![]() When the LLTV went into a straight, shallow dive, it was clear the game was over. On May 6, 1968, Armstrong had the thing just a few hundred feet off the ground at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, when it stopped responding to his commands, violently swinging first one way, then the other. (300 m) off the ground and was intended, as its name makes clear, to allow Apollo pilots to practice landing the lunar module - a spacecraft they would never get to fly for real until the day they were required to try to set it down on the surface of the moon. (1,100 kg), four-legged contraption was never supposed to climb much more than 1,000 ft. Two years later, Armstrong was flying a far more ignoble machine - the ugly, insectile Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV). By 10:22 p.m., he and Scott were safely bobbing in the Pacific. “We were approaching vertigo - with tunnel vision, loss of consciousness and all the rest.” Armstrong shut down the main thrusters, fired up the backup system and brought his bucking spacecraft to heel. “The rate was about one revolution per second,” Scott says. Releasing the deadweight of the Agena only accelerated the spin. The malfunction, it turned out, was in the Gemini spacecraft - a stuck thruster that wouldn’t stop firing. So Armstrong did what the rules dictated - and the roll rate only increased. NASA’s protocols - which were not necessarily Armstrong’s protocols - were that if anything went wrong they should undock from the Agena immediately, since surely the problem would be in the less exquisitely engineered of the two ships. Not long after they docked, the paired ships began spinning out of control, barrel-rolling to the right. Less than five hours into the flight, they chased down and docked with an Agena Target Vehicle - an unmanned craft significantly larger than their own Gemini capsule, designed to help astronauts practice the maneuvers they’d need to execute during later lunar missions. On March 16, 1966, Armstrong and his crewmate David Scott rode Gemini 8 to orbit, commencing what was supposed to be a five-day mission, but that lasted little more than 10 hours. On at least three occasions that followed, the machines he flew tried to kill him. It wasn’t until 1962 that Armstrong joined NASA - in the second crop of astronauts chosen after the glorious Original Seven. He retired from the Navy after the war and became a test pilot for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ( NASA’s predecessor) and flew 900 different types of aircraft - all of them fit only for test pilots because no one could say with any certainty whether the things would perform as designed or would simply shake themselves to rivets once they reached flight speed. He managed to stay airborne long enough to limp back into American-held territory before he bailed out. In his case, the piloting included 78 combat missions over Korea, during one of which his plane was crippled by antiaircraft fire. He, like so many others, was a military pilot. That, of course, is true of all of astronauts - especially those from the early era. There was a capital N, to be sure, but what followed was just a brief dash of gibberish. He then put down the pen and entered the party - and I still half-suspect the page wound up on eBay the next day.Īrmstrong was a man of almost preternatural imperturbability. When his turn came, he took the pen, stood for a moment - and then scribbled something wholly illegible. ![]() So Armstrong the pragmatist split the difference. Armstrong, the man of principle and hounded legend, could not sign Armstrong, the ex-Navy man, could not not. When we arrived, we could see that there was a queue to enter the residence - a queue that was moving unusually slowly because there was a guest book at the door that attendees were expected to sign. I went along on the tour as well, and on this particular evening, our group - well, the three astronauts, actually - were being feted at an outdoor party at the residence of the commander of the local U.S. That day was in March 2010, when he, Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell - moon men all - were part of a morale tour of American military bases in the Middle East. So he just stopped doing it - until one day he had to. For a uniquely private man, the offering up of the autograph had become an act of surrender, of obeisance, even of commerce - as the signature he handed over in a restaurant on a Monday would wind up for sale at an autograph show on a Tuesday. It was because for more than 41 years, writing his name was all people seemed to want him to do. Not because he was infirm - though in 2010 he was clearly looking frail - and not because his signature wasn’t still the strong and spiky cursive that was always as much calligraphy as it was mere handwriting. Follow once watched Neil Armstrong sign his name, and it appeared to be one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
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