space suit In June 1958, Armstrong was selected for the U.S. Air Force's
Man in Space Soonest program, but the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) canceled its funding on August 1, 1958, and on November 5, 1958, it was superseded by
Project Mercury, a civilian project run by NASA. As a NASA civilian test pilot, Armstrong was ineligible to become one of its astronauts at this time, as selection was restricted to military test pilots. In November 1960, he was chosen as part of the pilot consultant group for the
X-20 Dyna-Soar, a military space plane under development by Boeing for the U.S. Air Force, and on March 15, 1962, he was selected by the U.S. Air Force as one of seven pilot-engineers who would fly the X-20 when it got off the design board. In April 1962, NASA sought applications for the second group of NASA astronauts for
Project Gemini, a proposed two-man spacecraft. This time, selection was open to qualified civilian test pilots. Armstrong visited the
Seattle World's Fair in May 1962 and attended a conference there on space exploration that was co-sponsored by NASA. After he returned from
Seattle on June 4, he applied to become an astronaut. His application arrived about a week past the June 1, 1962, deadline, but Dick Day, a flight simulator expert with whom Armstrong had worked closely at Edwards, saw the late arrival of the application and slipped it into the pile before anyone noticed. At
Brooks Air Force Base at the end of June, Armstrong underwent a medical exam that many of the applicants described as painful and at times seemingly pointless. NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations,
Deke Slayton, called Armstrong on September 13, 1962, and asked whether he would be interested in joining the
NASA Astronaut Corps as part of what the press dubbed "the
New Nine"; without hesitation, Armstrong said yes. The selections were kept secret until three days later, although newspaper reports had circulated since earlier that year that he would be selected as the "first civilian astronaut". Armstrong was one of two civilian pilots selected for this group; the other was
Elliot See, another former naval aviator. NASA selected the second group that, compared with the
Mercury Seven astronauts, were younger, and had more impressive academic credentials. Collins wrote that Armstrong was by far the most experienced test pilot in the Astronaut Corps.
Gemini program Gemini 5 On February 8, 1965, Armstrong and Elliot See were picked as the backup crew for
Gemini 5, with Armstrong as commander, supporting the prime crew of
Gordon Cooper and
Pete Conrad. The mission's purpose was to practice
space rendezvous and to develop procedures and equipment for a seven-day flight, all of which would be required for a mission to the Moon. With two other flights (
Gemini 3 and
Gemini 4) in preparation, six crews were competing for simulator time, so Gemini5 was postponed. It finally lifted off on August 21. Armstrong and See watched the launch at
Cape Kennedy, then flew to the
Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston. The mission was generally successful, despite a problem with the
fuel cells that prevented a rendezvous. Cooper and Conrad practiced a "phantom rendezvous", carrying out the maneuver without a target.
Gemini 8 in March 1966|alt=Armstrong, with short hair, partially reclining on a beige chair. He looks very serious. He is wearing a white space suit without a helmet or gloves. It has the U.S. flag on the left shoulder. Two hoses are attached. A technician dressed all in white is bending over him. A dark-haired, darkly dressed man has his back to us. He may be talking to Armstrong. The crews for Gemini8 were assigned on September 20, 1965. Under the normal rotation system, the backup crew for one mission became the prime crew for the third mission after, but Slayton designated
David Scott as the pilot of Gemini8. Scott was the first member of the
third group of astronauts, who was selected on October 18, 1963, to receive a prime crew assignment. See was designated to command
Gemini 9. Henceforth, each Gemini mission was commanded by a member of Armstrong's group, with a member of Scott's group as the pilot. Conrad would be Armstrong's backup this time, and
Richard F. Gordon Jr. his pilot. Armstrong became the first American civilian in space. (
Valentina Tereshkova of the
Soviet Union had become the first civilian—and first woman—nearly three years earlier aboard
Vostok 6 when it launched on June 16, 1963.) Armstrong would also be the last of his group to fly in space, as See died in a
T-38 crash on February 28, 1966, that also took the life of crewmate
Charles Bassett. They were replaced by the backup crew of
Tom Stafford and
Gene Cernan, while
Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin moved up from the backup crew of
Gemini 10 to become the backup for Gemini 9, and would eventually fly
Gemini 12. Gemini 8 launched on March 16, 1966. It was the most complex mission yet, with a rendezvous and docking with an
uncrewed Agena target vehicle, and the planned second American
spacewalk (
EVA) by Scott. The mission was planned to last 75hours and 55orbits. After the Agena lifted off at 10:00:00
EST, the
Titan II rocket carrying Armstrong and Scott ignited at 11:41:02 EST, putting them into an orbit from which they chased the Agena. They achieved the first-ever docking between two spacecraft. Contact with the crew was intermittent due to the lack of tracking stations covering their entire orbits. While out of contact with the ground, the docked spacecraft began to roll, and Armstrong attempted to correct this with the Gemini's
Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System (OAMS). Following the earlier advice of Mission Control, they undocked, but the roll increased dramatically until they were turning about once per second, indicating a problem with Gemini's
attitude control. Armstrong engaged the Reentry Control System (RCS) and turned off the OAMS. Mission rules dictated that once this system was turned on, the spacecraft had to reenter at the next possible opportunity. It was later thought that damaged wiring caused one of the thrusters to stick in the on position. from the western Pacific Ocean; Armstrong sitting to the right A few people in the Astronaut Office, including
Walter Cunningham, felt that Armstrong and Scott "had botched their first mission". There was speculation that Armstrong could have salvaged the mission if he had turned on only one of the two RCS rings, saving the other for mission objectives. These criticisms were unfounded; no malfunction procedures had been written, and it was possible to turn on only both RCS rings, not one or the other.
Gene Kranz wrote, "The crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong because we trained them wrong." The mission planners and controllers had failed to realize that when two spacecraft were docked, they must be considered one spacecraft. Kranz considered this the mission's most important lesson. Armstrong was depressed that the mission was cut short, canceling most mission objectives and robbing Scott of his EVA. The Agena was later reused as a docking target by Gemini 10. Armstrong and Scott received the
NASA Exceptional Service Medal, and the Air Force awarded Scott the
Distinguished Flying Cross as well. Scott was promoted to
lieutenant colonel, and Armstrong received a $678 raise in pay to $21,653 a year (), making him NASA's highest-paid astronaut.
Gemini 11 In Armstrong's final assignment in the Gemini program, he was the back-up Command Pilot for
Gemini 11. Having trained for two flights, Armstrong was quite knowledgeable about the systems and took on a teaching role for the rookie backup pilot,
William Anders. The launch was on September 12, 1966, with Conrad and Gordon on board, who successfully completed the mission objectives, while Armstrong served as a
capsule communicator (CAPCOM). Following the flight, President
Lyndon B. Johnson asked Armstrong and his wife to take part in a 24-day goodwill tour of South America. Also on the tour, which took in 11countries and 14major cities, were Dick Gordon,
George Low, their wives, and other government officials. In Paraguay, Armstrong greeted dignitaries in their local language,
Guarani; in Brazil he talked about the exploits of the Brazilian-born aviation pioneer
Alberto Santos-Dumont.
Apollo program On January 27, 1967—the day of the
Apollo 1 fire—Armstrong was in Washington, D.C., with Cooper, Gordon, Lovell and
Scott Carpenter for the signing of the United Nations
Outer Space Treaty. The astronauts chatted with the assembled dignitaries until 18:45, when Carpenter went to the airport, and the others returned to the Georgetown Inn, where they each found messages to phone the MSC. During these calls, they learned of the deaths of
Gus Grissom,
Ed White and
Roger Chaffee in the fire. Armstrong and the group spent the rest of the night drinking scotch and discussing what had happened. On April 5, 1967, the same day the Apollo1 investigation released its final report, Armstrong and 17 other astronauts gathered for a meeting with Slayton. The first thing Slayton said was, "The guys who are going to fly the first lunar missions are the guys in this room." According to Cernan, only Armstrong showed no reaction to the statement. To Armstrong it came as no surprise—the room was full of veterans of Project Gemini, the only people who could fly the lunar missions. Slayton talked about the planned missions and named Armstrong to the backup crew for
Apollo 9, which at that stage was planned as a
medium Earth orbit test of the combined
lunar module and
command and service module. The crew was officially assigned on November 20, 1967. For crewmates, Armstrong was assigned Lovell and Aldrin, from Gemini 12. After design and manufacturing delays of the lunar module (LM),
Apollo 8 and9 swapped prime and backup crews. Based on the normal crew rotation, Armstrong would command Apollo 11, with one change: Collins on the Apollo8 crew began experiencing trouble with his legs. Doctors diagnosed the problem as a bony growth between his fifth and sixth vertebrae, requiring surgery. Lovell took his place on the Apollo8 crew, and, when Collins recovered, he joined Armstrong's crew. 1.|alt=An indistinct photo of a smoke trail rising from an area of orange fire in a recently harvested field. A white and orange parachute is recovering a human figure above and to the right of the fire.To give the astronauts practice piloting the LM on its descent, NASA commissioned
Bell Aircraft to build two
Lunar Landing Research Vehicles (LLRV), later augmented with three Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTV). Nicknamed the "Flying Bedsteads", they simulated the Moon's one-sixth gravity using a
turbofan engine to support five-sixths of the craft's weight. On May 6, 1968, above the ground, Armstrong's controls started to degrade and the LLRV began
rolling. He ejected safely before the vehicle struck the ground and burst into flames. Later analysis suggested that if he had ejected half a second later, his parachute would not have opened in time. His only injury was from biting his tongue. The LLRV was completely destroyed. Even though he was nearly killed, Armstrong maintained that without the LLRV and LLTV, the lunar landings would not have been successful, as they gave commanders essential experience in piloting the lunar landing craft. In addition to the LLRV training, NASA began lunar landing simulator training after Apollo 10 was completed. Aldrin and Armstrong trained for a variety of scenarios that could develop during a real lunar landing. They also received briefings from geologists at NASA.
Apollo 11 crew: Armstrong,
Michael Collins, and
Buzz Aldrin. After Armstrong served as backup commander for Apollo8, Slayton offered him the post of commander of Apollo 11 on December 23, 1968, as Apollo8 orbited the Moon. According to Armstrong's
2005 biography, Slayton told him that although the planned crew was Commander Armstrong, Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin, and Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, he was offering Armstrong the chance to replace Aldrin with Jim Lovell. After thinking it over for a day, Armstrong told Slayton he would stick with Aldrin, as he had no difficulty working with him and thought Lovell deserved his own command. Replacing Aldrin with Lovell would have made Lovell the lunar module pilot, unofficially the lowest ranked member, and Armstrong could not justify placing Lovell, the commander of Gemini 12, in the number3 position of the crew. The crew of Apollo 11 was assigned on January 9, 1969, as Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, with Lovell, Anders, and
Fred Haise as the backup crew. According to
Chris Kraft, a March 1969 meeting among Slayton, George Low,
Bob Gilruth, and Kraft determined that Armstrong would be the first person on the Moon, in part because NASA management saw him as a person who did not have a large ego. A press conference on April 14, 1969, gave the design of the LM cabin as the reason for Armstrong's being first; the hatch opened inwards and to the right, making it difficult for the LM pilot, on the right-hand side, to exit first. At the time of their meeting, the four men did not know about the hatch consideration. The first knowledge of the meeting outside the small group came when Kraft wrote his book. Methods of circumventing this difficulty existed, but it is not known if these were considered at the time. Slayton added, "Secondly, just on a pure protocol basis, I figured the commander ought to be the first guy out... I changed it as soon as I found they had the time line that showed that. Bob Gilruth approved my decision."
Voyage to the Moon A
Saturn V rocket launched Apollo 11 from
Launch Complex 39A at the
Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, at 13:32:00
UTC (09:32:00 EDT local time). Armstrong's wife Janet and two sons watched from a yacht moored on the
Banana River. During the launch, Armstrong's heart rate peaked at 110beats per minute. He found the first stage the loudest, much noisier than the Gemini8 Titan II launch. The Apollo command module was relatively roomy compared with the Gemini spacecraft. None of the Apollo 11 crew suffered
space sickness, as some members of previous crews had. Armstrong was especially glad about this, as he had been prone to
motion sickness as a child and could experience
nausea after long periods of
aerobatics. Apollo 11's objective was to land safely on the Moon, rather than to touch down at a precise location. Three minutes into the lunar descent, Armstrong noted that craters were passing about two seconds too early, which meant the
Lunar Module Eagle would probably touch down several miles (kilometres) beyond the planned landing zone. As the
Eagles landing
radar acquired the surface, several computer error alarms sounded. The first was a code
1202 alarm, and even with their extensive training, neither Armstrong nor Aldrin knew what this code meant. They promptly received word from CAPCOM
Charles Duke in Houston that the alarms were not a concern; the 1202 and 1201 alarms were caused by executive overflows in the
lunar module guidance computer. In 2007, Aldrin said the overflows were caused by his own counter-checklist choice of leaving the docking radar on during the landing process, causing the computer to process unnecessary radar data. When it did not have enough time to execute all tasks, the computer dropped the lower-priority ones, triggering the alarms. Aldrin said he decided to leave the radar on in case an abort was necessary when re-docking with the Apollo command module; he did not realize it would cause the processing overflows. on the Moon, July 20, 1969. When Armstrong noticed they were heading toward a landing area that seemed unsafe, he took manual control of the LM and attempted to find a safer area. This took longer than expected, and longer than most simulations had taken. For this reason, Mission Control was concerned that the LM was running low on fuel. On landing, Aldrin and Armstrong believed they had 40seconds of fuel left, including the 20seconds' worth which had to be saved in the event of an abort. During training, Armstrong had, on several occasions, landed with fewer than 15seconds of fuel; he was also confident the LM could survive a fall of up to . Post-mission analysis showed that at touchdown there were 45 to 50seconds of propellant burn time left. The landing on the surface of the Moon occurred several seconds after 20:17:40 UTC on July 20, 1969. One of three probes attached to three of the LM's four legs made contact with the surface, a panel light in the LM illuminated, and Aldrin called out, "Contact light." Armstrong shut the engine off and said, "Shutdown." As the LM settled onto the surface, Aldrin said, "Okay, engine stop"; then they both called out some post-landing checklist items. After a 10-second pause, Duke acknowledged the landing with, "We copy you down,
Eagle." Armstrong confirmed the landing to Mission Control and the world with the words, "Houston,
Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle has landed." Aldrin and Armstrong celebrated with a brisk handshake and pat on the back. They then returned to the checklist of contingency tasks, should an emergency liftoff become necessary. After Armstrong confirmed touch down, Duke re-acknowledged, adding a comment about the flight crew's relief: "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." During the landing, Armstrong's heart rate ranged from 100 to 150beats per minute.
First Moon walk The flight plan called for a crew rest period before leaving the module, but Armstrong asked for this to be moved to earlier in the evening,
Houston time. When he and Aldrin were ready to go outside,
Eagle was depressurized, the hatch was opened, and Armstrong made his way down the ladder. At the bottom of the ladder, while standing on a
Lunar Module landing pad, Armstrong said, "I'm going to step off the LM now". He turned and set his left boot on the lunar surface at 02:56
UTC July 21, 1969, then said, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." The exact time of Armstrong's first step on the Moon is unclear. Armstrong prepared his famous
epigram on his own. In a 1983 interview in
Esquire magazine, he explained to
George Plimpton: "I always knew there was a good chance of being able to return to Earth, but I thought the chances of a successful touch down on the moon surface were about even money—fifty–fifty... Most people don't realize how difficult the mission was. So it didn't seem to me there was much point in thinking of something to say if we'd have to abort landing." In 2012, his brother Dean Armstrong said that Neil showed him a draft of the line months before the launch. Historian
Andrew Chaikin, who interviewed Armstrong in 1988 for his book
A Man on the Moon, disputed that Armstrong claimed to have conceived the line during the mission. Recordings of Armstrong's transmission do not provide evidence for the indefinite article "a" before "man", though NASA and Armstrong insisted for years that static obscured it. Armstrong stated he would never make such a mistake, but after repeated listenings to recordings, he eventually conceded he must have dropped the "a".
Peter Shann Ford, an Australian computer programmer, conducted a digital audio analysis and claims that Armstrong did say "a man", but the "a" was inaudible due to the limitations of communications technology of the time. Ford and
James R. Hansen, Armstrong's authorized biographer, presented these findings to Armstrong and NASA representatives, who conducted their own analysis. Armstrong found Ford's analysis "persuasive". Linguists
David Beaver and
Mark Liberman wrote of their skepticism of Ford's claims on the blog
Language Log. A 2016 peer-reviewed study again concluded Armstrong had included the article. NASA's transcript continues to show the "a" in parentheses. When Armstrong made his proclamation,
Voice of America was rebroadcast live by the
BBC and many other stations worldwide. An estimated 530million people viewed the event, 20 percent out of a world population of approximately 3.6billion. About 19minutes after Armstrong's first step, Aldrin joined him on the surface, becoming the second human to walk on the Moon. They began their tasks of investigating how easily a person could operate on the lunar surface. Armstrong unveiled a plaque commemorating the flight, and with Aldrin,
planted the
flag of the United States. Although Armstrong had wanted the flag to be draped on the flagpole, it was decided to use a metal rod to hold it horizontally. However, the rod did not fully extend, leaving the flag with a slightly wavy appearance, as if there were a breeze. Shortly after the flag planting, President
Richard Nixon spoke to them by telephone from his office. He spoke for about a minute, after which Armstrong responded for about thirty seconds. In the Apollo 11 photographic record, there are only five images of Armstrong partly shown or reflected. The mission was planned to the minute, with the majority of photographic tasks performed by Armstrong with the single
Hasselblad camera. After helping to set up the
Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package, Armstrong went for a walk to what is now known as East Crater, east of the LM, the greatest distance traveled from the LM on the mission. His final task was to remind Aldrin to leave a small package of memorial items to Soviet
cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and
Vladimir Komarov, and Apollo1 astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee. The Apollo 11 EVA lasted two and a half hours. In a 2010 interview, Armstrong explained that NASA limited their Moon walk because they were unsure how the
space suits would cope with the Moon's extremely high temperature.
Return to Earth during the post-mission quarantine period After they re-entered the LM, the hatch was closed and sealed. While preparing for liftoff, Armstrong and Aldrin discovered that, in their bulky space suits, they had broken the ignition switch for the ascent engine; using part of a pen, they pushed in the circuit breaker to start the launch sequence. The
Eagle then continued to its rendezvous in lunar orbit, where it docked with
Columbia, the command and service module. The three astronauts returned to Earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, to be picked up by the . After being released from an 18-day quarantine to ensure that they had not picked up any infections or diseases from the Moon, the crew was feted across the United States and around the world as part of a 38-day "Giant Leap" tour. The tour began on August 13, when the three astronauts spoke and rode in
ticker-tape parades in their honor in New York and Chicago, with an estimated six million attendees. On the same evening an official
state dinner was held in Los Angeles to celebrate the flight, attended by members of Congress, 44governors, the
Chief Justice of the United States, and ambassadors from 83nations. President Nixon and Vice President Agnew presented each astronaut with a
Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the tour Armstrong took part in
Bob Hope's 1969
USO show, primarily to Vietnam. In May 1970, Armstrong traveled to the Soviet Union to present a talk at the 13th annual conference of the International
Committee on Space Research; after arriving in
Leningrad from Poland, he traveled to Moscow where he met
Premier Alexei Kosygin. Armstrong was the first westerner to see the supersonic
Tupolev Tu-144 and was given a tour of the
Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, which he described as "a bit Victorian in nature". At the end of the day, he was surprised to view a delayed video of the launch of
Soyuz 9 as it had not occurred to Armstrong that the mission was taking place, even though Valentina Tereshkova had been his host and her husband,
Andriyan Nikolayev, was on board. == Life after Apollo ==