Neil Armstrong

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings

by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton and Neil Armstrong  · 1 Jan 1994  · 469pp  · 124,784 words

MOON SHOT The Inside Story of America’s Apollo Moon Landings Alan Shepard AND Deke Slayton WITH Jay Barbree INTRODUCTION BY Neil Armstrong Moon Shot is for the quintessential space journalist Howard Benedict, the senior aerospace writer for the Associated Press and a perennial winner of spaceflight’s

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talents to herd the facts and details for the original Moon Shot. He was simply the best and we miss him. CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION by Neil Armstrong CHAPTER ONE: 2011 CHAPTER TWO: The Beginning CHAPTER THREE: The Pilots CHAPTER FOUR: The Astronauts CHAPTER FIVE: Training CHAPTER SIX: The Selection CHAPTER SEVEN: The

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before or since. As the captain said, fasten your seat belt. We’re going to the moon, the damnedest trip you’ll ever make. INTRODUCTION Neil Armstrong’s Moon LUNA INCOGNITA. THE UNKNOWN MOON. A silent sentinel. For all of man’s history it had hung overhead, remote, unreachable, unknowable. Marching across

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lunar highlands. Silent ramparts guard vast territories never yet visited by man. Unseen vistas await the return of explorers from Earth. And they will return. —Neil Armstrong CHAPTER ONE 2011 DURING THE FIVE DECADES FOLLOWING Alan Shepard’s first launch in 1961, NASA’s enormous accomplishments were respected and admired the world

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of astronaut. They would help the Mercury Seven fly the new Gemini two-man spacecraft. Some would become legends. Others would give their lives. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young came aboard Slayton now had fifteen astronauts

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highway to the moon. But linking two ships in orbit still had to be proven. That job now fell to the Gemini 8 crew of Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. Their Agena target satellite, boosted by an Atlas rocket and its own engine, shot into orbit on March 16, 1966, and they

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up as high as 550 degrees per second. That’s about the rate at which you begin to lose consciousness or the capability to operate. Neil Armstrong realized they were in very serious trouble, and he took all the power off the Gemini to try to stop the spin, and then he

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to fly the third flight after that.” Thus, Deke and Alan called the backup crew that had supported the moon-orbiting flight of Apollo 8. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and were told they were it. They would fly Apollo 11. They would get the first chance to land on

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the moon. But NASA had yet to fly that bug-eyed spidery creature it called the lunar module, which would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to lunar soil. It must be flown, and successfully, on Apollo 9. That meant firing the entire Apollo assembly of command

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toe or came down with the flu at the last moment, if, if, if, then the first landing assignment would go to the crew of Neil Armstrong, who had pulled Gemini 8 out of its deadly spin; Buzz Aldrin, who had solved the problems of space-walking on the very last Gemini

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lunar landscape in their landing craft—the first of their kind to descend on the moon. Their ship was named Eagle. Within its cramped cabin Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood with their booted feet flat against its flight deck. Each was sealed within the protective layers of a pressurized spacesuit, and

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gravity field. Their arms sagged. Legs settled within their suits. Their feet pressed downward in their boots as they yielded to their down-rushing speed. Neil Armstrong smiled. His eyes were tired but warm with anticipation, immersed in the reality of their incredible adventure. He saw Buzz Aldrin grinning like a kid

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the Eagle’s computer so all the key functions were performed in the time allotted. His computer was working, and that’s what mattered. But Neil Armstrong’s voice demanded a response. “Give usthe reading on that twelve-oh-two program alarm.” “GUIDO?” Gene Kranz shouted the question into the loop of

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. Hang tight, we’re GO. . . . ” Thirteen hundred feet above the moon’s surface, Eagle began its final descent. Flames gushed downward as the craft slowed. Neil Armstrong had flown his mission right along the edge of the razor. He and Buzz functioned as one mind. Now they were doing more than falling

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dead weight in vacuum. There also was no opportunity to orbit again for another try at landing. Their only chance to succeed was to land. Neil Armstrong gripped the hand controller in his fist, firm and strong, with a touch honed by years of flight in jets and rockets. He knew the

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21, dammit even ejecting from the lunar lander trainer before it crashed—all of it, everything came to this one moment. The Ohio farm boy, Neil Armstrong came from the same soil as Orville and Wilbur. This was his Kitty Hawk and he needed to hand-fly man’s first landing on

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would burn out. The tanks would be empty. An abort would need to be initiated seconds before that happened if Eagle was not to crash. Neil Armstrong calmly aimed for his new landing site. The Eagle’s commander kept one thought uppermost in his mind. Fly. Eagle swayed gently from side to

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Buzz. Deke Slayton knew they had to leave it to the pilots on the final approach. As Eagle skittered over boulders and across craters, only Neil Armstrong’s judgment counted. He was there. He was flying. The clock was ticking away precious fuel. Charlie Duke looked at Deke and held up both

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, and throughout the vast halls of NASA, everyone anywhere who knew what was happening just above the moon was hoping, praying, straining. Fuel flashed away. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle with the smooth touch of a naval aviator landing a jet on a tossing carrier. Millions of hearts pounded madly. Then, Buzz spoke

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-up. There would be time later to celebrate. The words flashed across space to Houston. “That may have seemed like a very long final phase.” Neil Armstrong was all business again. “The auto targeting was taking us into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks

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on the moon as they studied the lunar landscape. No birds. No wind. No clouds. A black sky instead of blue. Two days from Earth Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on a ghost world—a land that had never known the caress of seas. Never felt life stirring in its

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and a Mars-size planetoid. Its infancy was one of boiling lava and shattering space collisions before it died geologically. Today, in the year 2011, Neil Armstrong and those who walked the lunar surface will tell you if humankind is to survive a finite Earth, it must colonize the moon. Humans must

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TWENTY Boots on the Moon ON JULY 20, 1969, EIGHT years after President John F. Kennedy had promised to put a man on the moon, Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11’s lunar module and climbed down Eagle’s ladder to the moon’s surface. There was no hurry. Moving into the

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(who died in a plane crash in 1968). They unsheathed a metal disc on the descent stage with engraved messages to future moon visitors. As Neil Armstrong read the plaque’s words, his voice carried throughout the world. “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969

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, AD. We came in peace for all mankind.” There was yet another small cargo—private and precious—carried by Neil Armstrong to the moon. It was not divulged at the time, but he carried the diamond-studded astronaut pin made especially for Deke Slayton by the

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its launch platform—the bottom half of the lunar module. Insulation material torn free by the rocket blast scattered widely in a shower of debris. Neil Armstrong, watching the surface, saw the first American flag deployed on the moon yield to the whoosh of dust and debris and fall slowly over on

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ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person

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intense heat. Investigators said the fire was caused by defective electrical wiring. The Apollo 11 crew: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Mike Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin. On July 16, 1969, Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin rocketed away from earth and four days later Armstrong and Aldrin rode

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Armstrong were on the moon more than 21 hours and spent two hours exploring outside their lander. President Richard M. Nixon greeted Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean following the spacemen’s return from man’s first moon

A Man on the Moon

by Andrew Chaikin  · 1 Jan 1994  · 816pp  · 242,405 words

war, the environment, and unrest at home, NASA was expanding the reach of human beings on another world. On Apollo 11, the first lunar landing, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had spent little more than a day on a bland acre of moonscape. In their single moonwalk—which lasted a bit longer

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until Collins could get there. Wally Schirra's wife, Jo, and Chuck Berry, the space center's chief physician, would go to Betty Grissom's. Neil Armstrong's wife, Jan, would go to her next-door neighbor Pat White's, and Bill Anders, another member of the third group, and like Bean

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was only a matter of time. Gemini had had its share of close calls, none worse than when Gemini 8 began tumbling out of control: Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had narrowly escaped with their lives. And the Gemini pilots had taken some calculated risks. For example, everyone knew that the Gemini

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, the first one. He felt sure the other men in this room, especially the mission commanders—Wally Schirra, Jim McDivitt, Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Neil Armstrong—shared his ambition. But no one could predict who might make that first landing, not even Slayton, and that was part of his message on

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Air Force Base. There were those, like John Young, who had set a record or two. And there was even a rocket pilot among them: Neil Armstrong, a NASA man out of Edwards, who had flown the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space. In short, the Nine were ready

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to getting on a crew. On the first day of the mission, March 3, 1966, Anders walked into the Mission Control Center just minutes after Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had successfully docked with their unmanned Agena target. The craft was out of radio contact, somewhere over China. Jim Lovell was just

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spring as one of a handful of astronauts who were learning how to fly the dangerous and unwieldy trainer called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle. Neil Armstrong was flying it too, and he and Anders had a friendly competition to see who could make the better simulated lunar touchdown. No one had

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their last meal on earth, the traditional astronaut’s breakfast of steak and eggs. Deke Slayton was there, and Al Shepard, along with backup crewmen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, scientist-astronaut Jack Schmitt, and the man who had envisioned this mission, George Low. Years later Anders would remember the conversation as

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1968, when Frank Borman's crew swapped places with Jim McDivitt's, so did their backup teams, and Conrad's place in line went to Neil Armstrong. Now it looked as though Armstrong's team, a crew with hardly any lunar module experience, was about to be assigned to the landing. That

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wayside in the fall of 1968 when Borman turned down the offer. Many years later, the myth would endure that somehow NASA had hand-picked Neil Armstrong to command the first lunar landing mission. In one version it was because he was the best test pilot among the astronauts; in another, because

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pilot. It wouldn't be official for a few days, but assuming it was approved, they would be in line for the first lunar landing. Neil Armstrong had gone to work that Monday morning with only a suspicion, not an assurance, of what might come his way. Looking back, he would say

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Young. Thirty-one hours after that, early in the morning of May 24, the second team of moon voyagers headed back to earth. In Houston, Neil Armstrong and his crew were into their final months of preparation. When Tom Stafford's crew came back from the moon, only the landing remained. Everything

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past his canopy. From the ground, you might have seen him, wafting on the thermal currents, circling in wide arcs. Whenever he got the chance, Neil Armstrong took time out from the pressure of his life as an astronaut to go soaring. He loved this kind of flying—unpowered, pure, mentally demanding

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in existence. Somehow, the primitive beauty of Edwards was the perfect backdrop to the unfolding of the future. And it was the perfect place for Neil Armstrong. NACA’s High Speed Flight Station was perched on the edge of Rogers Dry Lake. The NACA fliers epitomized a new breed of test pilot

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to about that, but space is the frontier, and that's where I intend to go." June 1969 Flight Crew Training Building, Kennedy Space Center Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood side by side in the Lunar Module Simulator. A soft green light filled the enclosure, emanating from dozens of electroluminescent dials

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they had done many times over the past few months, Armstrong and Aldrin were about to confront Apollo’s greatest unknown. “Space is the frontier,” Neil Armstrong had said seven years earlier, and with the lunar landing he had found a piloting task at the frontier of spaceflight. Nothing like it had

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and hovered in midair for an instant, then flew slowly over the concrete apron. This was the moment that made NASA managers chew their fingernails. Neil Armstrong was piloting the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, one of the most unforgiving flying machines ever built. For Armstrong, it was also one of the most

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would be assigned to the very next mission to try again. For Collins, Paine’s promise took some of the pressure off, but not for Neil Armstrong. He was only too aware that the nation’s prestige was riding on this mission. It was impossible not to be aware, in the fishbowl

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welcome, or, perhaps, warning. 7:25 P.M., Houston time 3 days, 10 hours, 53 minutes Mission Elapsed Time Even before Apollo 11 left earth, Neil Armstrong knew the approach to his landing site as well as he had known the desert towns along the approach to Edwards. He’d spent some

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Gene Cernan. Charlie Duke knew more about the lunar module than any astronaut who wasn’t already on an Apollo crew; that expertise had prompted Neil Armstrong to ask him to serve as Capcom for the landing. A short time ago Kranz had ordered Security to lock the doors to the MOCR

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communications dropped out. “They’ve lost you,” Collins radioed to his crewmates. A moment later, after Aldrin switched to a different antenna, communications returned. Now Neil Armstrong turned his attention to the moon. Eagle was facedown, and through his small, triangular window Armstrong could see landmarks he recognized. Each checkpoint was appearing

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and some of the computer experts from MIT, studying each type of alarm and what to do if it came up. So when Kranz heard Neil Armstrong call “twelve-oh-two,” he knew it was serious. Whether they could continue or not was up to Steve Bales. But the complexities of the

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but dissolved, that the “center of gravity of the decision-making process" was no longer some point midway between himself and the moon. It was Neil Armstrong. Charlie Duke knew it too, and he said over the loop to Kranz, “I think we'd better be quiet." There was nothing to do

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mission that he had missed its significance—but now she realized she had been wrong. If Aldrin’s Communion marked a very personal observance, then Neil Armstrong had his own ceremony to think about. Almost from the moment the world learned that he would be the first human being to set foot

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. The front leg of the lunar module slanted across a tableau of black sky and bright ground, and at the top, the shadowy form of Neil Armstrong descended, one rung at a time, toward the moon. When Armstrong reached the bottom rung he paused. The legs were designed to compress with the

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opened, fuel would flow into the combustion chamber, and the engine would fire. That would have to happen two minutes from now. Before the flight Neil Armstrong had worried about those valves, and he'd suggested to the engineers that they consider replacing the electrical actuating system with a mechanical one that

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. Conrad and Gordon told Bean, “Hang on!” THE NEW ASTRONAUTS Heirs to the Original 7: The “New 9” on desert survival training, 1963. (From left) Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, Jim McDivitt, Elliot See, Torn Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. Eight of them would fly on Gemini; Elliot

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unforgiving flying machines ever built, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle was essential to learning how to land on the moon. APOLLO 11 above: April 1969: Neil Armstrong (right) and Buzz Aldrin clamber through a suited run-through of their moonwalk. right: July 20, 1969: An hour into history's first moonwalk, Buzz

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plenty of NASA people, at the Cape and in Houston, who were surprised when he didn’t get it. He was in mission control when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. And he was there when everyone, from the NASA managers in the control center to the geologists in

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Paine for his kind offer and said good-bye. He was halfway up the stairs when he realized Paine had made the same promise to Neil Armstrong. II: Shore Leave Monday, November 17 11:45 P.M., Houston time 3 days, 13 hours, 23 minutes Mission Elapsed Time “Twenty-four hours from

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t deny it; this was the big day. “Oh, you noticed?" Conrad said wryly, as the two men ate breakfast over the lunar far side. Neil Armstrong had never said a word about anxiety, but Conrad wasn't Armstrong. “I just hope we find the old Snowman! Then I hope we find

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never had any trouble speaking her mind, especially when it came to bureaucracy. And that afternoon she was convinced that NASA’s bureaucrats had told Neil Armstrong what to say when he stepped on the moon. Conrad tried to convince her otherwise, but she was certain of it. Conrad persisted; he couldn

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footpad with a gentle bump. “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it's a long one for me.” As Neil Armstrong had done, Conrad held on with his right hand and placed his left boot on the moon. He swirled his foot in the dust. “Ooh

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, Conrad ran out ahead of him, scouting a good area to lay out the experiments. In their 2l/z hours on the Sea of Tranquillity, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had never ventured more than a couple of hundred feet from their lander. Now, 1 hour and 48 minutes into this first

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had been the commander on Apollo 8. If Lovell had any disappointment about his commander’s decision, it vanished when Slayton assigned him to lead Neil Armstrong’s backup crew. Within weeks after Armstrong’s team came back from the moon, Lovell and his crew were training for their own landing. By

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the spring of 1970, most of Lovell’s colleagues from the second astronaut group had moved on to other things. Neil Armstrong had disappeared into the world of postflight P.R. that greeted him on his return from Apollo 11; it seemed unlikely he would fly again

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water about 5 hours before reentry. That would have been an ominous prediction if not for an important bit of data from Apollo 11. Before Neil Armstrong and his crew cast off Eagle’s ascent stage in lunar orbit, they began an experiment: they left everything inside the lander operating, but deliberately

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the moon in a command module without power, or an engine, or oxygen. Lovell realized it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Unlike Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell had not received any pre-flight promise from Tom Paine about letting him and his crew fly the next mission

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could settle a few lunar mysteries, it wouldn’t hurt. Unfortunately, Stafford’s crew didn’t have much time for science; of course, neither did Neil Armstrong’s. Schmitt understood that on the first landing science had to take a back seat—a fact that Shoemaker and some of his colleagues didn

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first and a scientist second. And in his more realistic moments, Schmitt had to agree. More importantly, some of the scientists had underestimated the astronauts; Neil Armstrong’s work on Apollo 11 made that clear. For years, the geologists had the feeling that Armstrong was genuinely interested, and that he was picking

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now. Don’t take any chances out there; just get home alive.” Understandable though it was, this kind of talk rankled Cernan. He sensed, as Neil Armstrong had in the months before Apollo 11, the damage that failure would cause the program and the national image. And as a mission commander, he

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a long-running stage play. Some of the stars of that production—several of the men who had crossed the translunar gulf, including Jim Lovell, Neil Armstrong, and, with special irony, Dick Gordon—were on hand to see the last of their comrades leave the earth. Nearby, more than a thousand newspeople

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the Mercury 7 Foundation, created by the Original 7 to give scholarships to college students studying space and engineering. None of the moon voyagers save Neil Armstrong has as much name recognition, and Shepard is able to use his fame to raise money for the foundation. Though he is more often identified

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likes to point out a pair of photographs that share a frame on his office wall: one of himself at Taurus-Littrow, the other of Neil Armstrong at Tranquillity Base. The last man to walk on the moon and the first. They could not be more different in the way they have

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moon. He is facing the camera, standing at the edge of a small crater; in his mirrored visor is a tiny image of the photographer, Neil Armstrong, and the Sea of Tranquillity. If Armstrong’s journey since that photograph was taken has been one of the most private, then Aldrin’s has

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main room of the house, the one where Bean spends most mornings, is the painting studio. Displayed around his easel are images Bean has created: Neil Armstrong, his gold visor reflecting the Sea of Tranquillity, unfurling an American flag in the vacuum; Ed Mitchell in midstride, map in hand, on his way

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the whole, his theory seems to hold up. Jim Irwin was a religious man before he went. Ed Mitchell was already interested in psychic phenomena. Neil Armstrong's retreat from the media spotlight, and Gene Cernan's acceptance of it, are entirely consistent with the people they were before Apollo. From Borman

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first LM capable of making a landing, but in the wake of the delays that prompted the Apollo 8 decision, his lightweight LM went to Neil Armstrong, and Stafford took over Frank Borman’s lander, which had been built before Grumman’s super-weight-saving program took effect. 153 Vibrations during Apollo

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not know how to use a camera, and as Hillary said, “Everest was no place to teach him." Coincidentally, there are no good pictures of Neil Armstrong on the moon. The only clear Hasselblad photo shows Armstrong with his back to the camera, working at Eagle s equipment storage tray. He also

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of Experimental Test Pilots never recognized him and his crew for their performances. And when Congress awarded the Space Medal of Honor to Pete Conrad, Neil Armstrong, and a handful of other astronauts, Lovell was disappointed once more. A medal of honor, he points out, is given for action above and beyond

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him absolutely blown away! ... I never thought Gene had that in him. Let alone the willingness to say anything about it.” 568 The photograph of Neil Armstrong at Tranquillity Base: There are only a handful of still photographs of Armstrong on the moon; these were taken by Aldrin as part of documentary

Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure

by Dan Parry  · 22 Jun 2009  · 370pp  · 100,856 words

. Some were completed before the Moonshot project was conceived, but during their production I was enormously privileged to discuss NASA's work with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, George Mueller and others. Humanity possesses the knowledge and experience to leave our planet at

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to say that 'Ubba's boop' is finally finished. PROLOGUE What would the Moon be like? While this question fascinated those back on Earth, for Neil Armstrong the Moon was playing no more than a supporting role. Here was a chance for man to achieve something beyond comparison. If it were successful

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on conventional control surfaces, forcing the pilot to rely on the small rocket boosters and the prototype hand controller that were tested by, among others, Neil Armstrong, one of only 12 men ever to fly the X-15.2 For Neil, it was not so much a love of flying that took

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who reported to the Launch Control Center, an enormous blockhouse built beside the VAB, from where the overnight preparations were directed.4 At 4.15am, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin were woken by the Director of Flight Crew Operations, Deke Slayton. Deke had originally been selected as one of the

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launch vehicle. When a fire broke out during tests the complicated hatch left them unable to escape. The crew of Apollo 11. From left: Commander, Neil Armstrong; Command Module Pilot, Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot, Buzz Aldrin. The crews of Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 in a debriefing session. Armstrong in

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flight would be commanded by Frank Borman, who had helped investigate the fire. Borman's crew included Michael Collins, while the backup crew consisted of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell. After Borman's flight, the F mission would stage a full dress rehearsal of the landing, while the G crew

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The two remaining seats went to Bill Anders and Jim Lovell (who had replaced Collins). Borman's backup crew was also pulled forward, so that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Lovell's replacement Fred Haise found themselves supporting Apollo 8 instead of 9. This meant they now had an unexpected shot at

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.23 Overnight they would become, in Kraft's words, 'an American hero ... beyond any soldier or politician or inventor'. Kraft was clear: 'It should be Neil Armstrong.'24 While Aldrin's talents were admired, the managers were not so much concerned with technical ability as with who would best serve as a

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after arriving in orbit, the crew's faces filled with blood until their bodies adjusted to weightlessness. Buzz Aldrin in the lunar module, photographed by Neil Armstrong during the long journey to the moon. The lunar module, Eagle, after undocking from the command module. The long rods under the landing pads are

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't care about orbital mechanics and P52 platform alignments, they wanted to know what astronauts had for breakfast. Some liked the attention. Others, among them Neil Armstrong, enjoyed press adulation as much as engine failure and considered this aspect of the job a necessary evil. There was a feeling within NASA that

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11... but I'm an integral part of the operation and happy to be going in any capacity.'5 For the rest of the world, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were just names in a newspaper – in Russia, Pravda had taken to calling Neil 'the Czar of the Ship' – but for Michael

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home. Mission Control: 'Eagle, Houston. We see you on the steerable [antenna]. Over.' Armstrong: 'Roger. Eagle is undocked.' Mission Control: 'Roger. How does it look, Neil?' Armstrong: 'The Eagle has wings.' Mission Control: 'Roger.' With the two spacecraft flying in formation, 60 feet apart, Collins took a careful look out of the

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of the work that went into America's race to reach the Moon. Eagle was not the only lunar module NASA built, any more than Neil Armstrong was the only man able to fly it. While the crew were training for their mission, other astronauts were preparing for subsequent flights, and these

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proving we are capable of leaving our home planet. This will permanently be a defining characteristic of our capabilities – which is why, 40 years on, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin remain household names. In landing their gold and silver spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, Neil and Buzz proved something new

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Cape Kennedy in 1963, in 1973 the area reverted to its original name of Cape Canaveral. 2 Dr James Hansen, First Man, The Life of Neil Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, 2005). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid

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. cit. 20 Buzz Aldrin and Wayne Warga, Return to Earth; and Hansen, op. cit. 21 Hansen, op. cit.; and personal conversation between the author and Neil Armstrong, Barcelona, 12/4/08. 22 Hansen, op. cit. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, with Gene Farmer and Dora

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/space/article2582966.ece; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin 13 Buzz Aldrin, roll 382, 22:13:01:17. 14 Harland, op. cit. 15 Neil Armstrong in conversation with Eric Jones, at NASA's Lunar Surface Journal http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.html 16 BBC News, at http

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Richard P. Hallion and Tom D. Crouch (eds), Apollo: Ten Years Since Tranquility Base, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979 Dr James Hansen, FirstMan, The Life of Neil Armstrong, Simon & Schuster, 2005 David Harland, The First Men on the Moon, Praxis Publishing, 2007 Edwin P. Hoyt, The Space Dealers: A Hard Look at the

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-Apollo 11 childhood Gemini flights landing on the moon launch, Apollo 11 launch preparation, Apollo 11 MIT moon, on appearance of moon walk, NASA, joins Neil Armstrong and position in Apollo program PR duties, Apollo 11 quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 rendezvous expert return to Eagle, Apollo 11

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preparation, Apollo 11 lunar orbit insertion (LOI), Apollo 11 LOI-2, Apollo 11 meals on Apollo 11 moon, on appearance of moon orbit, Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong and pictures, TV and camera, Apollo 11 pressure suits, hatred of quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree  · 18 Aug 2008  · 386pp  · 92,778 words

all the orbital flights in the upcoming Gemini program. New pilots had to be recruited for the astronaut corps. The agency went back and hired Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. They had just missed the Mercury Seven

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an elaborate dinner for the Seven, and Henri Landwirth lent his motel’s kitchen to the likes of Pete Conrad, Gene Cernan, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong. Then he helped the gang of nine with their dastardly deed. They advertised the Mercury Seven’s dinner as a magnificent meal of breaded veal

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his off time around the local airport, where he’d created the Gemini Flying Club. One of Button’s flying buddies was a pilot named Neil Armstrong. Armstrong wasn’t only an astronaut and one of NASA’s ace test pilots, he was an elite glider driver as well. One day Button

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realize you almost killed the man destined to first step on the moon?” “That’s me,” Button continued laughing. “But Neil was great about it.” Neil Armstrong and Bob Button sign flight logs following the loss of their aircraft engine power over the Gulf of Mexico. (Button Collection). “What did he say

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way to the moon, but docking two ships in space was still out there. That job would now fall to NASA’s only civilian astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who first raced to the edge of space in NASA’s X–15 rocket ship. He would command Gemini 8 with West Point graduate Dave

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twisting, turning, ticking bomb, looking for an opportunity to explode. The only good news for NASA was that Gemini 8 was in the hands of Neil Armstrong. He managed to reduce the roll to a point that he could undock the two craft. With a bang the ships let each other go

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listening. “We have a serious problem here…We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’ve disengaged from the Agena.” The ship was hearing Neil Armstrong’s calm voice. “It’s rolling and we can’t turn anything off,” Armstrong continued his report. Then he threw away the book. He decided

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with it,” and ordered Armstrong and Scott to set up for an emergency landing in the western Pacific. High over the African Congo, in darkness, Neil Armstrong fired Gemini 8’s retro-rockets. The braking rockets started their half-hour ride through an atmosphere of total darkness—there was not even the

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lost the crew.” Deke Slayton took a few days for Gemini 8’s emergency to settle some obvious facts in his mind. He told himself Neil Armstrong’s abilities to reason, to think, to handle emergencies, to fly the hell out of anything from the Wright brothers to rocket ships, made the

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picking the astronauts for the first landing attempt. The normal rotation of crews was playing right in his hands. The way it was working out, Neil Armstrong would command Apollo 11 and Pete Conrad would be at the helm of Apollo 12. Deke had long ago made the decision to have either

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odds were very high something would go wrong and 11 would have to abort. Deke realized there was no other feasible plan, and he called Neil Armstrong and crew into a private room. “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Because of Apollo 8’s success, we’re now on

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. They rose in a closing maneuver to dock with Charlie Brown, and Stafford reported, “Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other.” Back on Earth, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were in final training. The success of Apollo 10 meant all but one of the ifs had been blown away

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: After a breakfast of orange juice, steaks, scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee, the astronauts boarded Apollo 11 at 6:54 A.M. Eastern time. Commander Neil Armstrong was the first aboard. He was followed by Mike Collins. Buzz Aldrin, the man who is sitting in the middle seat during liftoff, was the

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internal power. The dragon was stirring. Butterflies swirled deep in Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. “This is Apollo/Saturn Launch Control,” Jack King was now singing. “Neil Armstrong just reported back. It’s been a real smooth countdown. “Our transfer is completed on an internal power with the launch vehicle. All the second

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third stage shut down and the mooncraft raced around Earth at 17,300 miles per hour. Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin exchanged broad grins, and Neil Armstrong released his harness. For the next two-and-a-half hours Apollo 11, still attached to its third stage, circled Earth with its crew taking

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,200 miles per hour, they were on their way. They were grinning like kids in a down-home swimming-hole. Even Armstrong. THIRTEEN The Landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stared through their helmet visors in wonder, mesmerized by the lifeless face of the moon rushing toward them. They were in their

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changed constantly before them, numbers flashing on Eagle’s flight panel in a breathless blur. This was PDI! Powered descent initiate. On Earth, billions prayed. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin braced themselves for the shock of ignition. Flame gushed beneath their feet. Inside Eagle the two astronauts, who had been weightless for

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Airlines charter for Houston. Now, Eagle was thirteen hundred feet above the lunar surface, beginning its final descent. Flames gushed downward as the craft slowed. Neil Armstrong had flown his mission right along the edge of the razor. He and Buzz were now so close that Neil had to fly this ship

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empty. An abort would need to be initiated seconds before that happened if Eagle was not to crash. Balancing on slashing flames and banging thrusters, Neil Armstrong calmly aimed for his new landing site. The flight controllers were almost frantic with their inability to do anything more to aid Neil and Buzz

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, and began waiting all over again. Three seconds for the voices to rush back and forth, Earth to moon and moon back to Earth. “Houston…” Neil Armstrong had landed so smoothly that Buzz wasn’t taking any chances. Were they really down? Stopped? Buzz studied the lights on the landing panel to

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F. Kennedy had promised to send astronauts to the moon before the end of the 1960s. Silently, Buzz and Neil saluted him. FOURTEEN Moon Walk Neil Armstrong moved slowly and purposefully down the ladder. He was in no hurry. He would be stepping onto a small world that had never been touched

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this ghostly figure moving phantom-like, closer and closer, and then, three-and-a-half feet above the moon’s surface, jump off the ladder. Neil Armstrong’s boots hit the moon at 10:56 P.M. Eastern time, July 20, 1969. All motion stopped. He spoke: “That’s one small step

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it so by splashing off the bright clouds and blue oceans. It was hope. It was the warmest port in this corner of the universe. Neil Armstrong lowered his head. There was so much to see and do and so little time. He and Buzz moved their television camera sixty feet from

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and other global investigators as well. In the lunar dust they placed mementos for the five astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives, and Neil Armstrong read the words on a plaque mounted on Apollo 11’s descent stage: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon

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, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag on the moon. (NASA). The two astronauts gathered fifty pounds of lunar soil samples and rocks, and once

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everything was loaded for the flight back to Earth, they shut down the first moonwalk. Twenty-one hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, they fired Eagle’s ascent engine and left the moon. They saw the first American flag deployed

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: Heavy crowds and confetti greet the Apollo 11 astronauts as they motorcade down the Ginza. The “Giant-Step-Apollo 11” Presidential Goodwill Tour took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins along with their wives to twenty-four countries and twenty-seven cities in forty-five days. (NASA). Lightning had cracked

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to survive, experts on the ground had only hours to calculate and engineer a rescue. Gene Kranz, the no-nonsense flight director who had landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, was in charge. He began by calming his shocked flight-control team. “Okay, now let’s everybody keep cool

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. In the Lovell home, Pete Conrad, the commander of Apollo 12, opened the first bottle of champagne. Buzz Aldrin grabbed the second, and he and Neil Armstrong popped the cork. Others followed. In the midst of hugs and screams of joy, Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, heard the phone ring. She ran

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, where Kitchell was the first to cover a breaking news event live. When it came to covering space flights, he led, we followed; and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon, Kitchell’s space unit was given the Emmy for “Coverage of Special Events.” But sadly, as quickly as Project

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body was trained and accustomed to such violent forces of flight and most likely could have handled the g-forces as did the bodies of Neil Armstrong and David Scott during the violent spinning of Gemini 8 if, and this is the big IF, Challenger still had power, pressure, and oxygen. The

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, Eagle landed softly on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Millions were listening to what the New York Times called Walter-to-Walter coverage as Neil Armstrong reported: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Capsule communicator Charlie Duke answered, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got

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book is written from the files and memories of Jay Barbree and the following storytellers… Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Sam Beddingfield Ted Anderson Howard Benedict Astronaut Neil Armstrong Jay Blackman Tom Baer Mary Bubb Jo Barbree Bruce Buckingham Dan Beckmann Dee Dee Caidin Martin Caidin Laurel Lichtenberger Steve Capus Lisa Malone Astronaut Scott

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992

by Rick Houston and J. Milt Heflin  · 27 Sep 2015  · 472pp  · 141,591 words

the Space Shuttle Challenger 25. Marianne Dyson 26. 2005 NASA flight director class Foreword 20 July 1969—The Eagle had landed, and Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin were now preparing for man’s first walk on the moon. In contrast to the intense drama that played

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. This was the real deal. Two months earlier, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan performed a powered descent to within nine miles of the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were going to try to go the rest of the way and settle the Eagle spacecraft down on the dusty plains of

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consoles. Just across the aisle from the EECOM console on the second row was the capcom station, where Charlie Duke sat as he helped talk Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the lunar surface. Up a row was the throne itself, the flight director’s console. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn

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that very kind of deeply felt dedication that Go, Flight! honors. As a direct result of working on this book, I no longer see just Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Charlie Duke when I look up at the moon. I also see the people who worked in that magnificent room

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orbit. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. And then later . . . That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. When Neil Armstrong called out those instantly iconic lines, he was talking to this room, and through this room, to hundreds of millions of people watching around the

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an astronaut capcom who sent Apollo 8 on its way to the moon; who talked Eagle down to the lunar surface, and another who talked Neil Armstrong down its ladder; who passed a fix up to the lightning-struck crew of Apollo 12; who talked the crew of Apollo 13 through the

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spacefarers actually got in some flying time with their capsules, and not only that, but there were spacewalks and rendezvous to perform and perfect. Before Neil Armstrong could take his first small step onto the surface of the moon, Project Gemini had to make some giant leaps to get him there. “We

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first in-flight tragedy. The nastiest emergency in the young history of crewed spaceflight began innocently enough on 16 March 1966, when Gemini 8’s Neil Armstrong brought his spacecraft in for a smooth docking with an Agena Target Vehicle six hours and thirty-three minutes after he and David R. Scott

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during the first extended exploration of the moon. Years later, John Hodge would joke that his contribution to the space program was making sure that Neil Armstrong was around to fly on Apollo. Planning for Gemini 9 began with one tragedy, and the flight almost ended with another. Original crew members Elliott

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called down from over the secondary tracking station at Canton Island, a small coral atoll located halfway between Australia and Hawaii, to speak with capcom Neil Armstrong in the MOCR. Okay. We both just finished talking it over. Right now, we’re both pretty well bushed. But I’m afraid it would

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(foreground) listens intently to the memorable Christmas Eve broadcast. Surrounding him are fellow astronauts Jack Schmitt (seated behind Mattingly), Buzz Aldrin (standing), Deke Slayton, and Neil Armstrong. Courtesy NASA. Aaron had not seen anything yet. Apollo 8’s second television broadcast from the moon, which started at 2:34 p.m. on

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that got away. An older gentleman broke out of the crowd during Apollo 11’s 16 August 1969 welcome-home parade in Houston to hand Neil Armstrong a small American flag. That was no small feat, considering the fact that some 300,000 people were estimated to have attended the celebration. The

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MPAD’s Orbit Determination Section, Mathematical Physics Branch, and it was up to him to come up with a solution. It was in good hands—Neil Armstrong was once asked about people he had worked with at NASA who stood out in terms of talent and ability, and without hesitation, he replied

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, babe. Jerry Bostick remembered Reed being even more specific with Conrad about Surveyor. I’m going to bring you down on top of it. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their descent to the lunar surface that summer, they had been all business, all the time. Conrad, on the other hand

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. She wrote a massive sixty-page paper titled “The Apollo Program” for an eighth-grade English class, and when her father brought home posters of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, they shared space on her bedroom wall with one featuring Peter Tork of the Monkees. There were no female astronauts at the

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think Bob Crippen (the flight’s commander) treated her as she should’ve been, as just one of the crew members.” Although Bruce McCandless talked Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down Eagle’s ladder and across the lunar surface during the historic Apollo 11 EVA, it was nearly fifteen more years before

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for a few moments. When the man left, Loe knelt down next to his son and spoke. Do you know who that is? That is Neil Armstrong. We’re going to make him the first man on the moon. Greg was forever changed. He had met many of his father’s friends

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith  · 3 Apr 2006  · 409pp  · 138,088 words

our first and only embrace of another world felt, if anything, more distant than it does now. Even the man who led that hazardous trip, Neil Armstrong, offered nothing that might clarify, angering townsfolk in his home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, by failing to turn up at a party thrown in his

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was difficult. I traced the others and found that they’d reacted to their experience in wildly different ways. The First Man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, became a teacher and retreated from public view, “getting back to the fundamentals of the planet,” while his partner Buzz Aldrin spent years mired in

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evidence was there in the coded monotone exchanges if you knew how to read them. The crew NASA chose for this landmark mission consists of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, and they’re a peculiar trio. The flight plan called for Collins to orbit the Moon in exalted frustration, tending

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spaceships on them, just drinking the sight in. They’re up there. Up there. There. We’ve been watching the screen for an hour, because Neil Armstrong was due out at 7:00 PM, after he told NASA that he couldn’t bear to hang around until midnight, much less sleep. The

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his home for only twenty-one hours. Now, what do you say as you become the first human being to set foot on the Moon? Neil Armstrong is an astronaut, not a poet, and certainly not a PR man. He wouldn’t have bothered about it much, but people have been writing

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craft I picture hovering above the Moon in a sheen of magic dust … well, I can’t have seen that. No one saw anything until Neil Armstrong pulled a cord which activated a camera on his way out of the Lunar Module. Then he jumped down to one of the lander’s

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group which became informally known as the “Next Nine” included such impressive and Luna-bound figures as Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, John Young and Neil Armstrong – who’d been trained by the military, but was by this time a crack civilian test pilot working for NASA. Then, a year later, a

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crew home. Thus, only six ships reached the surface, between July 1969 and December 1972, each with two astronauts aboard. Those astronauts were: APOLLO 11 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (CM pilot Michael Collins) APOLLO 12 Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (CM pilot Richard Gordon) APOLLO 14 Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell

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it with a screwdriver, and when Buzz Aldrin accidentally snapped a key used to arm the Apollo 11 ascent engine, so apparently condemning himself and Neil Armstrong to a whimsical death 240,000 miles from home, the day was saved by jamming a pen into the lock (Aldrin still has the pen

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orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful, and shockingly alone. In a rare instance of candor, Neil Armstrong once remarked that while on the Moon, he became aware that he could blot out the Earth with his thumb and when someone asked whether

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pension-fund managers, and I wonder if that’s why some of the CM pilots have since fallen into a silence more deafening even than Neil Armstrong’s. I ask what’s the most important thing Gordon has learned up to now and the question throws him. “Hm. I’ve never been

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died during riots in nearby Watts. Frank Zappa, who called his daughter Moon and had a father who worked on missile systems at Edwards while Neil Armstrong was flying rocket planes there (and used to bring home mercury and the pesticide DDT for his son to play with), wrote about the same

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of that era did significant things in 1962. First, Marilyn Monroe, actress and assumed lover of JFK, committed maybe-suicide; then the crack test pilot Neil Armstrong, having spurned an invitation to apply for the Mercury project, joined the second group of astronauts and his own idiosyncratic contribution to the mythology of

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without warning, in less than the time it takes to deal a hand of blackjack, then how on Earth do we explain the fact that Neil Armstrong is still with us? We know about his near misses in Korea. Now add to them the time his X-15 rocket plane’s engine

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really big deal for him, because you don’t often get the chance to see Apollo astronauts, and you never get within snapping distance of Neil Armstrong. He adds that Armstrong has a reputation for not showing up, so we shouldn’t count our chickens, and we gossip space on the single

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. Gene Cernan is erect. There are others I don’t immediately recognize – not Moonwalkers – and some who flew Skylab rather than Apollo. But no greensleeved Neil Armstrong. The room is full now. So we hit the bar. And that’s where I am, waiting my turn, when I hear a voice rear

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gratuitous award. Each member of the corps is called individually, in reverse alphabetical order, rising to a peal of applause. Second to last, the name “Neil Armstrong” soars through the whiskey-sour yonder, followed by a brief salvo of clapping, then … nothing. He appears not to be with us. The MC coughs

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politicians who themselves look and behave more like celebrities every day (perhaps in an effort to revive our waning interest in their show). Of course, Neil Armstrong is not a celebrity in the strict sense; because he did something to earn his status, his fame has a hinterland, but the boundaries between

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guests inspect and make written bids in a charity memorabilia auction, it doesn’t take long for me to find what I’m looking for. Neil Armstrong stands, surrounded like Custer at Little Big Horn, patiently explaining some aspect of his thirty-three-year-old adventure for the four hundredth time this

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as part of the Cold War, so they started pushing exploration as the motive – and soon I think they started believing their own PR. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the Moon, the programme was over and NASA didn’t realize it. Ever since, they’ve been

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thought it would be Ed White, America’s first space-walker, who unfortunately perished alongside Grissom. Collins also mused: “It is interesting to note that Neil Armstrong was the last in his group to fly. Were they saving the best for last, or was his selection as the first human to walk

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one, for the job. It just happened that way. And the thought hits me – and I’m astonished to find myself associating Monty Python with Neil Armstrong for a second time – that he must feel a little like the reluctant saviour Brian in The Life of Brian. A repository for the rest

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patches, signed by the astronauts on those missions. There are old is sues of Life, also signed, and heroic signed etchings. A signed snap of Neil Armstrong is particularly prized (“’cos those are tough to come by”), even though his favourite Apollo guy is John Young from Apollo 16, who’s almost

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respective fathers of German and American rocketry, Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard, were both obsessed with Verne’s tale as children (and not just them: Neil Armstrong named his Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia after Verne’s “Columbiad”). Oberth, in turn, acted as adviser to one of early cinema’s great directors

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a chance to just be there for a few minutes, to register the feelings, but time was tight and there was work to be done. “Neil Armstrong’s first thoughts might have been ‘This is one small step for a man …’” he says, “but I remember vividly that after climbing down the

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amazing that we did this’ – the same feeling that all the people on the planet had at that time.” Bean tells us that he called Neil Armstrong on the phone when he started to paint the Apollo 11 commander planting the first flag, and that Armstrong had declared this to be the

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on to NASA, where he became the first member of the second group of astronauts to fly (and was thus chosen over peers who included Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad). Indeed, by the time he commanded the shuttle’s first space flight in 1981, he was the most experienced astronaut in the

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, saying, “I don’t have any idea what flying in space has meant, or will mean, to him” (and lest we forget, Collins flew with Neil Armstrong). At the same time, Apollo 16 Command Module pilot Ken Mattingly described him as one of the best-read people he’d ever met, while

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let go. There’s Alan Bean with his equally compulsive efforts to capture what he saw and felt, make it somehow solid and communicable; and Neil Armstrong, who wants to live quietly with whatever it was he experienced or didn’t experience, but can’t because we won’t let him; who

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end of the table, the aged and much admired Pad Führer, Guenter Wendt. Before long, I am trying on the black-faced Omega watch that Neil Armstrong gave the German prior to boarding Apollo 11 and hearing about the transformation of the Apollo-struck Godwin brothers – who turn out to be from

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time, I’m struggling to find a gap between him and this vast reservoir of facts – I find that I like him, but feel, as Neil Armstrong did when landing the Eagle, somewhat behind the airplane. A comment on that extraordinary CV draws a smile. “I’ve been fortunate. Lots of opportunity

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on the Moon, when we never actually did? From this point on, I see a fresh continuity in the story of Apollo. Sibrel claims that “Neil Armstrong started shaking like a leaf when I asked him to swear on the Bible,” but I’m not sure whether to believe this. I absolutely

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in LA really did hurt. When all other argument is exhausted, conspiracy believers inevitably draw your attention to one thing: the sullen, peevish withdrawal of Neil Armstrong from public life. It seems doubly strange to me, then, that only days after finally chasing down Sibrel, I find myself en route to Portugal

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Armstrong Clause, a stiffly worded paragraph beginning, “Mr. Armstrong values his privacy …” and climaxing with a command “not to report anything that is said by Neil Armstrong and not to publish any pictures of him.” But it didn’t end there, because once the Armstrong Clause had been signed by anyone capable

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the Moon, then nothing is cool …” If I’m not mistaken, Michael Stipe is saying that he doesn’t believe in the landings, either. Being Neil Armstrong can’t be easy. And as for Dave Scott, well, where to start? David Randolf Scott, the lantern-jawed, six foot, brick-built Right Stuff

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journey. There was another, bigger, surprise waiting for me when I got back from Portugal. Before I went, I’d finally made myself write to Neil Armstrong, expecting no more than a polite brushoff. Now, trawling through my e-mails, I came across a message from an unfamiliar address which suggested another

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. The name at the bottom hit me first, sitting solid and square, as if carved on a tablet of stone, avatar of an alien world. Neil Armstrong. He told me that he received lots of requests from people writing books and making films, but he could see that this was a different

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are not the most efficient way of getting information across.” The implication for me was that if I wanted to sit down and speak with Neil Armstrong, the best bet would be to persuade him of my interest in the X-15’s landing gear. I’d done this kind of thing

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is not so surprising. But that’s not all. Jack Schmitt set off the next train of thought when he reminded me that “people like Neil Armstrong and the test pilots who flew the X-15 rocket plane were, in a sense, already astronauts.” And they were! Alan Shepard was not the

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anything. And in Apollo’s case, it’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did, via Neil Armstrong’s upstretched thumb, was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small. It’s no coincidence that when I

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, Lillian D. U.S. Space Gear . Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Kraft, Chris. Flight: My Life in Mission Control . New York: Dutton, 2001. Kramer, Barbara. Neil Armstrong: The First Man on the Moon . Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers Inc., 1997. Kranz, Gene. Failure Is Not an Option . New York: Berkley, 2001. Kurlansky, Mark

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969

by Francis French, Colin Burgess and Walter Cunningham  · 1 Jun 2010  · 628pp  · 170,668 words

’m this one!” Today, the same situation elicits “Did you fly in space?” and “What was your mission?” This happens because, except for John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and one or two others, the public sees us as generic heroes—a Mark IV, Mod 3 Astronaut. The media made us heroes at a

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that seeing Scott picked first reassured him that nasa knew what it was doing. Commanding the mission would be another space rookie—Group 2 astronaut Neil Armstrong. Armstrong was the last of his selection group to be given a prime crew flight assignment. He had in fact been waiting so long that

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of some of his colleagues, it is possible that he would have been waiting for a second flight for quite some time. As it was, Neil Armstrong would ultimately do very well with his next, and last, prime crew flight assignment. 3. The Ballet of Weightlessness No man’s knowledge here can

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there was not enough money in the family to send him to the best school, mit. Instead, he attended Purdue University, in the year behind Neil Armstrong, from which he received a degree in electrical engineering in 1956. He was only able to attend because the navy gave him a partial scholarship

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had allowed him to get one Gemini flight under his belt. Without it, Aldrin might not have been considered experienced enough to be assigned to Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crew. “A lot of fate determines where you fit into the puzzle,” he later reflected. There would only be one other American

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largest gatherings of former astronauts ever. Three Mercury astronauts, nine Gemini astronauts, and many other Apollo and Skylab astronauts paid their respects to their colleague. Neil Armstrong, struggling to fight back tears, gave an emotional farewell. “I’m not sure what he’s doing right now, but I suspect he’s telling

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the Activities of State in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space—more readily known as “The Space Treaty.” He was there with fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, and Jim Lovell. When Dick Gordon finally got back to his hotel room in the Georgetown Inn, the red message light

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the bottom, but didn’t have much to offer. They solved the problem basically on their own.” Perhaps it was because that mission’s commander, Neil Armstrong, was so impressed with his work that Anders soon found himself with his first placement on a crew—as the backup pilot for Gemini 11

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this ungainly vehicle, and Anders had enjoyed the brief but challenging flights, which reminded him of flying helicopters. He takes pleasure in noting that, while Neil Armstrong crashed the llrv, he never did. Not only was the training preparing Anders to test the lm in the first high-orbit Apollo mission, it

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assigned to do the lunar module checklist, and we conspired to make sure that the lunar module pilot got out first before the commander. But Neil [Armstrong] got in there later and changed it!” Mike Collins felt that the procedural, hardware, and safety changes resulting from the Apollo 1 fire had made

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the first time humans escaped Earth’s gravity and traveled to a new destination. Jim Lovell was glad he flew 8 rather than 11, and Neil Armstrong considers 8 to have embodied the true spirit of Apollo. Today Anders sees both flights as about the same in importance; one being the first

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agrees: “Two months after we went down in that heavyweight lunar module and picked out the landing site, with the radar map and photo map, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin repeated the trajectory we’d flown.” Other than his Gemini rendezvous mission, Stafford considers Apollo 10 his greatest contribution to the space

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-and-a-half-minute journey, and an insignificant distance compared to the enormous journey the astronauts had already taken. But if it was piloted successfully, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would achieve what the entire American space program had been working toward for eight years; they would land on the moon. The

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fever pitch, reporters were hoping for a commander who could meet their preconceptions of the first person to walk on another world. Instead, they got Neil Armstrong. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Norman Mailer, very much an outsider to the world of the space program, decided to write a book about Apollo 11

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only to be met with such diffidence was maddeningly frustrating. They gravitated instead to Mike Collins, who Stevens says “was as open and breezy as Neil Armstrong was reserved; . . . he sat down, threw a leg over a chair arm, and talked animatedly.” Armstrong is, of course, a far more interesting person than

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’ names. The mission, not the people, was the important thing. In the end, Armstrong’s quiet nature has mostlyworked in his favor over the decades. “Neil Armstrong today is a lovely guy, a very nice man, but pretty much a recluse,” Wally Schirra told the authors. “Neil has handled the fame very

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been a natural choice. He was the CapCom for Apollo 10’s flight over the lunar landing zone at the special request of Tom Stafford. Neil Armstrong also wanted Duke as the voice of Mission Control for landing as he had more experience with the lm activation procedures than anyone, other than

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landing, it was a sentiment that Armstrong had shared and knew how to respond to. Less than a year after he landed on the moon, Neil Armstrong visited Star City, and described the Apollo 11 landing to a packed audience in the auditorium. He told them how he had left medals commemorating

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age

by Robert Stone and Alan Andres  · 3 Jun 2019

ASTRONAUT today.” After the secret was guessed correctly following an interrogation by the panel of celebrities, host Garry Moore emphasized that the couple’s son, Neil Armstrong, was a civilian pilot, albeit one who had already flown to the edge of space in NASA’s experimental X-15 rocket plane. Moore then

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the end of the decade. An hour and forty minutes after an Atlas missile launched an Agena docking vehicle into orbit, two rookie astronauts, commander Neil Armstrong and pilot David Scott, headed into space aboard Gemini 8. Unlike what had happened a few months earlier on Gemini 6, the Agena worked perfectly

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Group Two, Armstrong was already a famed X-15 rocket pilot, and his unusual status as one of the few civilian astronauts set him apart. Neil Armstrong’s view as he moved Gemini 8 toward the Agena target vehicle above the Pacific Ocean before accomplishing the first successful docking of two spacecraft

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appeared to prefer the fiction of Lost in Space to the real thing happening live. Hours after their near-death experience on Gemini 8, astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott smile at the press and crowds of onlookers at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. Among those who turned out to catch

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the home to three sets of astronauts in 1973 and 1974. For the moment, though, the Gemini program was concluding with four more flights. Following Neil Armstrong’s success, three of the Gemini missions also docked with Agena target vehicles, and two ignited the Agena’s engine to boost the docked spacecraft

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he might have to perform someday. Anders changed his clothes and arrived at the Whites’ house ten minutes later. The Whites lived next door to Neil Armstrong, who was away in Washington for the signing of the Outer Space Treaty. When Anders arrived, Pat White was on the porch, talking with Armstrong

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’s wife, Jan. Had Neil Armstrong called her from Washington and asked her to be there as well? Anders wasn’t sure, but as he walked up to the house and

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the last members of the third astronaut group to garner a prime crew assignment. He had served on the backup crew of Gemini 11 with Neil Armstrong and would be the lunar-module pilot on Borman’s Apollo mission. Anders and Armstrong were among the astronaut corps’ lunar-module specialists, each logging

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wind,” Styron recalled. He looked over at his host “and saw on his face an emotion that was depthless and inexpressible.” In Mission Control, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were seated next to the Maroon Team capcom, Ken Mattingly, as the broadcast proceeded. In the back of the room

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both successful. All three of the Apollo 11 astronauts were known to those who had covered the space program in recent years. The commander was Neil Armstrong, well remembered from the crisis on Gemini 8; the lunar-module pilot was Gemini 12’s ace spacewalker Buzz Aldrin; and the command-module pilot

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reassigned by Slayton to Apollo 11’s third couch. The ungainly and dangerous Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was nicknamed the “Flying Bedstead.” In May 1968, Neil Armstrong narrowly escaped an LLRV accident in Houston when his vehicle suddenly became dangerously unstable, causing him to fire his ejection seat when only 200 feet

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-280 Fahrenheit in the shade. And it had to have a sustainable cooling system that would prevent the person wearing it from overheating. Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, the “amiable strangers” of Apollo 11, photographed on the deck of a modified landing craft used for spacecraft water recovery training in

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, both Cronkite and McGee were provided with the full quotation. More than a half billion people around the world watched the live television broadcast as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. At the time the ghostly black-and-white television pictures from the Westinghouse camera seemed remarkable. Within three years

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to arrange the Moon’s first communion. A second silent religious observance during the moonwalk may have occurred as well. Filmmaker Theo Kamecke spoke with Neil Armstrong’s grandmother shortly after the moon landing. “Neil made me a promise,” she told him. “He promised the first thing he would do when he

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of every race, nationality, age and condition were united in praise for an achievement symbolic of the American genius.” During his three weeks in quarantine, Neil Armstrong likely read accounts of the SCLC’s protest at Cape Kennedy and may have seen Nona Smith’s letter in The New York Times confessing

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surprisingly, all men—included the directors of most of the NASA centers as well as another VIP, the most celebrated space traveler in the world, Neil Armstrong. It was the first time Clarke and Armstrong met each other, a moment that Clarke made certain was captured in a snapshot taken outside of

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1970. The following year, Pan Am quietly terminated its First Moon Flights Club promotion. * * * — NINE YEARS LATER, the framed photograph of Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong taken at Wallops Station hung in a place of honor in the author’s study at his home in Sri Lanka, the island nation off

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, generals, and government bureaucrats. But within months of joining Fairchild, he was diagnosed with cancer and would die four years later. Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong meet at the NASA long-term planning session held at Wallops Island, Virginia, in June 1970. Although he had stepped on the Moon less than

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new computer diagnostics system. Frank Borman, now chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Eastern Airlines, became the public face of the company. Neil Armstrong, who had maintained a more private profile than most of his colleagues, surprised many by starring in an ad campaign for Chrysler at a time

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and billions of galaxies. Are we really that special? I don’t think so.” By the time he died at age eighty-two in 2012, NEIL ARMSTRONG had erroneously acquired a reputation as a recluse. Rather, Armstrong didn’t enjoy giving interviews, having his life scrutinized, or leveraging his fame to enrich

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6A’s commander Wally Schirra. “I did a fly-around inspection….I could move to within inches of it in perfect confidence.” Gemini 8 astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott wait to board the USS Leonard F. Mason after their emergency return from orbit. The original flight plan called for them to

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the result of a lucky accident. Known as “Earthrise,” this single photograph was worth the cost of the entire Apollo program, said anthropologist Margaret Mead. Neil Armstrong waves to the press as he leads the crew of Apollo 11 to the van that will transport them on the ten-mile journey to

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high 80s. Prior to the lunar landing, Buzz Aldrin checks out the lunar module while it is still docked to the command-and-service module. Neil Armstrong photographed in the lunar module after landing on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin descends the lunar module ladder. NASA scientists contemplated the remote possibility that energy

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nuclear-powered Apollo seismometers, this solar-powered device operated for less than a month. It was so sensitive that it picked up the motions of Neil Armstrong turning over in his sleep within the lunar module following the moonwalk. The iconic image of Aldrin on the lunar surface, with

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Neil Armstrong reflected in the mirrored visor. Because Aldrin was assigned to take photographs of the landscape and the condition of the lunar module, there are few

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Armstrong standing on the Moon. For my mother, who awakened her ten-year-old son in the middle of an English midsummer night to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make history as they walked on the Moon. —R.S. For Charlie, older brother and teenage rocket scientist, who, as the youngest

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(September–December 2007); Billy Watkins, Apollo Moon Missions: The Unsung Heroes, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), p. 57. The journals of Lewis and Clark George Plimpton, “Neil Armstrong’s Famous First Words,” Esquire (December 1983): p. 118; Julian Scheer, letter to George Low (March 12, 1969). “We should dream no small dreams” “3

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Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 283. Armstrong later said Neil Armstrong, quoted in Apollo 11: Technical Crew Debriefing, July 31, 1969 (Houston: Manned Spacecraft Center, 1969), p. 60. “A symbolic act” Lewis Mumford, “No: ‘A Symbolic

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can anybody” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). “Old-fashioned humanist” CBS News, “Man on the Moon,” (July 20, 1969). Astronauts deemed Neil Armstrong, “The Moon Had Been Awaiting Us a Long Time,” Life (August 22, 1969): p. 25. Buzz Aldin, interview with Eric M. Jones (1991), https://www

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. He grinned John Noble Wilford, “Apollo Crew Appears Calm 11 Days Before the Mission,” NYT (July 6, 1969). During a lull Dean Armstrong, interviewed in Neil Armstrong—First Man on the Moon, BBC Two (December 30, 2012). Truman Capote William H. Honan, “Le Mot Juste for the Moon,” Esquire (July 1969). “I

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need you” George Alexander, interview with Robert Stone (June 2, 2015). “You’re not” George Plimpton, “Neil Armstrong’s Famous First Words,” Esquire (December 1983): pp. 116–118. Lunar scientists theorized Leonard Reiffel, interview with authors (May 12, 2015). “I didn’t hear

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Michael Collins and Charles A. Lindbergh  · 15 Apr 2019

decade must find me ten years older but I don’t feel that way, although some sad things have happened. Old friends, John Young and Neil Armstrong, have died, and my life has changed with the death of my wife, Patricia Mary Finnegan Collins, after fifty-seven years of marriage. I miss

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, not simple. Sometimes, in space planning, it costs less in the long run to go all-out in the first place. On the other hand, Neil Armstrong thought it was wiser to first fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge, and a lunar base could do that. Neil was a

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last forty years have worked out well for me. On my tombstone should be inscribed LUCKY because that is the overriding feeling I have today. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin in 1930, Mike Collins in 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. I used to imagine a

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regardless of his branch of the service). I strongly suspect that at least one civilian will be included, for propaganda purposes, if nothing else, and Neil Armstrong will be on the list unless his physical discloses some major problem. I say this because he has by far the best background of the

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them to be from the Seven and the Nine, with no such early chance for us upstarts. As it turned out, we were both right, Neil Armstrong being a Nine and Buzz Aldrin a Fourteen. I returned to Edwards, and a week or so later, a Bob Gilruth letter made it official

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non-hero, with a country boy’s “aw shucks—t’ain’t nothing” demeanor, which masks a delightful wit and a keen engineer’s mind. Neil Armstrong Makes decisions slowly and well. As Borman gulps decisions, Armstrong savors them—rolling them around on his tongue like a fine wine and swallowing at

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a pair of dehydrated desert rats. Fortunately, no spacecraft has yet come down in an area where jungle or desert survival training has been needed. Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott brought Gemini 8 down suddenly and unexpectedly in the Pacific Ocean rather than the Atlantic, but they were picked up by a

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to be that quick and simple, for there is no time for more elaborate switching arrangements. Yet consider the consequences of poor design. “Oops!” says Neil Armstrong, as he drops his pre-launch check list, bumping his arm against the translational hand controller as he attempts to retrieve it, aborting the first

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4), Conrad (Gemini 5), Stafford (Gemini 6), Borman (Gemini 7), Lovell (Gemini 7), Armstrong (Gemini 8), See (Gemini 9). It is interesting to note that Neil Armstrong was the last in his group (Elliot See having been killed) to fly. Were they saving the best for last, or was his selection as

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astronaut group ran the gamut. Bon vivant Wally Schirra allowed as how the best way to prepare for a restful experience was to rest. Mathematician Neil Armstrong suggested that a person was given only a finite number of heartbeats in this life, and he was not going to hasten his demise by

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, with as many variations on the rendezvous theme as could be squeezed into five earth orbital flights. The next flight up, Gemini 8, belonged to Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, which meant that Dave would be the first Fourteen to fly, despite the fact that I had been the first to be

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with a different target, the Gemini 8 Agena, which had been waiting for us in orbit for four months, after it had been abandoned by Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. So what? Well, the big difference was that the 8 Agena had long since “died,” as its batteries had discharged, which meant

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Mission Control in Houston, watched as the dot representing the Titan launch vehicle climbed smoothly up its assigned line on the wall chart, watched as Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott separated their Gemini from the Titan and began the four-orbit chase of their Agena, which had been launched earlier in the

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a solitary man seeking his karma. Nobody ever mentions Δh, but that is what was important. The rendezvous heavyweights—Tom Stafford, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Neil Armstrong, Dave Scott—may have run or meditated, or they may not have, but they sure as hell spent hours worrying, and talking, and planning rendezvous

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down on December 27, and the names of the Apollo 11 crew were announced on January 9. The Apollo 8 back-up crew had been Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Fred Haise (Fred replacing Lovell, who had replaced me). Under Deke’s system, the back-up crew of 8 would expect to

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call it the moment of truth, but all I want is a moment of no surprises. 13 Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed. —Neil Armstrong, 3:18 p.m., Houston time, July 20, 1969 “Apollo 11, Apollo 11, good morning from the Black Team.” Could they be talking to me

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flown Apollo 8, Conrad would have been commander of Apollo 11 and would have been the first human to walk on another planet, instead of Neil Armstrong. But the Borman-McDivitt switch put Jim on Apollo 9 and slipped Conrad to Apollo 12. Who was the third man to walk on the

Apollo 11: The Inside Story

by David Whitehouse  · 7 Mar 2019  · 308pp  · 87,238 words

INSIDE STORY DAVID WHITEHOUSE To Jill, as well as the Moon and the stars ‘The Moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to’ —NEIL ARMSTRONG ‘We must master the highest technology or be crushed’ —VLADIMIR LENIN Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraph Acknowledgements Prologue The Spoils of War Object D The

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joined the BBC as science correspondent and soon realized it was a job that opened doors, and that people took my calls. Some astronauts, like Neil Armstrong, treated writers with suspicion. He disliked articles that featured him as a personality. Other astronauts, well, they could talk and talk. Often I would hear

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book to be written that put the people first and used, as far as possible, the words of those involved. I would like to thank Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, David Scott, John Young, Alan Shepard, James Lovell, Charlie Duke, Donn Eisele, Alan Bean, Gordon Cooper, Al Worden, Walt Cunningham, Tom

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do something that has never been done before – we will land an American on the Moon. Less than an hour after those words were spoken, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 500 metres from the lunar surface in the region of the Sabine complex of small craters on the western shore of

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saw one another after the mission, outside ceremonies. ‘Amiable strangers’ was how one of them described their relationship. Born near Wapakoneta, Ohio, as a boy Neil Armstrong was fascinated by flying. He was always returning to his bedroom and his model aircraft. Looking back on his childhood many years later, he said

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Force after West Point in 1952. For a decade or so he was a pilot and instructor and several times came close to working alongside Neil Armstrong. He said: Like most of the early astronauts, I was a test pilot, and it was a sort of step-by-step process. I went

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meet von Braun; by the time he arrived in Germany, von Braun was already in America. As the war in Europe drew to a close, Neil Armstrong was still dreaming of becoming an aircraft designer. He went to half a dozen schools as his family moved around Ohio. The war ended when

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the public was not to believe him. That day the Society of Experimental Test Pilots was holding a symposium in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, California. Neil Armstrong, now a young test pilot, was taking part. He was trying to find ways to get the Los Angeles press interested in the various technical

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for some minor medical issue. Soon Frank Borman and Jim McDivitt arrived as well, and Elliot See, one of two civilians selected. The other was Neil Armstrong. On the morning of 16 September the new recruits travelled to Ellington Air Force Base to meet Deke Slayton and Al Shepard, along with the

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pressure suits; Jim Lovell got recovery and re-entry matters; Elliot See got electrical systems and mission planning; Pete Conrad would oversee cockpit layout, and Neil Armstrong got trainers and simulators. The Mercury program was gaining momentum with the launch of Walter Schirra in the ‘Sigma 7’ capsule in October 1962. He

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manned flight, Gemini 7, had been a routine mission, Gemini 8 certainly would not be. It was to be NASA’s first serious space emergency. Neil Armstrong had become a civilian test pilot, flying the advanced X-15 rocket-plane out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. Apollo excited him and

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the 20-foot swells!’ Robert Seamans, NASA’s Deputy Administrator, was at a dinner when he was told about the problem. The cool-headedness of Neil Armstrong and David Scott in a life-threatening situation did not go unnoticed. Both of them would walk upon the Moon. Afterwards Armstrong described it as

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away. Susan and I left and drove back to Houston and went over to Ed White’s house, because Susan was close to Pat White. Neil Armstrong was in Washington where the President was signing the Outer Space Treaty with other nations that kept the Moon as the property of all people

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accident Frank Borman was asked if he thought that NASA would be unable to recover from the disaster. He replied, ‘Never, not for one instant.’ Neil Armstrong said, ‘We were given the gift of time. We didn’t want it.’ Apollo is Faltering On 3 April 1967, NASA 2, a Grumman Gulfstream

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and explode at any time. Engineers risked their lives dismantling the explosive wreckage. The July and August lunar launch windows were abandoned. On 6 May Neil Armstrong came close to being killed. He was flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. This was basically a

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Slayton.’ ‘When you added up what we would gain, as opposed to what we would lose, the decision was pretty easy.’ On 24 March 1969 Neil Armstrong was told that his mission, Apollo 11, would be the first to attempt a lunar landing. He said: ‘During the flight of Apollo 8 I

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lot of talks about who might be available and be right to be on that crew, that sort of thing.’ The crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins – were introduced to the press on 9 January 1969 and immediately the assembled reporters got down to the big

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and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious – that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil Armstrong, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since

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role as Lunar Module commander. The disclosure of Aldrin as the choice comes as a surprise to many who had speculated that the top commander, Neil Armstrong, would be entitled to pull rank and take his place in the history books as the first man to set foot on a satellite of

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is the eldest at 89. Since then plans to return to the Moon have come and gone and none of them have lasted very long. Neil Armstrong used to draw a diagram at some of his lectures. It consisted of four circles, inside which he wrote ‘Leadership’, ‘Threat’, ‘Good Economy’ and ‘World

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a more sustained political will and public support there will come a time when there are no moonwalkers among us. After returning from the Moon Neil Armstrong worked for NASA in the Office of Advanced Research and Technology but his work was inevitably interrupted by public appearances and it seems NASA did

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for a reason. No one, no one but no one, could have accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and grace than Neil Armstrong. Hearing those words from the large dais near the pulpit was Michael Collins, who read a prayer. Sitting in the front row in the Cathedral

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when first God dawned on chaos’. Will the conquest of the Moon be a new great morning? When will we go back? After his return, Neil Armstrong wrote, ‘Luna is once again isolated.’ It still is. Sources The majority of the quotations featured in this book are from the author’s personal

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interviews with Neil Armstrong, Charles Duke, Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Walter Cunningham, Eugene Cernan, Pete Conrad, and George Low, or from NASA’s Oral History projects (www

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manned spacecraft, 15 December 1965. Jim Lovell, capsule communicator (Capcom) for the Gemini 8 mission, 16 March 1966. Neil Armstrong and David Scott had to abort the mission and return to Earth early. Neil Armstrong and David Scott await their recovery craft the USS Leonard F. Mason after splashing down, 16 March 1966. The

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taken 16 April 1972, during Apollo 16. NASA’s official Apollo 11 crew portrait. From left to right: Neil Armstrong (Commander), Michael Collins (Command Module Pilot) and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin Jr (Lunar Module Pilot). Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin practise landing in a Lunar Module simulator, July 1969. Apollo 11 launch, 16 July 1969

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Apollo lands on the Moon. NASA Buzz Aldrin starting his descent to the lunar surface, as photographed by Neil Armstrong. NASA Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong can be seen in his visor. NASA Neil Armstrong back in the Lunar Module after the first moonwalk. NASA The ascent stage of the Lunar Module, ‘Eagle

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