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[Radio Chatter]
>>I didn't want to go to bed that night.
My parents told me 'don't worry, you won't miss it, we'll wake you up'.
They did, and I remember watching him.
And I remember splashdown and also going into the quarantine and seeing all that on television.
When I was a little kid, I used to play astronaut in the backyard.
Neil Armstrong and others like him are what inspired me, they were my heroes.
I'm Nils Larson, I'm the lead project test pilot for NASA on the X-59 from NASA Armstrong
Flight Research Center.
Neil Armstrong flew the X-15, there were a couple other aircraft that he flew, the early
DinoSoar program, which was somewhat similar to a space shuttle.
I sit approximately where his desk was when he was here.
All these guys that were our heroes, you know, to kind of see that you're sitting where they
used to sit, that's pretty cool.
Well I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Armstrong a couple of times.
Back when I was in the Air Force flying U-2s, he did a program called 'First Flights' and he
came out to fly the U-2.
One of my friends was the instructor who got to fly with Mr. Armstrong.
The U-2 is a difficult airplane to fly, it's very challenging, especially in the landing
phase.
One of the things that will happen with the U-2 is it has a tendency to skip back into
the air if you don't flare it out quite enough.
Mr. Armstrong on his first landing had a very slight skip, maybe six inches, you know, something
that everyone of us would have taken any day.
The instructor keyed the mic and said 'That's one small skip for man' and then said 'Sorry,
sir, I had to.'
So we all thought that was kind of funny.
And I remember asking him later, I go 'so what's it feel like to have flown with Christopher
Columbus?'
And he had to pause for a second and he goes 'Oh, wow that is pretty cool.'
The really cool part when everything was done, we had a squadron bar and he came up to the
squadron bar and we all got a chance to meet him and talk to him.
Everybody wanted to know what he thought of our airplane.
You hear a lot of different stories about the man, and he really truly was an engineer and
a test pilot first, it was really great, because we kept asking him 'what'd you think of our
airplane', and he told us, you know, and talked about what he thought it was like to land
and all the different aspects of the airplane, and so, you know, for the first minutes, maybe
even half hour that we were there, we didn't talk about the Moon or going to space or anything
like that.
It was about our airplane and what he thought of our airplane and we were excited to hear
his thoughts on our airplane.
Eventually we got to talk about the Moon.
And as time went on, other people would come in and we'd talk about their flight that day,
and, you know, the pilot community likes a little good-natured ribbing, people, you know,
gave each other a little guff back and forth.
I remember Mr. Armstrong standing there with a beer in his hand and says 'This is what
I really miss, the camaraderie of the squadron.'
It was like he was a member of our squadron for that day, so that was really pretty cool.
Of course, everybody wanted to buy him a beer, everybody chalked it up on their tab, you know,
so we could make sure that we all had the chance to buy him a beer, even though he only
drank one.
That was the first time I got to meet him, and that was pretty special, that was pretty
interesting.
One of the other times I got to meet with Mr. Armstrong, it was early in my career here
at NASA, we were working on a study for a lunar lander research vehicle, or training
vehicle.
We were down in Houston for a meeting with several of the moon walkers, we were sitting
there at breakfast, Harrison Schmitt was already there, so he was at one end of the table,
and I was the last guy through the line, so I was way at the other end of the table.
Luckily for me, I wasn't truly the last guy there, the last one was Mr. Armstrong.
So he came and sat right next to me.
So we all knew who he was, that was kind of obvious, so we went around the table and all
introduced ourselves.
I was the last one to introduce myself and at the time I said 'Well, I'm you about forty-five
or so years ago.' and he just kind of looked at me, and I said 'Well, I'm the, you know,
Dryden test pilot assigned to the LLRV/LLTV', which originally before he became an astronaut,
he was the guy that was on the study back in the 1960s, and here I was in the 2009,
somewhere around in there, a guy on that study, so that was pretty cool, to, you know, get
to meet him and talk to him about that.
Watching the astronauts going to the Moon he first time is what put me on this path
to go study and become a test pilot.
I think it's really interesting that I get to sit in about the same place that he used
to sit and it's pretty daunting and inspiring and just plain awesome when you think about
it, when you're looking out the same window and looking down the taxiway and kind of reflect
back on how you got here.
Neil would've been eighty-nine this year, so Happy Birthday Neil.
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