According to legend the family name Armstrong was bestowed upon a Celtic
clan after a leading member displayed an amazing feat of heroism in battle using
just one of his arms if that's true it might suggest where centuries later
Pioneer pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong got his sense of adventure
from. By the time of the first manned moon mission Apollo 11 on the 22nd of
July 1969 he'd already cheated death on at least seven occasions in
vehicles provided to him by the American government. Neil Alden Armstrong was
born in Ohio on August 5th 1930 of Irish Scottish and German stock, he got the
flight bug when he attended for Cleveland Air Races at age 2 and he took
to the air for the first time when he was 5 he got his student flight
certificate age 16 and made his first ever solo flight before he could even
drive a car. His first brush with death came in August 1951 when the 21 year old
Armstrong was serving with the US Navy in the skies over North Korea. He'd first
flown a Grumman F9F-2B Panther just 5 days earlier, renowned as the first
U.S. jet fighter that operated well from aircraft carriers but his plane number
125122 was hit by anti-aircraft fire whilst he undertook a low
bombing run, he struck a pole sticking up out of the ground and it took off a
section of his right wing aiming to crash land in the sea, he ejected just
before losing control but high winds blew the ejector seat back onto short he
was rescued unharmed and went on to fly nearly 80 more missions during the
Korean War. Armstrong left the Navy in August 1952 and studied his Bachelor of
Science and Master of Science degrees achieving some of the highest marks ever
noted. In 1955 he applied to join the high-speed flight station at Edwards Air
Force Base operated by Annette the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics NACA which later became NASA in 1958. He took off on his first
experimental flight on his very first day to Edwards. His next near-fatal
experience came in March 1956 and he was co-piloting of Boeing b-29 Superfortress
that was carrying a Douglas D558-2 skyrocket slung under its fuselage.
During the flight number four engine of the Superfortress suddenly shut down. Now
if this occurred it was normal practice to lock the propeller to stop it from
spinning out of control and to prevent the risk of disintegration from over
speed but on this occasion he refused to lock. The B-29 couldn't land until the
skyrocket is launched, they had a choice speed up to release of a rocket and risk
damage in the plane or slow down to save the propeller. They chose to speed up and
launch the rocket just as the rocket launched the propeller exploded
launching its blades through for number three engine on through the fuselage and
into the number two engine on the other side of the plane. Amazingly with just a
few control cables still connected to Armstrongs side of the cockpit the B-29
managed to limp back to base with just one of its four engines working.
Armstrong's first journey in a rocket plane nearly ended in disaster - he took
off in Bell X-1 be in August 1957 and all went well until he tries to land. As
he touched down the front landing gear disintegrated and he had no option but
to guide the plane into a controlled crash once again if you walked away
uninjured. The fearless Armstrong evaded death three more times in 1962. In April
of that year he flew a North American X-15 hypersonic rocket plane to an
altitude of 207,000 feet the highest any human
had reached but a fault in the control system sent the X-15 into a nose
dive and he struggled to regain control because at those altitudes Aero
dynamic design has almost no effect. Armstrong missed his landing strip as he
overshot it at 2,000 miles an hour and finally got the X-15 onto the ground
some 40 miles where we should have landed. Four days later he was in trouble
yet again this time alongside fellow test pilot icon Chuck Yeager the pair
flew a Lockheed T-33 shooting star into a dry lakebed with the aim of seeing
if it to be used as an emergency landing site, it couldn't
heavy rains meant that the lake bed wasn't dry and the plane got stuck in
mud. Armstrong and Yeager later tried to blame each other for the incident. By the
time Armstrong joined the U.S. space program he'd already lived through at
least six near-death experiences however he very nearly didn't make it
into NASA because the application to join arrived after the deadline
fortunately a friend recognized his paperwork and slipped into the received
pile when no one was looking and so in September 1962 Armstrong became the
first civilian member of the astronaut corps. The Gemini 8 mission of March 1966
was his first space mission and America's 12th manned spaceflight as
command pilot he and David Scott were to undertake the first ever docking of two
vehicles in space but no mission ended in the first-ever critical failure of an
American spacecraft and it happened during radio blackout when the
astronauts had no way of communicating with Mission Control. After several hours
of carefully lining up the Gemini 8 with the Agena target vehicle and finally
making a connection with combine spacecraft began spinning uncontrollably
in a nose-about-tail yawing motion. Armstrong activated these orbit attitude
and maneuvering system or OAMS thrusters and brought the movement under control
only for it to start again almost immediately following instructions to
abort the docking attempt if anything went wrong and concerned of the motion
might cause an explosion in the Agena fuel tank, Scott initiated the undock
command whilst Armstrong used the Gemini thrusters to move away from the other
vehicle but that through the Gemini into an end
over end pitching movement with the astronauts at risk of blacking out from
the centrifugal forces as they endured one revolution per second or 60 rpm.
Armstrong regained control using the RCS or reentry control system thrusters
after which they discovered that the number 8 OAMS thruster was refusing
commands to shut down. Mission rules stated but as soon as the RCS thrusters
had fired the flight should be aborted so Armstrong began preparations for an
emergency landing which took place 600 miles south of Yokosuka in Japan 10
hours and 41 minutes after takeoff. On May the 6th 1968 Armstrong was using the
lunar landing training vehicle also known as the flying bedstead in
preparation for the moon landings in the lunar module but because that would only
work in the moon's low gravity it couldn't be used here on earth. The LLTV
was basically a jet engine in a framework with thrusters to control it's
attitude. Flying it was described as like trying to balance a dinner plate on
a broom handle during the flight one of the thrusters ran out of fuel and the
LLTV lost control. Armstrong ejected at a height of just 200 feet before it
crashed into a ball of flames. Having just four seconds on his full
parachute he suffered just a cut lip on landing.
Of course Armstrong's most famous mission was as
commander of Apollo 11 in July 1969 and whilst he had to take control of the
Eagle Lander due to an overloaded flight computer as they approached the surface
of the moon and a broken ignition switch threatened to strand them on the moon
before its return to Earth he was never again in as much danger as
he had been during that Gemini mission or during the more than 900 flights as a
test pilot. That's a remarkable survival rate for a man whose family gained their
name through an act of strength in an arm and throughout his remarkable career it
seems as though some of his ancestors were looking after him as he secured his
place in history as the first human to step foot on the Moon.
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