Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight Read online

  The NACA’s High Speed Flight Station hangar with its people and planes in the 1950s. (NACA)

  Neil wasn’t quite sure how Janet felt about the parched wasteland. He could only hope this place fifty miles east of nowhere would grow on her.

  He was only sure he loved it. He didn’t mind the heat. He didn’t mind the desert and the bones of the foolhardy who had fallen where they met their demise. He had a few months to get used to living in Valhalla where the souls of the world’s fastest pilots were received, where their longest runways were outlined on dry lake beds, where in the heart of this sprawling home of daring flyers huge aircraft hangars rose in the incessant heat and all creatures endured windstorms that huffed and puffed sand and desert waste across all it reached.

  Temperatures crashed to near freezing at night, and in December the rains arrived. They laid down thin layers of water on the dry lake surfaces, oozing something prehistoric and wiggly to the top—ancient brine shrimp that sea gulls from the Pacific would dive in and gobble up. As the winds blew these thin layers of water back and forth, the lake beds below were smoothed and readied for baking by the hot sun. Then the great natural runways would return and the high-speed machines would fly higher and faster than ever.

  Neil Armstrong believed Edwards was home. He settled in for what promised to be an exciting life having not a hint the place would be renamed on March 1, 2014, the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.

  They were at the time building the X-15 rocket plane, but it would be four years before it would be ready to fly. While he waited Neil would stay busy as a lower-rung research test pilot and engineer.

  “They wanted me to learn NACA techniques for collecting data,” Neil said. “They had a P-51 Mustang, one of the fastest propeller-driven planes ever, and they made me go out there and fly it,” he explained. “I had flown its double fuselage version the F-82 back at Lewis. It had very rudimentary instruments and data-collection techniques and I practiced lots of maneuvers for test purposes.

  “It was good experience,” he nodded assuredly.

  * * *

  For eighteen months Neil Armstrong flew every research aircraft NACA had—dropping the agency’s manned experimental rockets, or chasing them in the fastest jets. NACA had them all—including two B-29s, the same aircraft that had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

  “I flew both of them—right seat, or left seat,” Neil said. “We used the B-29s to air drop over 100 rocket planes in the 1950s.

  “The early drops were the X-1 and the Douglas Skyrockets, and I flew an average of ten times a month—just about every day we had good weather.

  “Of course all the drops didn’t go right—like the Skyrocket we dropped March 22, 1956.

  “I was Stan Butchart’s copilot with Jack McKay in the rocket plane to be dropped,” Neil continued. “When we reached altitude in the B-29, about 31,000 feet, the number four engine quit, just quit running. Butch turned his seat around to help the engineer run down the problem and left the flying to me.”

  Neil took over the controls and they dropped Jack McKay in his Skyrocket. McKay landed safely on the dry lake bed below while Stan Butchart and the engineer busied themselves doing what they could do with the dead engine.

  That’s when it happened.

  The B-29 shuddered. In that hair-raising moment Neil had a quick glimpse of a bullet-shaped propeller hub shooting backward. Engine number four’s propeller had disintegrated. He was suddenly looking at a banged-up and dented engine without a propeller.

  “It appeared the whole propeller shredded itself,” Neil said. “And when it did, it clobbered engine number three.”

  Butchart and the engineer began trying to feather engine three’s propeller—rotate its blades so they were parallel to the direction of the airflow. This reduced resistance and reduced the workload on the remaining two engines.

  Neil was left with two good engines of the four, but not really. There was a problem. Both good engines were on the left wing, and they were approaching the north lake bed at 30,000 feet. Nobody did that—landing a B-29 from 30,000—and Neil was thinking get your gear down, create some drag, or you’re going to overrun the lake bed. He was happy to see Butchart rejoin him at the controls.

  That was the good news. The bad news was the disintegrating engine four had damaged their controls. Butch and Neil decided they could only use engine number two—just one of their four for landing; engine number one was the farthest out on the wing and had too much torque. It was already trying to wrench the controls from their hands. Somehow, with both Neil and Butch fighting their yokes and rudder foot pedals, doing their best to keep the plane from getting away from them, they managed a safe landing.

  * * *

  The B-29 emergency was no little thing, but Neil hardly spoke of it to Janet. To him it was another day of writing the textbooks on flight.

  When it came to growing their knowledge, he and Janet were on the same page. They had found time to continue their college studies in Los Angeles area schools but there was another act of acquiring afoot. That next summer Janet gave Neil a gift. One he would care more about than flying. Their first child, Eric Alan Armstrong, arrived on June 30, 1957.

  Friends immediately noticed a longer stride in Neil’s walk.

  He wouldn’t brag on himself, but he wouldn’t miss a chance to brag on the son he and Janet decided to call Ricky.

  There was just one problem. Neil didn’t have the patience to wait for Ricky to grow into a baseball glove. But he did manage—he waited and watched and his son grew, and Ricky eventually became the six-foot-something athlete his father wanted.

  The strapping young Armstrong was a permanent fixture on the baseball diamonds and football fields. He soon lost the “y” at the end of his name—especially on the football team where they called him kicker.

  In 2008, I introduced my grandson Bryce to Neil. I proudly told him Bryce had set football records kicking for the universities of East Carolina and Shenandoah. No sooner had the words left my lips the normally quiet Neil Armstrong was telling Bryce all about Rick’s kicks.

  Their conversation became lengthy—each unashamedly stretching the truth. I could only watch a talkative Neil Armstrong—yes, a talkative Neil Armstrong—brag on his first born.

  What was a strong fact was that Neil loved Rick as he did all his children. There were things like family and flying he would go on about with those close to him—but not to the public. There Neil remained a mystery. His blue eyes seemed to reach all the way to his soul—they sent the message “keep your distance.” His boyish face was absent of any lines, and his expression only changed with his distinct smile, his one-of-a-kind grin.

  If you dared ask a question, Neil would stare at you, forcing you to wait and then begin asking again before he would finally speak. His words were perfectly thought-out sentences—a direct product of his scientific research training. Whatever he said he wanted it to be correct. He didn’t like having to defend something his mouth had carelessly gotten wrong.

  * * *

  Most assuredly Neil Armstrong was big on fact and accuracy.

  But it wasn’t all work.

  Once in a while there was fun. Neil would fly routine tests over his family’s cabin and waggle his wings.

  When he and Janet first set up housekeeping, they lived in a couple of places in the Edwards area before buying property in the San Gabriel Mountains.

  “On that property on a mile-high perch was a cabin built for a weekend getaway, and compared to the comforts back home,” Neil bragged, “the cabin qualified us for honorable mention in early pioneer folklore.

  “Its floor was bare wood. No bedroom, just four bunks with a tiny bath and small kitchen with primitive plumbing and no electricity.

  “Of course there was no hot water,” he laughed. “The shower was a hose hanging over a tree limb. We did some remodeling. I ran some wiring to get us electricity, and Janet cooked on a hot plate.

  “No one lived
near Edwards,” he explained. “It was a big base and you were always at least 30 minutes away.”

  The cabin was located where the flora was lush and the fauna were plentiful. “On a clear day,” Neil assured us, “we could see across most of Southern California.”

  Northwest were the Tehachapi Mountains with their trails winding across the Mojave Desert floor to the fertile green fields of the San Joaquin Valley. To the northeast lay granite buttes amid sandscapes including Saddleback and Piute. And though the harsh summer sun baked the land below to a winter-wheat brown, in the wet springtime the entire valley bloomed into one of nature’s perfect gardens.

  “My job was 50 miles and one stop sign away,” Neil laughed, not in the least aware that if you flew to the opposite side of the planet from his mountain home, you would arrive at another world not unlike Edwards.

  You would be in the land of the sky: not the sands of the Mojave, but the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, a flat plain where the yellowed grasslands turn green only in the spring, where at days end one could see nothing, not even a leaf or twig between self and setting sun.

  It was this bare, unpopulated land that was chosen in the 1950s by a small army of Russian space pioneers to build the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was a sprawling space center located perfectly to launch rockets, where mishaps would do little damage to the sparse life surrounding it. Even more important, the desolation would hide the Soviet’s secrets.

  They developed and tested missiles and rockets just as Americans did at Cape Canaveral. And on October 4, 1957, the Soviets gathered around a large white booster for the first step on the road to arguably one of humankind’s greatest achievements. They were planning the first of many major events needed to set in motion Neil Armstrong’s exciting life in flight whereby he’d become the first to step on a place other than Earth.

  The rocket was called R-7. Neither Neil nor anyone beyond its launchpad were aware that a historically momentous rocket was about to be fired. It would add greatly to the pages of history, and the man orchestrating the stop-and-go countdown was cut from the same bolt of cloth as those like Neil who asked the question, “How high is up?”

  The man’s name was Sergei Korolev and he was near the launchpad inside a steel-walled room. He sat at an old wooden desk, microphone in hand, directing his launch team. He was the chief rocket scientist for the Soviet Union, who, unlike America’s genius in rocketry, Dr. Wernher von Braun, had the blessing and support of his country’s government. His R-7 was four times more powerful than von Braun’s Redstone, and it was about to send a satellite into orbit and open the road to the moon.

  Korolev’s simplicity would tolerate no fancy surroundings. Shortly after arriving in Kazakhstan, he built for himself a small wood-frame house not unlike Neil’s California cabin. The essential difference between Armstrong’s place in the mountains and Korolev’s house was location: instead of 50 miles from Neil’s runways it stood a mere walking distance from the R-7’s launchpad.

  Korolev left nothing to chance. He had worked side by side with mechanics and metalworkers, personally helping fashion and assemble what would be the first artificial satellite of Earth. Korolev created a sphere of aluminum alloys with four spring-loaded whip antennas and two battery-powered radio transmitters that would sing their unmelodious song to the world.

  No science aboard this one. It was a satellite to simply demonstrate such a device could successfully be placed in Earth orbit, and he fitted it within a pointed metal nose cone and watched technicians installing it atop the R-7 booster.

  Once the rocket’s technological glitches had been resolved, events moved rapidly and they left the launchpad for safety behind thick concrete walls. The final countdown went quickly, heard only by the launch team, a handful of experts, and those officials protecting their place in the Soviet hierarchy.

  An unsuspecting world was about to be shocked. The huge launch tower and its work stands were rolled back. The last power umbilicals between the tower and rocket separated, falling and writhing into their places of rest.

  The rocket now stood alone.

  The minutes were gone.

  The final seconds were passing. Korolev’s voice rang out: “Zashiganiye! Tri, Dva, Odin.”

  Enormous flame created a pillow of fire. It lashed and ripped into curving steel, followed concrete channels blowing long unbroken bright-orange flames across the desolate landscape. A continuing thundering roar followed. It rolled over Baikonur as Korolev’s rocket climbed on an unbroken column of fire, delighting all that watched before leaving them and speeding away to reach for where nothing created by man had ever been. Korolev stayed inside. The Russian scientist was far more interested in the readouts from his rocket than seeing the startling, pyrotechnic display R-7 had created. He was not disappointed. The numbers were perfect. Engines cut off on schedule. Stages separated as planned. Then, when the last engine died, protective metal flew away from the satellite. Springs pushed it free in space.

  The satellite became known as Sputnik (fellow traveler). Obeying the laws of celestial mechanics, it immediately began to fall, beckoned invisibly toward the center of Earth. As fast as it fell in its wide, swooping arc, the surface of the planet below curved away beneath the falling satellite moving at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour in its orbit around Earth.

  Some hour-and-a-half later it came back. Accounting for the movement of Earth beneath its orbital track in the time it took to circle the globe, Sputnik’s path now took it fifteen hundred miles north of its still-steaming launchpad. It swept across Asia transmitting its incessant lusty beep. The loudspeakers of Baikonur blared its voice. Its launch team broke into cheers and shouts of joy. Korolev turned to them and spoke with deep feeling, “Today, the dreams of the best sons of mankind have come true. The assault on space has begun.”

  * * *

  Neil Armstrong was in nearby Los Angeles at a symposium held by the Society of Experimental Test Pilots when Sputnik reached orbit.

  He was disappointed Sputnik didn’t belong to America, but found the Russian launch encouraging. “It changed the world,” Neil said. “It absolutely changed our country’s view of what was happening, the potential of space. I’m not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead.

  “President Eisenhower was saying, ‘What’s the worry? It’s just one small ball.’ But I’m sure that was a facade behind which he had substantial concerns,” Neil explained. “Because if they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United States. The navigation requirements,” he added, “were quite similar.”

  That said, in Neil’s judgment the Soviet Union was without question technologically inferior. Someone had dropped the ball and it gnawed at him. He knew that Dr. Wernher von Braun and his Huntsville, Alabama, group were better. He knew von Braun’s seasoned engineers had built rockets that were already reaching space, and America could have been in orbit with one of von Braun’s Redstone rockets and a couple of upper stages long before now. Why weren’t they? Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson.

  Neil, as did many at the High Speed Flight Station knew Wernher and his group had been trying to get official approval to punch a satellite into Earth orbit for more than a year. But Wilson thought it was just so much nonsense and he and President Eisenhower were perfectly willing to put America’s prestige on a larger version of the Navy’s Viking RTV-N-12A sounding rocket. The Navy had tested about ten. About half had failed and the final launcher to carry a satellite was to have a larger engine and additional upper stages. In a sense the United States was putting its reputation on a yet-to-be built paper rocket named Vanguard.

  Eisenhower and Wilson undressed it from its Navy whites and hung a sign around its neck that read “Civilian.” It was now part of an international science project, the IGY (International Geophysical Year), which had a membership of sixty-seven nations. No one was sure the pencil-shaped thing would fly but it was the politically correct thi
ng to do.

  In 1956, Wilson ordered von Braun to remove Redstone 29 from its launchpad. It could have been a year ahead of the Russians in launching a satellite. But it wasn’t. Neil and others on the front line of research wanted to go to Washington and ride Wilson out of town on a rail. Instead Neil went outside with the others from the test pilots’ group to look for what was now orbiting Earth.

  According to some, Sputnik could be seen sweeping over an early evening Los Angeles, but Neil knew better. There was too much reflected light in the metropolis’s night sky for that. It might be possible to see the large trailing rocket stage glinting from the sun that was still lighting it above Earth’s early darkness. The conditions would have to be just right. Neil and others looked for a while but, as he had expected, there simply was too much reflected glow. They gave up and went back inside.

  * * *

  Only a month after Sputnik 1, the Russians did it again. Sputnik 2 raced more than a thousand miles above Earth. On board was a living, breathing animal. A dog named Laika.

  Americans were livid. Was Eisenhower fiddling while Rome burned? Where were our rockets? Where were our satellites? What the hell was going on? The president got the message. He acted, but prematurely. A civilian launch team working on Vanguard rushed the unproven rocket to its launchpad. On top was a grapefruit-size satellite that was so small it weighed only a laughable three pounds.

  The day was December 6, 1957. The launch team neared the end of its countdown and an anxious hush fell over a hopeful America.

  “T-minus five, four, three, two, one, zero.”

  The slender Vanguard ignited, covered its pad with flaming thrust, and rose four feet, no more, before crumbling into its self-made fireball, consuming not only itself, but burning most of its launch facilities, leaving only blackened steel and ash.

  The slender Vanguard ignited and rose four feet before consuming itself in its self-made fireball. (U.S. Navy and Air Force)

  The loss of Vanguard wounded our pride, again. It also came close to destroying our confidence, and most Americans knew it was time for something to be done. The Russians were kicking us where we sat and it was time for a stubborn White House to call in the cavalry—to call in the von Braun team.