First Man for a New Year! (Armchair Astronaut, Jan. 2011)

Welcome to this third edition of Armchair Astronaut!! This time we feature the complete, authorized biography of America's most famous astronaut, Neil Armstrong.

First Man is totally awesome. James Hansen, the author, starts telling Armstrong's story with his genealogy and history of his parents. Next, Hansen tells of Armstrong's boyhood of growing up in Ohio. The young Armstrong joined the Boy Scouts, and got his pilot's license before he learned how to drive. In fact, when he wanted to visit Purdue University for himself, he took out his plane and flew there from his home field. When he landed at the airport near Purdue, Armstrong asked an amazed person to re-fuel his plane. (The guy was amazed at Armstrong's young age.) While some of Armstrong's flight school classmates never left the safety of Wapakoneta airfield, it goes without saying that Armstrong ventured far away.

When the Navy beckoned, Armstrong heeded the call and learned to fly at the Navy air school at Pensacola, Florida. During this time he also learned a most difficult task--how to land a plane on an aircraft carrier! Soon Armstrong and his "Screaming Eagles" group of flyers were called to Korea (in 1950) and proceeded to carry out the most difficult of missions. Some of his colleagues never made it back to ship. Armstrong himself was almost in this group, as on one mission some anti-aircraft fire teared his jet to smithereens. Armstrong barely made it back to safety and ejected over land. All in all, Neil Armstrong flew 78 missions over Korea.

By 1956 Neil Armstrong was living in southern California and working at Edwards Air Force Base as a test pilot, taking the fastest and latest planes and seeing what they could or couldn't do. In the realm of Edwards, you didn't talk about miles per hour or even couple hundred knots. It was Mach--the speed of sound. Usually that meant almost 800 miles per hour! And Mach 1 (the speed of sound) wasn't as far as you went. Going Mach 2, 3, 4, or 5 was how fast Edwards test pilots would fly. It was a dangerous job, but the higher and faster you went, the more fun you had. Armstrong even was named as a pilot to the X-15, the revolutionary and ground-breaking plane that took Armstrong to the edge of space. Armstrong flew 7 times in the X-15, and on his highest flight he reached 207,500 feet! The X-15 went up to Mach 6.72 (4,520 mph).



Even before the one-man, Mercury flights were over, NASA had recruited a new set of astronauts, as the upcoming Gemini program would be a two-seater. Neil Armstrong was in this second astronaut group (the "New Nine"), and was one of the first civilians named an astronaut. Along with Armstrong, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young made up the "New Nine".

Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong, prime crew for Gemini 8

In 1965 Armstrong was named as the Commander of Gemini 8, along with Dave Scott as Armstrong's Pilot. In March of 1966 he and Scott were launched aboard a Titan II booster and were hurled into space to start what was planned to be a very full and fulfilling mission. According to the flight plan, the Gemini 8 crew were to dock with an Agena docking vehicle, and then Scott was to do an spacewalk, or EVA (extra-vehicular activity).

The Agena docking target as seen from Gemini 8

The launch of Gemini 8 went fine, and Armstrong magnificently guided the capsule to a smooth docking with the Agena. Then the whole flight plan went to shreds. Attached to the Agena, the Gemini capsule started twirling, spinning around. Armstrong undocked from the Agena and backed away. The spinning kept on, kept getting worse. The crazy thing was that when the problems started, Armstrong and Scott were out of contact with Mission Control. The spinning increased. It increased so much that the Gemini capsule was revolving once per second! Armstrong and Scott were almost unconscience. Finally, Armstrong reached above his head and switched to another control system, which stabilized the spacecraft and put it back under Armstrong's control. The only downside was that once Armstrong initiated this other (RCS) control system, he had to complete re-entry as soon as possible and effectively abort the mission. While the mission was cut short,  Armstrong and Scott were still alive. If they had died, who knows? Perhaps we wouldn't have gone to the moon, or at least not by 1970. The Gemini training program was also reworked, and future crews came to think of the Gemini-Agena as one spacecraft, not two.

First Man goes on to touch on Armstrong's role as backup commander of Gemini 11, but after that he did not have any crew assignments until Apollo 11. However, Neil Armstrong was certainly still busy with various astronaut activities. For example, to give astronauts (and especially commanders) good practice at landing the Lunar Module (LM) on the moon, NASA had commisioned Bell Aircraft to create and manufacture a simulator for the Lunar Modules. It was called the "Lunar Landing Training Vehicle" or just simply, the LLTV.  In other words, some kind of real-life flying comtraption that would simulate landing in the moon's 1/6 gravity. Nicknamed "the flying bedstead", astronauts were fly it to practice moon landings. It would fly like regular until the pilot switched it into a lunar mode, and from there on it would fly like it would with the moon's 1/6 gravity. Even though it was an extremely dangerous machine to operate, all the astronauts praised it and said it gave them invaluable practice at landings on the moon.

How dangerous the LLTV was very obvious as Armstrong flew it on May 6, 1968. He was about 100 feet off the ground, and suddenly the LLTV's controls degraded and became virtually unusable. Quickly Armstrong bailed out and his parachute unfolded and carried him safely away from the fireball LLTV that exploded on the ground. If Armstrong had bailed out just a half-second later, he would have been killed.

From left to right, Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin

On January 9, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew was named and had their first press conference. Armstrong would command the mission, and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin would accompany Armstrong to the moon while Michael Collins would remain in the Command Module and keep everything running for his crewmates.

The press felt that Armstrong was a recluse, that he wouldn't say anything that they could use in their articles. He would give short, terse, answers, and almost no options for a follow-up question. For example, one person noted that Armstrong had totally mastered the language of "computer-ese": Instead of saying turn on or off, Armstrong would say "enable" or "disable". Instead of saying "other options", he'd say, "peripheral  secondary options". I thought it was quite funny when I read that! Of course the press wasn't too happy; they were trying to display a person that just wasn't. Armstrong was not that accessible, if you will, to the general public.

First Man also describes Buzz Aldrin's desire to be first man on the moon, as well as the Apollo 11 mission in quite some detail. And of course it tells of Armstrong's never-forgotten words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Several astronaut kids were watching Neil's first steps. One of them, saw the live transmission from the moon and decided that the quality wasn't good enough. So he told his mommy that he was going to go outside and watch them! When he couldn't see the moonwalkers, he returned inside saying, "Can I please have a magnifying glass??" :D

Concluding his biography, James Hansen tells of Armstrong's life after retirement from NASA, and his life as a celebrity, even though Armstrong may not exactly like all the attention he gets.

First Man is totally awesome--I highly recommend it. It may be (literally) 650 pages, but I promise you that you will never get bored with reading in such great detail about the fascinating life of Neil Armstrong. If you ever wanted to learn more about America's most famous astronaut, read First Man!