BEFORE APOLLO

YEAR BEFORE HIS HISTORIC MOON LANDING, NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS A NASA TEST PILOT

The Boeing P2B-1S mothership shuddered and pilot Neil Armstrong, flying the converted bomber from the copilot's seat, glimpsed a bullet-shaped propeller hub shoot past the cockpit. He looked over and saw that the number four propeller had disintegrated.

Armstrong, along with pilot Stan Butchart, reacted coolly - testing the bomber's controls. Butchart's were gone but Armstrong still had some flight control linkage, so together they prepared the aircraft for an emergency landing. They had been trying unsuccessfully to feather the number four prop before it blew apart.

Seconds before the disintegration, they had jettisoned the Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket research aircraft with pilot Jack McKay aboard to land early, due to a stuck valve on the Skyrocket, as well as the large workload the propeller problem presented. McKay landed the Skyrocket safely on the dry lake bed below.

This hair-raising moment in 1956 over California's Mojave Desert, and others experienced later in space, footnote the illustrious career of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

Before joining NASA's astronaut corps, Armstrong served as a research pilot at the NASA High Speed Flight Station, now NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, located at Edwards AFB, from 1955 to 1962.

The first airplane Armstrong flew at NASA Dryden was an ex-WWII P-51D Mustang. he learned the ropes of airborne data collection in this aircraft, performing many flights to hone his techniques. Early on, flying the station's modified B-29 mothership, he launched more than 100 X-plane missions.

Armstrong's primary responsibility at NASA Dryden was an engineer. Program development, devising simulations, and looking at the problems of flight while trying to figure out solutions took a great deal of time.

"It was a wonderful time period and it was very satisfying work," Armstrong said during an interview with Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley for the NASA Johnson Space Center's oral history program in 2001.

He remembered the planning for hypersonic flight, faster than five times the speed of sound, leading up to the X-15 program. "In those days, space flight was not generally regarded as a realistic objective, and it was a bit pie-in-the-sky. So, although we were working toward that end, it was not something that we acknowledged much publicly," said Armstrong.

Armstrong flew seven flights in the X-15, including the first flight of the third X-15, before continuing the journey that led him to the moon.

"It wasn't an easy decision," Atmstrong reflected. "I was flying the X-15 and I had the understanding or belief that if I continued, I would be the chief pilot of that project. I was also working on the Dyna-Soar, and that was still a paper airplane, but was a possibility.

"I always felt that the risks that we had in the space side of the program were probably less than we had back in flying at Edwards or the general flight test community," said Armstrong. "The reason is that when we were out exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits. We had less technical insurance, less minds looking, less backup programs, less other analysis going on."

That most famous small step Armstrong made on the moon 35 years ago on 20 July 1969 followed the pattern of his flying boots on the tarmac at Dryden years earlier, where the abilities and temperament that suited him for space exploration were validated over and over.

Copyright Challenge Publications Inc. Oct 2004
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