Armstrong's cool head won him 'hottest job'

Monday, July 20, 2009 05:32:32 PM, The Guardian

New York: What train of events led to Neil Armstrong, a civilian, being the first man to walk on the moon? When John F. Kennedy threw down the gauntlet to Nasa in 1961, the technological challenge and dangers involved in landing a man on the moon were heart-stopping.

Fortunately, there was no shortage of men brave enough to take up that challenge.

Nasa decided that experience flying jets was more important than scientific training for potential astronauts, given the tight deadline.

Applications weren't restricted to the military but, because the agency stipulated that candidates should have spent a high number of hours flying fighter jets, the navy and air force became the main source of recruits.

The only successful candidate who wasn't in the military was Neil Armstrong, who was selected in 1962.

Armstrong had built up the requisite flying experience because he was a test pilot. His Apollo 11 crewmates, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins, were selected the following year, both fresh from the military.

At the time they were chosen, fewer than 10 men had been into space and none had spent more than a few days tumbling around in Earth orbit.

Each of the future Apollo 11 astronauts was first assigned to a two-man Gemini crew. "Not only were they training for Gemini, they were actively involved in the design for the various parts of what was needed for the Apollo system.

These astronauts were actively involved and consulting on the design of the spacecraft they were going to fly," says Anu Ojha, director of education at the National Space Centre in Leicester.

They had to rehearse, in Earth orbit, every aspect of the procedures needed to get to the moon.

In the resulting investigation, engineers found serious flaws in the design of parts of the Apollo command module. If Apollo 1 hadn't happened, and a command module had burned up on the dark side of the moon, out of contact with ground control, these problems with Apollo's design might have remained a mystery. The programme would almost certainly have been grounded.

Each Apollo mission built incrementally on the previous one, so when the crew for Apollo 11 was confirmed, it was by no means clear that it would be the first to successfully make it to the moon's surface.

Apollo 9 was tasked with taking all the components of the mission, including the command module and lunar lander, into low-Earth orbit on a Saturn V rocket. Apollo 10 took the whole kit to the moon but didn't land.

If any of the earlier missions had failed, Armstrong's team would have had to join the queue to fix the mistakes and a subsequent mission would have been the first to land on the moon.

Just in case, Nasa had scheduled Apollo 12 and 13 after Armstrong's mission, either of which could have landed before Kennedy's deadline expired in 1970.

Many people have speculated about why Nasa chose Armstrong as the man who would probably be the first to step onto the moon's surface. Some say it was because Armstrong was a civilian: the decision was meant as a slight against the military.

Ojha thinks that version of events is apocryphal, instead attributing the decision to Armstrong's phenomenal ability to remain calm and in control even during the most dangerous of situations.

"He'd only had one space flight before [Gemini 8] which was a hard docking in space and the spacecraft began tumbling out of control. That was a mission where Armstrong's quick thinking saved it from, at the time, the most serious emergency in the space programme."

That ice cool calm was most evident just after he had guided Apollo 11's lunar module to a hair-raising landing on the moon.

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