First Man

Reading has been a little lacking with the level of activity of late, but it started to pick up this past weekend and I suspect that it will be a major activity for the next 2=3 weeks. I just finished "First Man", the life of Neil Armstrong. It was an excellent somewhat scholarly book on the man that said "One small step for (a) man ... one giant leap for mankind". To those of us who lived through it, it is one of those times that you remember, and this is really THE one of national/world significance that is precisely remembered as good. (Kennedy being shot, Challenger disaster, 9-11, those go into the bad bucket)

Armstrong is a hero cut in the Lucky Lindy mode; not flashy, plain spoken, humble and appreciative of all the people that had a hand in the achievement of the the moon landing, very private and very unemotional. Much like the "strong silent type" American male of yore, you get the impression that he didn't "work to be calm and unemotional", he just was. Like all things, this provides upside and downside. In 1962, the Armstrongs lost their 2-year old daughter Karen to an inoperable brain tumor. It appears that Neil may have dealt with the pre and post death tradegy by throwing himself into his work, and it may even be that the event was the catalyst for him making the decision to be an astronaut.

The "mistakes" of the Armstrong flying career are clustered around the death, and it may well be that he was adversely affected (who could blame him?). He had an X-15 incident where the craft "skipped" on the atmosphere causing him to be hundreds of miles off course, and he narrowly made it back to the opposite end of the Edwards dry lake bed from where he was supposed to land. Supposedly he came over the last ridge under 100' above ground, but that may well be legend. Getting stuck on a "dry" lake bed that was wet with Chuck Yaeger in the back seat is more humorous than anything, and the "Nellis debacle" where Neil had a gear failure doing simulated X-15 landings in another plane certainly COULD have been serious, but turned out to be again more humorous than anything. If one is going to be adversely affected by a horrific life experience that destroys many who have to live through it, continuing to be a test pilot flying the highest performance craft of the day with only "incidents" to show as "failures" during the core of it it is the kind of makeup that one expects from the guy that did the first moon landing.

Armstrong was also the first astronaut to dock in space with Gemini VIII. I had never realized how close to disaster that flight came as a thruster on the Gemini became stuck and put the craft into a spin where the crew was on the edge of losing concousness at the point they were able to remedy the situation. Had they blacked out, there would have been the loss of a crew in space, and likely the moon landing would have been long delayed.

The book is highly detailed, early on with geneology that I wasn't particularly interested in, later with issues of simulation and crew dynamics that were more to my liking. I never saw a mountain until I was 20 years old, although I read a lot about them, heard people talk about them, and of course saw plenty of pictures. The experience is radically different. Much in the same way, it is clear that all the astronauts that went to the moon were changed by the experience of seeing the earth as a tiny blue marble in the blackness of space, and apparently even more so the onces that stood on the surface of that desolate world and saw their home hanging in the sky. For a number of years we had the wallpaper picture of "earthrise over the moon" in our family room in a previous home. It is an arresting scene, and I'm sure the effect of being there changes people for the rest of their lives.

For me it was a book well worth reading. It is so hard to believe that we are fast coming up on FORTY years since that landing, and except for the immediate missions in the very early 70's, we have never gone back. Space travel is one of those areas lik e "flying cars" where technology has fallen far short of what those of us alive in the 60's thought. Armstrong predicted that man would go to Mars in his lifetime, and to me, "2001 A Space Oddessy" looked almost "conservative", right down the the smart computer. I never imagined the Internet though. The future has a way of not being exactly what we expect.