[Music]
>>Our Center here, in case you didn't already know, is named NASA Armstrong- Neil A. Armstrong.
Neil was a test pilot here, actually, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s.
Neil had these old English sports cars- they were called MGs...MGA, and they were very
unreliable.
And Neil had four of them.
And he lived on a hill in the south end of Palmdale and Neil would go out in the morning
and he would jump into one of the MGs and he would roll down the hill...and when he
got to the bottom of the hill, he would put the car in second gear and let the clutch
out to see if the car would start.
And if the car started, then he would drive off to work.
If the car didn't start, then he would continue rolling down to the bottom of the hill and
put it back in neutral and then there was a gas station at the bottom of the hill with
a garage.
And he would would roll in there and he would take the keys and he would throw them under
the mat.
And then he would walk back up the hill and he'd get into his second MG.
And he repeat this.
There were days when all four of the MGs would be parked in front of the garage there and
Milt or Bill Dana would have to drive down and pick Neil up to give him a ride to work.
Milt loved to tell the story about Neil and his unreliable cars.
All the way through the Apollo program, I understood that Neil drove rather, I would
say, pedestrian sort of vehicles, he was not one of the guys that would run around in a
Corvette or anything like that, that was not Neil's style.
He flew a variety of aircraft, the F-4D Skyray, the F-5D Skyray...he ended up flying the X-15.
He had a very famous story that happened on the X-15- he ended up pulling out a little
bit too soon and the X-15 skipped back out of the atmosphere...he ended up over-flying
Pasadena before he got it turned around.
He ended up just barely making it all the way back to Edwards and landing on the lakebed.
He was a very experienced test pilot.
He was very calm, even when things were not necessarily going his way.
This would actually play out several times after he was selected as an astronaut.
He had an incident that happened about a year before he landed on the moon.
He was flying the LLTV actually, one of the trainer vehicles, down at Johnson.
The gyroscope that was the feedback inside to keep the vehicle stabilized failed, and
as a result of that vehicle started tilting over, and he was perhaps three hundred feet
off the ground, and he was about a second and a half from the point where it probably
would have been a fatal accident, and he ejected.
Neil was very very calm under pressure.
During the actual moon landing, if you go back and listen to the tape replay of that,
they're down to about twenty seconds of fuel.
You have to imagine an entire Saturn V, about six and a half million pounds, seven
and a half million pounds of thrust when it lifts off the pad.
You have all this rocket, all this hardware, all this fuel, they go a quarter of a million
miles in space to the moon, and they arrive at the moon and he lands on the moon with
twenty seconds of fuel remaining.
That's how ragged-edge everything was in getting there.
And there was a lot of thought at that time that even then, that Apollo 11 would not
succeed, that we wouldn't make it.
And ultimately that didn't play out that way.
Everything worked out.
It wasn't perfectly smooth- there were alarms, the 1201 alarm, 1202 alarm during the approach
to the moon.
Neil was told to ignore those and so the alarms were going off and Neil kept right on going.
They looked at the ground where they were supposed to land and it was a boulder field.
And Neil had to fly downrange for quite some distance before he found a level spot that
was clear of boulders and he was able to set down, he and Buzz Aldrin.
It's just such an amazing story that he was able to pull all this off with twenty seconds
of fuel left after going all the way to the moon.
And Charlie Duke was the CapCom at that time, and Charlie makes this great statement, over
the radio to Neil after Neil announces that they had landed.
Charlie says >>"Roger Tranquility, we copy you on the ground, you got a bunch of guys about
to turn blue, we're breathing again, thanks a lot."
>>It was quite the event for Neil to have been able to pull that off.
Everyone seemed to have a great deal of respect for Neil's piloting skills.
So the day I met Neil, it was actually a quiet day here at the Center, there wasn't much
going on.
I knew that there was this committee that Neil had been assigned to be the chair of.
And they were tasked with trying to figure out how we could fly more experimental airplanes
here.
There was not going to be any sort of a press conference, there was not gonna be any sort
of a meet and greet or him coming out to the auditorium and talking to people.
And so I really didn't anticipate running into him or seeing him or anything at all.
And I happened to be walking by the conference room where they were meeting at one point.
And a friend of mine stuck his head out and he grabbed me by the arm and said "you need
to come in here."
He dragged me in and there were a series of younger people.
Neil was standing there.
And he was talking about flying airplanes.
There were only like five or six people and I got put into this circle and here's Neil
Armstrong just talking about flying airplanes.
Completely unanticipated, a total surprise to me.
And I was just so blown away by the moment.
There's very...there's actually big pieces of it that I don't recall.
But he was talking about onto and off of aircraft carriers during the Korean War.
He was just such a quiet, humble...incredible...it's just so amazing to think you have this image
of what your heroes are like and he was none of those things, bigger than life, he was
none of those things.
Very very calm, quiet, excited to talk about airplanes.
If you asked him a question about airplanes, you got this excited, almost like boyhood
"yeah, I wanna talk about this stuff."
He had a glider and he use to fly gliders.
He would go out on the weekends and just fly, just for the fun of it because it was fun
to him to actually do this.
I have to admit just, even just sitting here talking about this, the hairs on my arms and
back of my neck are standing up, just thinking about this is the guy that went all the way
to the moon and landed on the moon and walked on the moon and came back.
And he didn't really appreciate talking about that.
To him, it was about flying.
And to him, flying was airplanes.
And that was really an incredible thing about Neil.
Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, so he would have been eighty-eight years old this year.
Happy Birthday Neil.