Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who marked an epochal achievement in
exploration with "one small step" from the Apollo 11 lunar module on
July 20, 1969, becoming the first person to walk on the moon, died
overnight at 82.
His family announced the death in a statement but did not
disclose where he died. They attributed it to "complications resulting
from cardiovascular procedures."
A taciturn engineer and test pilot who was never at ease with his fame,
Mr Armstrong was among the most famous Americans of the 1960s Cold War
space race.
Twelve years after the Soviet Sputnik satellite reached space first,
deeply alarming US officials, and after President John F. Kennedy in
1961 declared it a national priority to land an American on the moon
"before this decade is out," Mr Armstrong, a former Navy fighter pilot,
commanded the NASA crew that finished the job.
His trip to the moon — particularly the hair-raising final
descent from lunar orbit to the treacherous surface — was history's
boldest feat of aviation. Yet what the experience meant to him, what he
thought of it all on an emotional level, he mostly kept to himself.
Like his boyhood idol, transatlantic aviator Charles
Lindbergh, Mr Armstrong learned how uncomfortable the intrusion of
global acclaim can be. And just as Lindbergh had done, he eventually
shied from the public and avoided the popular media.
In time, he became almost mythical.
Mr Armstrong was "exceedingly circumspect" from a young age,
and the glare of international attention "just deepened a personality
trait that he already had in spades," said his authorised biographer,
James Hansen, a former NASA historian.
In an interview, Hansen, author of
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, cited another "special sensitivity" that made the first man on the moon a stranger on Earth.
"I think Neil knew that this glorious thing he helped achieve
for the country back in the summer of 1969 — glorious for the entire
planet, really — would inexorably be diminished by the blatant
commercialism of the modern world," Hansen said.
"And I think it's a nobility of his character that he just would not take part in that."
The perilous, 195-hour journey that defined Mr Armstrong's
place in history — from the liftoff of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, to
the capsule's splashdown in the Pacific eight days later — riveted the
world's attention, transcending cultural, political and generational
divides in an era of profound social tumult and change in the United
States.
As Mr Armstrong, a civilian, and his crew mates, Air Force
pilots Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins, hurtled through
space, television viewers around the globe witnessed a drama of
spellbinding technology and daring. About a half-billion people listened
to the climactic landing and watched a flickering video feed of the
moon walk.
At centre stage, cool and focused, was a pragmatic,
38-year-old astronaut who would let social critics and spiritual wise
men dither over the larger meaning of his voyage. When Mr. Armstrong
occasionally spoke publicly about the mission in later decades, he
usually did so dryly, his recollections mainly operational.
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector,
nerdy engineer," he said at a millennial gathering honoring the greatest
engineering achievements of the 20th century. Unlike Aldrin and
Collins, Mr Armstrong never published a memoir.
After flying experimental rocket planes in the 1950s at
Edwards Air Force Base in California — the high-desert realm of
daredevil test pilots later celebrated in author Tom Wolfe's
The Right Stuff — Mr Armstrong was selected for NASA's astronaut corps in 1962 and became the first US civilian to be blasted into space.
In 1966, during his only space flight other than Apollo 11, a
life-threatening malfunction of his Gemini 8 vehicle caused the craft
to tumble out of control in Earth orbit. It was the nation's first
potentially fatal crisis in space, prompting Mr Armstrong and his crew
mate, David Scott, to abort their mission and carry out NASA's first
emergency reentry.
His skill and composure were put to no greater test, though,
than in the anxious minutes starting at 4:05pm Eastern (US) time on
Sunday, July 20, 1969. That was when the lunar module carrying Mr
Armstrong and Aldrin, having separated from the Apollo 11 capsule, began
its hazardous, 14.5km final descent to the moon's Sea of Tranquility.
Collins, waiting in lunar orbit, could only hope that the two would make it back.
The lunar module, or LM (pronounced lem), was dubbed "Eagle."
Its 1969 computer, overtaxed during the descent and flashing alarm
lights as it fell behind on its work, guided the spider-like craft most
of the way to the surface.
In the last few thousand feet, however, Mr. Armstrong,
looking out a window, saw that the computer had piloted Eagle beyond its
targeted landing spot. The craft was headed for a massive crater
surrounded by boulders as big as cars.
Mr Armstrong, as planned, took manual control of the LM at
150 metres. Standing in the cramped cockpit, piloting with a control
stick and toggle switch, he maneuvered past the crater while scanning
the rugged moonscape for a place to safely put down.
Although the world remembers him best for walking on the
moon, Mr Armstrong recalled his time on the surface as anti-climactic,
"something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable." Flying the
LM was "by far the most difficult and challenging part" of the mission,
he told a group of youngsters in a 2007 email exchange.
The "very high risk" descent was "extremely complex," he wrote, and guiding the craft gave him a "feeling of elation."
"Pilots take no particular joy in walking," he once remarked. "Pilots like flying."
As he and Aldrin kept descending, balanced on a cone of fire
385,000km from Earth, the LM's roaring engine kicked up a fog of moon
dust, distorting Mr. Armstrong's depth perception and clouding his view
of the surface.
Meanwhile, the descent engine's fuel — separate from the fuel
that would later power the ascent engine on their departure from the
moon — dwindled to a critical level.
"Quantity light," Aldrin warned at just under 30.5m. This
meant that Mr Armstrong, according to NASA's instruments, had less than
two minutes to ease the LM to the surface or he would have faced a
frightful dilemma.
He would have had to abort the descent, ending the mission in
failure at a cost of immense national prestige and treasure; or he
would have had to risk a sort of crash landing after the fuel ran out —
letting the LM fall in lunar gravity the rest of the way down, hoping
the slow-motion plunge wouldn't badly damage it.
Finally, with 50 seconds to spare, the world heard Aldrin
say, "Contact light," and Eagle's landing gear settled on the lunar
soil. Their precarious, 12-minute decent into the unknown left Mr
Armstrong's pulse pounding at twice the normal rate.
Humanity listened, transfixed. "Houston, Tranquility base
here," Mr Armstrong reported. "The Eagle has landed." The response from
mission control was filled with relief: "Roger, Tranquility, we copy you
on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're
breathing again. Thanks a lot."
About 6 1/2 hours later, Mr Armstrong, soon to be followed by
Aldrin, climbed down the ladder outside the LM's hatch as a television
camera mounted on the craft transmitted his shadowy, black-and-white
image to hundreds of millions of viewers.
How Mr Armstrong wound up commanding the historic flight had
to do with his abilities and experience, plus a measure of good fortune.
Months earlier, when he had been named Apollo 11 commander,
NASA envisioned his mission as the first lunar landing — yet no one
could be sure. Three other Apollo flights had to finish preparing the
way. If any of them had failed, Apollo 11 would have had to pick up the
slack, leaving the momentous first landing to a later crew.
Why the space agency chose Mr Armstrong, not Aldrin, for the
famous first step out of the LM had to do with the two men's
personalities.
Publicly, NASA said the first-step decision was a technical
one dictated by where the astronauts would be positioned in the LM's
small cockpit. But in his 2001 autobiography, Christopher C. Kraft Jr., a
top NASA flight official, confirmed the true reason.
Aldrin, who would struggle with alcoholism and depression
after his astronaut career, was overtly opinionated and ambitious,
making it clear within NASA why he thought he should be first. "Did we
think Buzz was the man who would be our best representative to the
world, the man who would be legend?" Kraft recalled. "We didn't."
The stoic Mr Armstrong, on the other hand, quietly held to
his belief that the descent and landing, not the moon walk, would be the
mission's signature achievement. And it didn't matter to him whether
the Earth-bound masses thought differently.
"Neil Armstrong, reticent, soft-spoken and heroic, was our only choice," Kraft said.
As for his famous statement upon stepping off the ladder, Mr
Armstrong said he didn't dwell on it much beforehand, that the idea came
to him only after the landing.
He would always maintain that he had planned to say "a man."
Whether the "a" was lost in transmission or Mr Armstrong misspoke has
never been fully resolved. As his boots touched the lunar surface at
10:56:15pm Eastern (US) time, the world heard:
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Ever the precise engineer, Mr. Armstrong later said that if
it were up to him, history would record his immortal words with an "a"
inserted in parenthesis.
Neil Alden Armstrong was born August 5, 1930, outside the
little farming town of Wapakoneta in western Ohio. From the morning in
1936 when his father, an auditor of county records, let him skip Sunday
school so the two could go aloft in a barnstorming Ford Trimotor plane
near their home, the boy was hooked on aviation.
He got his pilot's licence on his 16th birthday, before he was legally old enough to go solo in an automobile.
After a few semesters at Purdue University, he left for Navy
flight training in 1949, eventually becoming the youngest pilot in his
fighter squadron on the aircraft carrier USS Essex. He flew 78 combat
missions in the Korean War and was shot down once before his tour of
duty ended and he went back to Purdue.
After earning an aeronautical engineering degree in 1955, he
joined NASA's forerunner, the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, and was soon rocketing in the stratosphere, pushing the
boundaries of aviation in missile-like research planes.
In 1959, at the beginning of the Mercury project, which would
soon blast the first American into space, NASA chose its storied
"original seven" astronauts from the ranks of active-duty military
fliers. Mr Armstrong, who was less than enthusiastic about the program,
remained at Edwards as a civilian test pilot.
Then, in 1962, his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, died of brain
cancer. Mr. Armstrong's grief "caused him to invest [his] energies in
something very positive," his sister recalled in an interview with
Hansen. "That's when he started into the space program."
Not long after Karen's death, when NASA recruited its second
group of astronauts, about 250 test pilots applied, and Mr Armstrong was
among the nine who made the cut. Most took part in the Earth-orbiting
Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, refining flight procedures that would
be needed later in the moon-bound Apollo program.
Mr Armstrong's harrowing Gemini 8 flight, in March 1966, was
aborted hours into its three-day schedule after the spacecraft began
toppling end-over-end, pinwheeling so violently that Mr Armstrong, the
commander, and crew mate David Scott were in danger of blacking out,
which almost surely would have been fatal.
A malfunctioning thruster was the culprit. "I gotta cage my
eyeballs," Mr. Armstrong remarked, deadpan, as he and Scott, their
vision blurred, struggled to cut short their flight. NASA officials were
impressed by Mr Armstrong's handling of the crisis, and three years
later they entrusted him with command of the ultimate mission.
After weeks of hoopla surrounding Apollo 11's return — a
ticker-tape parade, a presidential dinner, a 28-city global goodwill
tour — Mr Armstrong worked in NASA management for two years, then joined
the University of Cincinnati's engineering faculty.
"We were not naive, but we could not have guessed what the
volume and intensity of public interest would turn out to be," he said
of his worldwide celebrity.
Over the ensuing decades, Mr Armstrong, a solitary figure,
warded off reporters' efforts to penetrate his privacy until most gave
up or lost interest. Unhappy with faculty unionism, he resigned from the
university in 1979 and spent the rest of his working life in business,
amassing personal wealth as an investor and a member of corporate
boards.
Although he was loathe to exploit his fame, Mr. Armstrong
signed on as a pitchman for Chrysler in his waning months as a
professor, appearing in ads for the nearly bankrupt automaker, including
one that aired during the Super Bowl in January 1979.
He said he agreed to the deal mainly because it involved an
engineering consultancy and because he wanted to help a beleaguered US
company buffeted by imports and rising foreign oil prices. The
arrangement was short-lived, however, and afterward Mr Armstrong
repeatedly turned down opportunities to endorse products.
Hansen, now an aerospace historian at Auburn University, said
Mr. Armstrong felt awkward taking credit for the collective success of
400,000 employees of the space agency and its Apollo contractors. In
2003, Hansen recorded 55 hours of interviews with Mr Armstrong after
years of coaxing him to cooperate on a biography.
He was not a recluse, as some labeled him. In 1986, for
instance, he was vice chairman of the commission that investigated the
explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
But that was a rare step into the spotlight. As a rule, Mr
Armsrong was extremely choosey about his public appearances, limiting
them mostly to aerospace-related commemorative events and to other
usually low-key gatherings that piqued his interest, such as meetings of
scientific and technical societies.
"The lunar Lindbergh," he was dubbed for his refusal to grant
interviews to journalists. His remoteness also irked some NASA
officials, who had vainly hoped that Mr Armstrong would become a
forceful public advocate for the funding of space exploration.
"How long must it take before I can cease to be known as a
spaceman?" he once pleaded. Yet by the time he retired in 2002, to
leisurely travel and enjoy his grandchildren, the "First Man" finally
had outlived the nation's fascination with him, and he could often walk
down a street in blissful anonymity.
His 38-year marriage to the former Janet Shearon ended in
divorce in 1994. Later that year, he married Carol Knight, a widowed
mother of two teenagers. Besides his wife, survivors include two sons
from his first marriage, Eric and Mark; two stepchildren; a brother; a
sister; and 10 grandchildren.
"Looking back, we were really very privileged to live in that
thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself, and
what he might become, and where he might go," Mr. Armstrong said in a
2001 NASA oral history project. "So I'm very thankful."
The Washington Post
