Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (24 page)

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Aboard the LLTV, Neil’s preflight checkout was normal and thorough. With one last pull on his seat harness he and the control van’s four engineers and ground crew were ready. The operations engineer gave the go, and the sound of the deep whining of the trainer’s turbofan jet engine spinning faster and faster in its start-up told nearby personnel it was time to move away to safety.

Neil increased power and he felt the LLTV lift. Not unlike a helicopter leaving the ground, but with one great difference: Instant loss of power could quickly allow the lunar trainer to drop like a rock before its six 500-pound backup rockets would take over; on a helicopter spinning blades would make for a softer landing.

The hand positions on the LLTV controls in fact were mostly opposite of those on a helicopter—all strange and different but controls in which Neil had become comfortable.

He settled into his climb, gaining altitude much slower than usual because of the vehicle’s fight with wind gusts. Suddenly coming into view was the Manned Spacecraft Center’s landmark Building One, dominating the center’s campuslike skyline. Quickly he returned his focus to his ascent to 450 feet where he would begin his run.

Reaching his assigned altitude was anything but normal. Normal was a little more than a two-minute climb, but the wind gusts and strong headwinds retarded Neil’s ascent greatly. He needed twice the time to get upstairs. Four minutes and 26 seconds in fact to reach 450 feet, where he transferred the LLTV’s rockets for their lunar-simulation landing.

He used the automatic control system to set the turbofan engine thrust at five-sixths the vehicle’s weight and all appeared ready to the control van’s four test engineers.

“You have a good weighing at 450 feet,” the operations engineer told Neil.

“Roger.”

“Come on down.”

“Roger.”

Neil moved into his simulated lunar-landing run as he had on twenty previous test flights. He was using both attitude-control systems to offset gust reactions. All pictorial and telemetered data told the ground Neil was making a normal yet rapid and somewhat steeper descent through the so-called “Dead Man’s Curve”—the terminal phase—and all involved were convinced it was just another day at the office for Neil Armstrong.

But suddenly it wasn’t.

The left “low rocket fuel” light flickered then came on steadily, but because of its location in the extreme upper right of the panel, it went unnoticed by Neil.

For only a short instant, the LLTV settled in a hovering position about 30 feet above ground when Neil immediately sensed something was wrong.

“Come out of the lunar sim,” the operations engineer ordered and Neil’s instincts were cat quick. Before the operations engineer could repeat, “Come out of lunar sim,” Neil depressed the lunar simulation release switch advancing the jet throttle to 100 percent. He was instantly climbing about 45 feet per second—reaching for altitude and safety—when the operations engineer saw the helium low light come on.

“Come on back down. We’ve got helium low,” he ordered.

Neil halted his climb at 4.22 seconds with his vehicle nearing 200 feet. For the next 7.34 seconds the LLTV moved forward and level as Neil reoriented vehicle and self.

He knew the loss of helium pressure would shut down his control rockets and just as quickly as he’d reminded himself of this, it happened. He had no control. The LLTV started a pitch-up attitude and began sagging, rolling to the right. Neil tried to regain control but he knew he was sinking. He knew he needed to save the expensive high-tech machine. Deke had the lunar trainer on a low budget, but he also knew he couldn’t roll through 30 degrees. If he did and he fired his ejection seat, the seat’s rocket would drive him headfirst into the ground.

“Instantly I was out of choices,” he later told me. “I lost the pressure and gas to the attitude-control rockets, and when you lose attitude control it diverges, and there was very little time to analyze alternatives at that point. It was just because I was so close to the ground,” he explained, “below 100 feet in altitude—time for instant decision, time to depart—and I told the van, ‘I have to leave it.’”

“Leave the vehicle?” the operations engineer questioned.

Neil’s hand was already on the tiger-striped ring beneath his seat. He jerked it forward and felt his world explode.

He and his zero-to-zero ejection seat were blown instantly from the LLTV and in a blink of the eye a small explosive blasted his parachute canopy open.

There was no waiting for a drogue. No waiting for the main chute to blossom. Parachute deployment was instant. Rocket power and pressurization fully opened his chute in a second flat.

Following Neil’s ejection, the failing LLTV had taken only 2.84 seconds to hit the ground, crumbling and exploding into a violent fireball.

Neil was watching from a safe distance, grateful to be riding his parachute away from the burning fuel and melting metals. Some had feared an ejecting pilot would simply fall into the middle of the burning crash.

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Neil was thankful he did not. He judged his chute was taking him about the length of a football field from the burning wreck into a patch of waste-high weeds. He refocused his attention on making a good parachute landing by pulling his knees together, his legs upward, and holding firmly to his parachute straps as his feet parted weeds.

He rolled to a stop on the ground 10.34 seconds after ejecting, pulling in his parachute and harness before taking stock of his body and limbs. He reminded himself that it was his first ejection in seventeen years—since he ejected from his crippled Panther over Korea. With the exception of biting his tongue, he would realize later that night the only other damage he suffered was a bad case of chiggers he got in the weeds.

Other than that Neil brushed himself off and was grateful he hadn’t a scratch when help arrived. He was taken back to the staging area for a quick debriefing with the ground crew.

Neil Armstrong ejects from his failed Lunar Landing Training Vehicle and rides his parachute to safety above the burning crash below. (NASA)

The time was 1:45
P.M.
and the unflappable test pilot continued dusting himself off all the way to his car. He nursed his lacerated tongue and drove his ’Vette back to his office. He was satisfied he had done what he’d been trained to do and there was no reason to make more out of it.

Neil went back to work, and in the coming days investigators found the cause of the LLTV accident. It was a poorly designed thruster system that allowed propellant to leak out, and the loss of helium pressure in the tanks caused attitude thrusters to shut down. Neil had no control, and did nothing that contributed to the accident, and while applauding Armstrong for his flight skills and decision-making, Manned Spacecraft Center Director Bob Gilruth and Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft felt it was only a matter of time before an astronaut would be killed in the lunar trainer.

The executives were ready to eliminate LLTV training completely, but Neil, Pete Conrad, Alan Shepard, Dave Scott, and Gene Cernan—five of the six Apollo commanders who would land on the moon—were adamant they needed the LLTV.

“Forget about punching buttons in a safe ground trainer,” Neil told the bosses. “Would you have us train for real only once—when we were 200 feet above the moon’s surface, or would you rather for us to learn above Earth where we have help?”

The man who would be last on the moon, Gene Cernan, backed the astronaut who would be first, and Cernan didn’t sugarcoat his words: “Training with the LLTV means you ain’t allowed any mistakes. It puts your ass in the real world. We have to have it.”

Neil wasn’t easily excited but he believed strongly in the fact that you had to expect some things to go wrong, and you needed to prepare yourself to handle the unexpected. “You just hope those unexpected things are something you have prepared yourself to cope with,” he told me.

Some writers wrongly accused NASA of exaggerating Armstrong’s ejection altitude of about 200 feet. The writers stated it was more like 50 feet with Neil having only two-fifths of a second before impact. Neil told me he judged he was slightly less than 100 feet, the point where the rules called for the pilot to eject if he was having problems. The video confirms Neil’s judgment. Apparently those writers were confusing the facts of the LLTV’s first ejection by its test pilot Joe Algranti.

From Neil’s mouth to this writer’s ears, from the videos, the investigations, and the interviews with others who were there, it was revealed Neil was higher than 50 feet when he ejected and his lunar trainer took 2.84 seconds to hit the ground. Not a scant two-fifths of a second, and most important, there was never an accident in LLTV training caused by an astronaut.

The training continued with Neil making almost sixty landings in the LLTV, and after he had made history landing first on the lunar surface, he said, “The LLTV gave me a good deal of confidence—a comfortable familiarity when we landed on the moon.”

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Next for Neil was
Apollo 8
.

Deke Slayton had selected him as backup commander to Frank Borman, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin as the backup command module pilot to Jim Lovell. But Mike Collins, who would fly to the moon with Neil and Buzz on
Apollo 11
, had to stand down for a neck operation. Deke moved astronaut Fred Haise in as the third member of the
Apollo 8
backup crew.

The mission plan called for
Apollo 8
to follow the first Apollo crewed mission into Earth orbit, and that flight, dubbed
Apollo 7,
was on the calendar for October—less than seven months away.

Fourteen months had passed since the
Apollo 1
fire and
Apollo 7
’s scheduled launch seemed promising. Neil took stock of the fact that half a billion dollars had been spent on the exhaustive redesign and rebuilding of Apollo, including a new hatch that an astronaut could open in three seconds flat. The new spacecraft included extensive use of fire-resistant materials, a redesigned electrical system, better protection for plumbing lines, and use of a combination nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere system when the spaceship was on the ground.

Neil was aware that what happened to Apollo could also happen to the lunar module, a fact not lost on its builder Grumman Aircraft. The Grumman team made extensive changes to that vehicle, too, and although Neil didn’t know it at the time, Grumman was building the only space vehicle that would carry humans without ever suffering a failure. It would in fact be the lifeboat that would later save the three
Apollo 13
astronauts.

The Grumman team quickly earned the respect of the industry and Neil, remembering his friend Gus Grissom, who hung a lemon on the
Apollo 1
simulator, spoke often about the efforts before assemblages.

Neil would say, “I’m convinced we would have ended up losing more lives in a number of ways before we got to the moon, and we may never have gotten there if it hadn’t been for
Apollo 1
. We uncovered a whole barrel of snakes. We would have fixed them one by one. The fire forced us to shut the program down and redo it right, and we got there on the backs of Gus, Ed, and Roger.”

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On October 11, 1968, the Saturn 1B rocket thundered from its launchpad and boosted
Apollo 7
and its crew of three into orbit.

Halfway through powered flight Commander Wally Schirra keyed his microphone and told Mission Control, “She’s riding like a dream.”

From launchpad 34, where Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died, their backups Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham, and Donn Eisele leave for Apollo’s first flight. (NASA)

Apollo 7
’s Schirra, Walter Cunningham, and Donn Eisele spent eleven days in space. They tested the new Apollo systems, conducted experiments, and beamed the first extensive live television scenes from space to fascinate audiences around the world while proving the new Apollo would work in space longer than needed for a flight to the moon and back.