Page 143 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

Edwards AFB, California. Armstrong was involved in several incidents that went down in
Edwards folklore or were chronicled in the memoirs of colleagues. I won’t detail them here, but
colleagues praised his engineering ability, and one said he was “the most technically capable of
the early X-15 pilots”. Another said he “had a mind that absorbed things like a sponge”.

In September 1962, with the beginning of the Gemini program, Armstrong was selected as one
of two civilian members of the second group of NASA astronauts. In 1966, Armstrong was
selected to command Gemini 8, thereby becoming the first American civilian to fly in space.

As the Apollo program began, Armstrong was assigned to the backup crew for Apollo 9 and
later as the commander of Apollo 11. In the meantime, astronauts were given practice time
piloting the lunar LM or Landing Module. While practicing flying the LM in 1968, Armstrong was
at a height of 100 feet when his controls malfunctioned, and the craft began rolling. According
to an employee at Kennedy Space Center who was a part of Armstrong Apollo support crew, he
was convinced that no other astronaut could have ejected from such a rotation in the brief time
involved before the craft crashed and burst into flames. His only injury was from biting his
tongue.

Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket launched from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on July 16,
1969 at 9:32 am EDT. Four days later, on July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM, and
began their descent to the moon’s surface. As they neared the landing zone, Armstrong noticed
that they were heading for an area that appeared unsafe. He then took manual control of the
lander and managed to find an acceptable spot with only 45 to 50 seconds of burn time
remaining. When Armstrong finally announced that “The Eagle” had landed, NASA Launch
Control and the rest of the rest of the world heaved a huge sigh of relief. Approximately 530
million people (about 20% of the world’s population) watched the event. Four days later the
command service module, Columbia, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The rest is history.

Note: The impact of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing and globally televised first step on the
moon is hard to explain to anyone who didn’t experience it firsthand. The 60s were full of
negatives and unrest in America – the death of the Apollo 1 astronauts; the assassinations of
President John F. Kennedy, his brother and Presidential front-runner Bobby Kennedy, and
Martin Luther King; the infamy of Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s complicity;
changing public views of government, war, and civil rights; and a new, youth-driven counter
culture advocating sex, drugs and a non-conventional lifestyle. Armstrong’s landing on the
moon was global news followed by an international audience that, at least for eight days in July
1969, brought the world together to witness one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments.
There are a limited number of occurrences that take place in a person’s lifetime that are so
momentous that they are never forgotten. This was one of them. I remember sitting in my
father- and mother-in-law’s living room in Naples, Italy with them and my wife, watching on
their black and white television set as Neil Armstrong emerged from the lunar lander and slowly
backed down the rungs of the ladder, before placing that first foot on the lunar surface. During
the following weeks and months, Neil Armstrong became a world-wide sensation; a hero like

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