Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (3 page)

Edwards was situated next to the dusty salt-pan bed of Rogers Dry Lake. An enormous runway two and a half miles long extended into the lake itself which for most of the year was swept dry by the heat of howling desert winds. Stretching for 25 miles towards desolate mountain ranges, in an emergency the flat lakebed was as useful to dare-devil pilots as it was unforgiving. With its fearsome death toll and harsh climate, its rattlesnakes and sandstorms, Edwards was only marginally less desperate than the kind of air force pilots attracted there by the range of exotic aircraft.What mattered to many was the opportunity to clamber aboard something with an X in its name and push it as hard as possible in a wham-bam moment of ecstasy. However, the small number of engineer pilots, including Armstrong, who were attached not to the air force but to the NACA's High Speed Flight Station sought time to get intimately acquainted with the aircraft in the interests of aeronautical research.

Edwards for Armstrong proved to be a shining highlight of his career. His work was as varied as the aeroplanes he flew: he carried out more than 900 flights in a range of famous aircraft, from the F-104 Starfighter to the KC-135 Stratotanker. While he occasionally evaluated a new aircraft, noting its characteristics and recommending changes, he also flew older types that were fitted with experimental components designed to enhance the performance of the instruments, engines or airframe. A couple of his contemporaries considered other pilots to be better 'stick-and-rudder' men than Armstrong, but he acquired a reputation for a detailed understanding of technical issues and could be consistently relied upon to monitor a test accurately while rocketing through the sky faster than the speed of sound. His unflappable command of the aircraft bought him the time he needed to complete the task in hand.
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Sometimes the pressures were enormous. During the early 1950s, an average of one test pilot a week was killed in an air accident; in 1952 alone 62 pilots died at Edwards during a nine month period.
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Neil had been introduced to the ugly side of flying while still in Wapakoneta where he witnessed a fatal crash, but it was in Korea that he was first personally touched by loss. On the day he returned to his ship after bailing out, two squadron friends had been killed. Less than two weeks later a Banshee jet, attempting to land on the
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, smashed into a row of aircraft lined up on the deck, burning four men to death. Later, the loss of Armstrong's cabin-mate Leonard 'Chet' Cheshire hit him particularly hard.
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At Edwards the risks could be more easily calculated, but much of the flying was still inherently dangerous, particularly Neil's work with the X-15, an aircraft he was to fly seven times.

Designed to reach hypersonic speeds above Mach 5, three X-15s were built by North American Aviation, each so dangerously close to the limits of aircraft performance that they set speed records which still stand today. Managed by a flight control centre equipped with tracking facilities, each flight to the edge of space was first rehearsed in a simulator. Once in the air, the aircraft was accompanied by four chase planes, while on the ground a fleet of vehicles was ready to deal with all eventualities. The pilot, wearing a pressure-suit and squashed into a tiny cockpit, could see little of his sleek black aircraft through the reinforced windows. At the end of his ten-minute test, he would have to lose speed and altitude quickly by flying a specific flight pattern, later adopted by space shuttle pilots. Even then he would be unable to land without first jettisoning the ventral fin slung beneath the fuselage.

On 20 April 1962, as the launch countdown reached zero, Neil prepared to assess a new 'g-force limiter' designed to prevent a pilot from experiencing a force more than five times greater than gravity. Once released, with a sharp lurch, from the B-52 he ignited his rocket engine and zoomed up to 207,500 feet – the highest altitude he would ever reach in an aircraft. At this height he could see the black void of space. He was completely reliant on his rocket thrusters to get back into the atmosphere, but while focusing on a test of the limiter he held the nose of the aircraft up for too long and as he tried to descend the X-15 bounced off the atmosphere back up towards the edge of space. The flight control centre urged him to follow the correct course, but Neil found that by the time he had managed to cut back into the upper reaches of the atmosphere he was screaming past the airfield at a speed of Mach 3. Turning round 45 miles south of Edwards, he was confronted with the uncomfortable thought that he might have to ask for permission to bring his rocket-plane into the traffic pattern of Palmdale municipal airport. When he eventually came within sight of the southern tip of Edwards the chase jets caught up with him and the control centre helped co-ordinate the landing as Armstrong raced in just a few feet above the desert floor.

During the post-flight debriefing a flight manager asked one of the chase pilots how close Neil had been to the trees.

'About 150 feet,' came the reply.

'Were the trees 150 feet to his right or to his left?' asked the smirking manager.
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Yet for all the record-breaking altitudes and speeds achieved by Armstrong and the other X-15 pilots, there was a growing sense that America was being left behind in the attempt to send a man into space. In October 1957, the legendary aircraft streaking about the blue skies above Edwards were overshadowed by a football-sized satellite. It did little more than transmit a radio signal back to Earth, but it was unmistakably un-American. Russia's successful development of Sputnik propelled the Cold War into space, prompting a sense of shock that rippled in many high-level directions. There was a widespread belief that if the Russians could send a ball across the United States, they could surely send nuclear warheads. But instead of bombs, a month later Sputnik 2 carried a dog, Laika, into orbit, extending Russia's bid for recognition as the world's leading technical nation. For the first time the NACA realised that Moscow was preparing to send a man into space,
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something that would deal a major blow to American esteem and put the US on the back foot for years to come. Washington was forced to act.

Less than a year after Sputnik, the NACA was replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and its managers were given a specific brief: put a man in space ahead of the Soviets.
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But what could a man actually do in space? Would the high g-forces, weightlessness and the undiscovered problems of orbital flight allow him to do anything at all? These questions shaped the search for recruits, and eventually 110 military pilots, each with a college degree and at least 1,500 hours' flying time, were invited to apply.

Armstrong, a civilian, was not asked. In any event, it is unlikely that he would have agreed to swap the successful X-15 programme for an unproven project where a man would be shut up in a capsule and blasted on a short trajectory largely controlled from the ground. 'Spam in a can' Yeager called it, though Armstrong himself was not quite so scornful. He saw that space represented a new challenge. 'I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium,' he said later.
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In April 1959, seven men were selected to take part in the fledgling manned space programme, named Project Mercury. All were white military men despite the fact that thirteen women later proved they could pass the demanding round of tests, including Jerrie Cobb. Cobb, who had set records for speed, distance and altitude, sought support from Congress, and a memo noting her impressive qualifications was laid before Vice President Lyndon Johnson – who promptly dismissed her cause with the comment 'Let's stop this, now.'
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NASA argued that one day capsules would support two or more astronauts in a confined space, making it difficult to accept women into the programme. However, as writer Andrew Smith put it, 'anyone capable of contemplating the myriad nasty ends available to an astronaut could probably learn to bare his arse in front of a lady without bursting into tears'.
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After being accepted by NASA, the Mercury Seven began preparing for America's first manned missions. The United States expected to become the first nation to send a man on a suborbital flight, in a mission that would be a triumphant coup for the West. In the first weeks of 1961, however, doubts remained concerning the safety of the capsule and its rocket, and both had yet to be man-rated in a test-flight. Instead of an astronaut, the capsule would first carry Ham, a four-year-old chimpanzee, and on 31 January Ham was launched on a flight lasting nearly 17 minutes. Then on 12 April the Russians, once again ahead of the Americans, launched Yuri Gagarin not just into space but into a complete orbit of the Earth. The coup had been pulled off, not by NASA but by Moscow. In the States, a contemporary newspaper cartoon by John Fischetti showed one chimpanzee telling another 'We're a little behind the Russians, and a little ahead of the Americans.'

On the day when he first flew faster than sound, Chuck Yeager had been unable to close the aircraft canopy unaided, after breaking a couple of ribs two days earlier while riding a horse. He had told only his wife and a fellow pilot about the accident, asking his buddy to secretly rig up a device that would help him secure the hatch. This anecdote comes from the writer Tom Wolfe, who wrote about the rugged, pioneering ways of pilots like Yeager, and his contemporaries the Mercury Seven. Only men with the 'right stuff', who rode horses through the desert, were able to fly experimental flying machines powered by rockets and testosterone, while ignoring eye-watering pain. Men like Yeager could 'break the sound barrier' (although there was no such thing), and if you asked them nicely they could even possibly squeeze spinach from a tin using just their hands. Wolfe's pilots are lone heroes, 'single-combat warriors' living on the edge, having taken over the mantle of the cowboys who occupied the wild deserts of the West before them. Such bravado was embraced by many of the air force pilots at Edwards. Men like Yeager were dismissive of the more studious type of airmen, some of whom came to be recruited as astronauts.
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It was said that anyone who would want to sit in a Mercury capsule would have to 'wipe the monkey shit off the seat first'.
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Some of these air force men were not actually entitled to become astronauts themselves because they did not have a college degree, such as Yeager. Priding himself on his 'balls out' attitude, Yeager regarded NASA's airmen as 'sorry fighter pilots' who rated 'about as high as my shoelaces'.
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But it was NASA's research pilots who would prove themselves capable in the agency's blossoming space programme.

In May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space, his Mercury capsule being carried to an altitude of 116 miles by a Redstone rocket. During this and subsequent Mercury flights, the astronauts' work in weightlessness exceeded all expectations. Encouraged by their early success, NASA began to plan for more complicated missions in preparation for the ultimate ambition, a journey to the Moon. Such a flight would rely on orbital mechanics, lunar trajectories, docking procedures and machinery complex enough to safely carry a crew nearly a quarter of a million miles and back. More technically complicated than anything achieved by man before, such a mission would require years of studious preparation. Notwithstanding Wolfe's adulation of heroics, only those with the bright stuff would be up to completing such an adventure.

In April 1962, NASA asked for applications for a new class of astronauts. Applicants had to be test pilots who were currently flying high-performance aircraft and who had a college degree in engineering or one of the sciences. They could be no taller than six feet and no older than 35. Although it wasn't explicitly mentioned, it was clear that one way or another they would be involved in the preparations for a lunar landing. As well as new personnel, such ambitious plans would require spacecraft and rockets bigger and stronger than anything that was currently available. Two months earlier, Project Mercury had successfully achieved its goal of putting a man in orbit. John Glenn, a former marine, circled the Earth three times, but his hardware fell far short of the capability needed to get to the Moon. The rockets propelling the first two Mercury flights were not much more powerful than the XLR-99 engine installed in the X-15.

In May, NASA's plans for the future were set out at a conference in Seattle, and among those speaking was Armstrong, who delivered a presentation on hypersonic research flights. The conference was held alongside the Seattle World's Fair, whose guests included John Glenn. By proving that NASA was capable of orbital flight, Glenn had demonstrated that proposals for more adventurous missions deserved to be taken seriously. It was clear that the design and engineering challenges posed by flights into space promised to go beyond anything on offer elsewhere. For a pilot captivated by powered flight since childhood the new opportunities were too exciting to resist. Still, never one to rush things, Armstrong waited until he got back from Seattle before submitting his application. It arrived at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in early June, missing the final deadline by a week.
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