE FLYING

  March 18, 1965, America was caught with its pants down, again.

  Alexei Leonov stepped into space linked to his Russian craft by a lifeline. He floated for twelve minutes to perform history’s first Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA)—an ability necessary for building structures or reaching other places in space.

  But despite being beaten again America wasn’t standing still. The country was no longer stumbling. NASA’s plans for reaching the moon and landing there were gathering steam. Project Mercury had been thoroughly successful. The first Gemini two-seater was on its pad, ready for launch in five days.

  Neil Armstrong had been given a major role.

  Deke Slayton had selected Gordon Cooper as the Gemini 3 astronauts’ primary capsule communicator—the CapCom. He was sending Armstrong to NASA’s primary tracking station located in the country’s southernmost state, Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. Neil would be sitting as CapCom in the middle of the Pacific, the perfect place to help Gemini 3’s crew Gus Grissom and John Young prepare for reentry across Earth’s largest ocean.

  It was a good assignment. Neil had been there before with a support group made up of the new astronauts for the final Mercury flight flown by Gordon Cooper. He had studied the Hawaiian tracking station’s history. It was located on the most northern of the major Hawaiian Islands. The station was tucked away in the mountains of Hawaii’s Garden Isle on the northwestern rim of Waimea Canyon, described by most as the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific.”

  The scenery was so breathtaking and relaxing Neil brought Janet along. It was a feel-good moment. Janet was a fort as a mother and wife—a daughter of a medical doctor educated strongly in her own right. Neil knew from the moment Janet agreed to marry him, he’d been blessed. Never once had Janet faltered. Never once did Neil hesitate to leave home and hearth in her hands. No matter where NASA sent him, having to worry about how Janet was handling the home fires was never a concern. A happy Janet telling Hawaii station director Virgil True, “This is my first vacation in seven years,” brought a pleased smile to Neil’s face.

  God knew she deserved it.

  * * *

  Virgil True would serve four decades as director of the Hawaiian station. He and Neil became friends and Neil soon learned the station was only 5 degrees south of Cape Canaveral’s orbital insertion of 28 degrees inclined with the equator. Its location permitted Hawaii to track more orbits than any other on NASA’s worldwide tracking network.

  For this reason Kauai was designated the “primary” station and transmitted verbal commands to orbiting spacecraft. “Secondary” stations handled radar and telemetry information, but like most in NASA Neil found it difficult to get his mind off of Alex
ei Leonov’s first EVA. His thoughts kept going back to his friend and next-door neighbor Ed White.

  White was assigned the right seat of Gemini 4. Jim McDivitt in command would fly the left. In two or three months they were to follow Gemini 3 into orbit. Their flight plan called for them to pressurize their spacesuits and then depressurize Gemini 4. They would then open Ed White’s hatch and he would stand up. This would expose most of his body and suit to space. That was to have been NASA’s first step at mastering Extra Vehicular Activity.

  Neil’s best guess was that with the Russians beating them to the first EVA, NASA bosses would have Ed make a full spacewalk. Neil was aware of Chief Flight Director Chris Kraft’s candor when he complimented the Russians, admitting to the public that the Extra Vehicular Activity “was a tremendous surprise.” Neil knew the Russians clear warning to their cosmonauts that they were headed for the moon was well noted by his agency. He could visualize flight planners laying out a full EVA for Ed but he also knew he would not learn the real details until he was home and talking with Ed over their shared fence.

  * * *

  Within NASA there might have been even more concern about Russia reaching the moon had they known the details of their plans for cosmonauts Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov—the crew that had just conducted the first EVA.

  Soon after the cosmonauts return, mission commander Pavel Belyayev began training for a circumlunar flight, a loop around the moon, which would be made in about two-and-a-half years. Spacewalker Alexei Leonov was assigned to the group training to go to the moon and possibly land. In fact Leonov would become the commander of the Soviets’ lunar-landing program and be promoted to the rank of general. He and cosmonaut Oleg Makarov were planning to follow Belyayev in Zond, a larger spacecraft currently being built. It would be the first two-man circumlunar flight.

  The Russians were most aware of the propaganda value of flying around the lunar landscape first even if they couldn’t land. They knew that if Belyayev could complete a flight sooner by doing it alone, then they could lay claim to and no doubt be given full credit for having reached the moon first.