Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (52 page)

Neil Armstrong was a man humbled, awed, and grateful for what he had been privileged to see. He understood he was seeing clearly into tomorrow, focusing on life and time itself. Understanding that life was indifferent, realizing that time is a dimension measured only within the mind.

He was most aware that Earth was the human-species spaceship and that it would one day pass into history. No one knew when, but all knew it was inevitable.

That end should be eons away. But if another asteroid or another incurable disease decides to visit our planet, humans could be wiped out within a few years. But if our leaders should have the foresight to populate the moon and Mars, even beyond, then life would go on.

Neil Armstrong saw the Magellanic Cloud from
Apollo 11
, as shown here in this picture by Mount Hood Community College’s Planetarium. (Mount Hood Community College Planetarium)

As Neil had come to face, that wasn’t likely.

What is and has been missing, and promises to continue at the rudder of the America Neil knew, is our lack of vision for the future. Leaders in both houses of Congress, but mostly Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, have kept astronauts locked in Earth orbit. These chief executives only gave America’s space program short shrift. From 1981 to 2011 135 space shuttle missions were launched while America’s leaders stood on the sidelines with little comment. The space shuttle flights were really only astronauts exploring the first onionskin beyond the surface of their own planet.

When President Ronald Reagan’s daughter Maureen visited Cape Canaveral she only wanted to know, “When are you sending Sally Ride to the moon?” She wasn’t at all happy to learn NASA couldn’t send astronauts higher than 300 miles with the space shuttle. Today she would be sorely pissed to learn NASA can’t send a live flea to the moon and bring the speck of life back still breathing. The agency doesn’t expect to have hardware that can fly a living being beyond Earth orbit before 2021 or 2022.

With an international crew of six, the magnificent International Space Station orbits Earth. (NASA)

Wow, you say! But the truth is NASA hasn’t been capable of sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit since 1972—an expected gap of a half-century. That’s criminal! Yet the agency could explore farther out if our dysfunctional federal government would take a few taxpayer dollars from a couple of meaningless pet projects. But it won’t. So for now to tend the International Space Station, NASA must keep buying its astronauts seats on Russian spacecraft. We will endure that humiliation until a commercial company or two can human rate their spacecraft for low Earth orbit taxis to carry astronaut crews to the station. That should be by 2017 or 2018, but none of these planned commercial spacecraft will be equipped to scratch a single particle in deep space. It’ll just be the same-old-same-oh.

*   *   *

What Neil and many other visionaries long recognized is that if humankind is to continue its destiny as explorers we must conquer the problems of deep space travel in measured, incremental distances by first settling and fully understanding our own neighborhood—the Earth-Moon system.

Neil was aware, as most others were, that we could send spacecraft to Mars without life on board. We have done so with great unmanned NASA programs like its car-size rovers Curiosity and Spirit. They moved over the Martian landscape sending back information and pictures while two spacecraft did the same circling the red planet.

But Neil also knew that until science developed the means to travel at faster interplanetary speeds, Mars-bound astronauts would arrive as blubbering idiots from radiation poisoning—no ship headed to Mars today could carry enough lead to protect its crew.

What’s needed is a lightweight radiation protection device like a small magnetic field. Neil was convinced that to develop such equipment we needed first to explore and settle our Earth-Moon system. This would teach us how to move on to more distance places like the Lagrangian points—those points in space affected equally by the gravity of two larger objects like the Earth and the moon so a smaller object can be left in one place.

But until we learned how to live in and master our own unaided personal survival while dealing with the hazards of space, Neil said, “We need the 3s. We need to stay within 3 seconds of communicating with Mission Control for its invaluable aid, and we need to stay within 3 days of returning to Earth.

“For deep space journeys we need to really know what we are doing,” Neil explained. “We need to be masters of our own survival.”

He went on to point out that Earth and the moon make up one celestial system. Neither world could survive without the other. It is the center of this dual system, rather than the center of Earth itself, that describes an elliptical orbit around the Sun in accordance with Kepler’s laws. It is also more accurate to say the Earth and moon together revolve about their common center of mass than to say the moon revolves about Earth. This common center lies beneath Earth’s surface, about 3,000 miles from our planet’s central point.

“If the Earth-Moon system is our home, shouldn’t we be caretakers of both worlds?” Neil asked. “You wouldn’t manicure your front yard and leave your back to become overgrown with weeds. Shouldn’t exploration of our own place and the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange points (all five of them) be our baby steps? Wouldn’t it be silly to go trotting off to asteroids and Mars, millions of miles away, before we knew our way around our own neighborhood—before we really solve the problem of space radiation?”

Neil believed during his final years that NASA was going nowhere fast. He worried that the space agency no longer had a rocket of its own, leaving no direct way for astronauts to go from their own launchpads to the space station. He feared the international outpost could experience a major failure with little support from the country that assembled it in orbit.

In congressional testimony Neil testified:

Americans have visited and examined six locations on Luna, varying in size from a suburban lot to a small township. That leaves more than 14 million square miles yet to explore.

The lunar vicinity is an exceptional location to learn about traveling to more distant places. Largely removed from Earth gravity, and Earth’s magnetosphere, it provides many of the challenges of flying far from Earth. But communication delays with Earth are less than two seconds, permitting Mission Control on Earth to play an important and timely role in flight operations.

In the case of a severe emergency, such as Jim Lovell’s
Apollo 13
, Earth is only three days travel time. Learning how to fly to, and remain at, Earth-Moon Lagrangian points would be a superb precursor to flying to, and remaining at, the much farther distant Earth-Sun Lagrangian points.

Flying to farther-away destinations from lunar orbit or lunar Lagrangian points could have substantial advantages in flight time and/or propellant requirements as compared with departures from Earth orbit.

Flying in the lunar vicinity would typically provide lower radiation exposure than those expected in interplanetary flight. The long communication delays to destinations beyond the moon mandate new techniques and procedure for spacecraft operations. Mission Control cannot provide a Mars crew their normal helpful advice (while landing) if the time delay of the radar, communications, and telemetry back to Earth are minutes away.

Flight experience at lunar distances can provide valuable insights into practical solutions for handling such challenges. I am persuaded that a return to the moon would be the most productive path to expanding the human presence in the solar system.

*   *   *

When President George W. Bush decided to bring the space shuttle program to an end on the advice of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, he put in its place Project Constellation.

Constellation would have given NASA two sets of rockets with emergency-abort systems and safety measures never in place on the space shuttles.

An early version lifted off in October 2009. It worked as advertised. But despite that successful flight and the fact that the new rocket offered the shortest and least costly route to keep American astronauts flying, Constellation was canceled.

Three years of infighting and knock-down-drag-out brawls failed to produce a replacement. Then, those who tossed Constellation away in the first place, hurried back to the waste dump and picked up its pieces. At the direction of Congress, NASA reinstated the big heavy-lift Constellation rocket—the first rocket since Apollo that could boost astronauts beyond Earth orbit. It is now the heavy-lift SLS (Space Launch System) with the development of an Apollo-type spacecraft called Orion.

When I learned NASA was adopting Neil’s thinking—the agency was drawing up plans to reach deep space in increments—I told Neil. I could feel his smile all the way through the telephone line.

He was pleased, but told me, “This sounds good but there is still lots to do.”

In Neil’s last days I sensed the bottom line. He was satisfied with his life. He felt he had accomplished most things important. He could now permit himself to coast just a little and reflect on what had been and what must be.

*   *   *

In one of Neil’s last visits to his Florida launch site, Herb Gold, NBC’s associate producer for our space coverage team commented, “I had never seen him so relaxed. All times before, Neil had been uncomfortable, on guard.

“We sat down with you guys,” Herb continued, “and as we enjoyed our libations, Neil asked my wife Sharon if she believed there were Martians among us.”

Sharon smiled, but before she could answer, Neil told her, “There are Martians on Earth. They are our children in pre-kindergarten. They’ll be the first Martians.”

It was a gathering pretty much of the old NBC space coverage team including our boss Jim Kitchell, who would sadly write me when Neil passed, “At least we had those last moments with him.”

It was indeed a good evening. When I and my wife Jo walked Neil to his accommodations at Cocoa Beach’s Holiday Inn, the hotel we had all frequented in the Apollo days, Neil—not usually a touchy-feely person—hugged my wife, and then we put our arms around each other for a brotherly embrace.

To me it was an important road marker in the sunset of our lives. We both felt as if we’d been there, done that.

*   *   *

A few days later Neil went off to spend a few weeks traveling the world with the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, and his backup, the commander of
Apollo 13
, Jim Lovell.

They spent some time with our troops, sold space exploration to the movers and shakers, and served as America’s ambassadors from space. All their travels were uneventful save one.

Their trip was almost over when Gene and Neil boarded an airliner from London to New York and Jim flew to his office in Chicago. Gene and Neil were flying a Boeing “triple-seven” scheduled to land at 6:00
P.M.
—dinnertime in New York City. Being the dog days of summer it was also the peak time for thunderstorms, and the weather did not disappoint.

“There was this mother of all thunderstorms,” Gene Cernan told me. “Lighting and turbulence we’d never seen before. It was big-time bad,” he emphasized, “and the pilots, God bless them, tried to land in New York twice. It was no go.

“They waved us off to Boston, and once there put us on a bus back to New York.

“It was about one o’clock in the morning when the bus finally stopped and we all unloaded for a bite at a roadside diner. Neil and I were trying to make the best of it—two old astronauts sitting at the counter drinking our coffee and eating our Danish. Neil and I both sensed that the kid serving us didn’t have a clue he was serving the first and last men on the moon.”

Neil and Gene for a long time had not been recognized by the general public. Neil once told me he was only recognized at an event where he was expected. The bottom line was that neither cared. Public adulation was not a big thing for Neil and Gene. Their major concern was America’s future in space—how we would get to the point where humans could travel safely to Mars.