This story seems like advanced stuff for a six-year-old kid, though it's simple enough to still be believable. Check out one of our favorite parts, featuring Doodle's character, Peter, a guy in a shiny gold robe: When Peter was ready to go to sleep, the peacock spread his magnificent tail, enfolding the boy gently like a closing go-to-sleep flower, burying him in the gloriously iridescent, rustling vortex 3.
OK, "gloriously iridescent, rustling vortex" is probably Brother-the-narrator talking, not Brother the kid or Doodle. But, Doodle describes something that Brother now recognizes as this vortex.
Speaking of vocabulary, something "iridescent" is something sparkly, shiny. As far as a "vortex," think of a whirlpool or a whirlwind. Now, try to visualize the image. Doodle is deep. Even though the text seems to affirm Doodle's intelligence, lots of readers miss it. This may be because people often have a tendency to judge the mind by the body.
This is part of why Brother is so intent on getting Doodle physically ready for school. He's sure that people will think Doodle's mind is "slow" if they see that his body is slow. Readers who make this mistake prove Brother's point. If you are one of those readers, don't feel bad.
This text is great at making us examine assumptions we didn't even know we had. There are several passages that suggest that in Brother's mind, Doodle is some kind of saint. Aunt Nicey lays the groundwork for this by telling Brother that Doodle "would live because he was born in a caul and cauls were made from Jesus' nightgown" 1. Now, whatever you think of Jesus' nightgown, you might be wondering what a "caul" is.
When a woman is pregnant, her baby is enclosed in a membrane filled with fluid. This membrane is sometimes called a "caul. Sometimes the membrane doesn't break during labor, and the doctor or midwife breaks it.
Click here for a photo that shows that a dried caul can looks like wings, which, as we all know, angels are known to have. This is probably the root of Aunt Nicey's comment, and what leads to her more explicit comment about Doodle's potential for sainthood: She said caul babies should be treated with special respect since they might turn out to be saints 2. But wait, what exactly is a saint? We all have a general idea of what a saint is — a saint is somebody who is pure good.
Various religions feature saints, and saints often give their lives, or at least their liberty, to spread a message of truth and justice, often as directed by a higher power. In the Catholic religion, saints are often misunderstood in their own times, and, as a result, killed or harmed by their own people.
Future generations recognize and benefit from their saintly acts, often more than the people in their own times. In any case, Doodle doesn't seem to be spreading a religious message. If he's a saint it's because he's a sweet kid who brought joy into the lives of his relatives, who didn't understand him until he was dead.
Like the saints, he is "different" from those around him. While his differences are seen as largely negative when he's alive, Brother now sees the differences as positive. Armstrong: Well, 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. 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.
Our knowledge base was probably not as good as it was in the space program. We had less technical insurance, less minds looking, less backup programs, less other analysis going on. That isn't to say that we didn't expect risks in the space program; we certainly expected they would be there, were guaranteed that they would be there.
But we felt pretty comfortable because we had so much technical backup and we didn't go nearly close to the limits as much as we did back in the old flight-test days. Do you feel it captured the climate around Edwards in any way, shape, or form, or is it exaggerated? Armstrong: I haven't read the book critically. I'm not sure I've read it all.
I've read a bit. I did see the movie. I thought it was very good filmmaking, but terrible history; the wrong people working on the wrong projects at the wrong times. It bears no resemblance whatever to what was actually going on.
Brinkley: And to live out around Edwards at that time, you were right near the base? Armstrong: I lived about an hour drive away, south. Nobody lived close. A half hour is about as close as you could live. Big base. Brinkley: At this point in your life when you're telling all these stories to us, do you miss the opportunity of flying in that kind of way, on a regular basis, like you were doing back then?
Sometimes you almost get nostalgic for those days at all? Armstrong: That was a very exciting job and very excellent flying, very challenging goals. I think it was certainly one of the memorable parts of my life. Brinkley: When you flew in today, do you ever sit on the airplane and think, "God, I wish I could pilot this. I've got the itch.
I wish I could just sit in the—"? Armstrong: I'm still a legal pilot and I still enjoy it as much as I always did…. Brinkley: We were out at Edwards. I was just wondering if you could comment on the air force's Dyna-Soar [Dynamic Soaring] program and how did you decide upon the Douglas F5D-1 Skylancer as the suitable demonstrator for parts of the Dyna-Soar flight profile.
And did you develop any procedures based on flying this aircraft? The Dyna-Soar program, of course, was first intended to be a high hypersonic but nonorbital vehicle, and predominantly a research vehicle. It was originally scheduled to be launched on the Titan I. It later became obvious the Titan II might be available and be a better choice, and that gave increased performance, but still not orbital. Then when the Titan III was introduced, or looked like it was going to be introduced, with additional [solid] rocket engines strapped on the side of the liquid, … why, it might be an orbital vehicle, and if it would be orbital, why, it could be an operational craft.
The air force savored the idea of having an operational spacecraft and having their own manned space program separate from NASA. So the project grew and grew. Eventually it was not continued; it was canceled perhaps because it grew too much.
The launch, unlike the Mercury and Gemini and so on, was a winged vehicle on top, and there was a question what kind of abort technique would be practical to try to use in case there was a problem with the launch vehicle, fire, say, in the launch vehicle, in the Titan. It was determined rather than a puller rocket, [a] pusher rocket, to push the spacecraft up to flying speed from which it could make a landing, but it wasn't known at that time what might be practical and how much thrust would be needed and how much performance would be needed.
So then establishing that initial condition, you only had to work out a way to find your way to the runway and make a successful landing. I worked on that project for a time and found a technique that would allow us to launch from the pad at Cape Canaveral [Florida] and make a landing on the skid strip, not the Shuttle landing strip, but the old skid strip. We practiced that, and I believe that Bill [William H. There was a NASA report written about the technique.
It was a practical method. I wouldn't like to have to really do it in a real Dyna-Soar. Brinkley: What other responsibilities did you have at the High Speed Flight Center other than being a test pilot? Armstrong: Our principal responsibility was engineering work. We did not do a lot of flying. It was program development, devising simulations, looking at the problems of flight, and trying to figure out ways we could test those things and devise solutions to those problems.
It was a wonderful time period and it was very satisfying work, particularly when you found a solution that would work. Brinkley: Did you know about the first call for astronauts that went out to military test pilots? I was wondering what your thoughts may have been when you learned about the astronaut program, when you first started realizing it. Armstrong: We were certainly aware of it, both through NASA, because NACA had become NASA by this time, and also from our colleagues in the military, good friends and people we flew with daily, some of whom had been invited to consider applying for that.
Brinkley: When you were at Edwards, did you develop a close friendship with other astronauts with people that later, or did you stay more to yourself and your own life, or do you guys all socialize? Armstrong: I knew a number of the air force people at Edwards who later transferred to Houston like I did.
They were on a different part of the base. We occasionally had meetings where we would be discussing the same subjects and we would see them probably more frequently in the air when they were out on our wing tip with an F [Starfighter] or something. Do you have any thoughts on some of the early events of the space race, such as the launch of Sputnik? Do you remember your feeling, on hearing about Sputnik and Explorer 1?
Were you conscious of the politics of the cold war going on with the race into space at that time when you were at Edwards? They were looking ahead to days when we would fly hypersonically and high hypersonically and eventually even further, [hoping] to solve … the problems along the way that would allow that to happen. It wasn't something we talked a lot about, because 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 we acknowledged much publicly. Not necessarily for fear of ridicule, but probably somewhat. Brinkley: With Sputnik, do you recall where you were when you heard about that? But in any case, I was very much involved in the symposium, and we were trying to find ways to get the Los Angeles press interested in the kinds of technical presentations that were being produced there, and get a little coverage of what our industry was doing and what was happening in the test-flight world.
But it was a very hard sell, and it became completely impossible once Sputnik came across the sky, and all of a sudden we couldn't get any people to come listen to problems about airplanes flying. Ambrose: And your own reaction to Sputnik? Curiosity or more than that? Or "God almighty" or what? Armstrong: I don't remember exactly what my reactions were at the time, too much colored by intervening events.
But I guess it was disappointing that a country who was the "evil empire" in our minds at that time would be beating us in technology, where we thought we were preeminent. At the same time, it was encouraging, because it demonstrated the kinds of things that we were interested in really might be achievable and perhaps it would encourage people to look at our world with somewhat more curiosity and perhaps approval than they had before.
It did change our world. It absolutely changed our country's view of what was happening, the potential of space. I'm not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead.
President Eisenhower, I think, was saying something like, "What's the worry? It's just one small ball. Ambrose: Something you said a minute or two ago reminded me of all of the—how did the Russians get the bomb? They must have stolen our secrets. They couldn't possibly have done this on their own, and they must have stolen our secrets. And they did in some part. But the real secret of the atomic bomb was revealed in August That is, it works. It seems to me that's almost what you're saying about Sputnik.
It can be done. Armstrong: It can be done. That was an eye-opener, I think, to a lot of people [and to Killian]. Maybe there was substantial interest in, "Well, maybe we can get people up into space. Brinkley: Here you are a test pilot and you're flying the most advanced aircraft in the world. What makes you at that point in time want to join the astronaut corps?
What is it that made you decide, "This is what I want to do"? Armstrong: It wasn't an easy decision. I was flying the X 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. Then there was this other project down at Houston, [the] Apollo program. Gemini hadn't been really much identified yet at that point. It wasn't clear to me which of those paths [would be best].
Recognize that people who are in this world see projects come and go. A project's established, begun, it may run for several years, finally get canceled, and I had been assigned to aircraft test projects and never, never flew the airplane, because the need changed or something else became more important.
I never got to that goal. We sort of saw every project of this type as something that, it may go or it may not. Although you learn a lot when you're on a program that eventually gets canceled, there's a lot more satisfaction in being in a program that really reaches its fruition. I can't tell you now just why in the end I made the decision I did, but I consider it as fortuitous that I happened to pick one that was a winning horse.
But there would be no way to predict that at the time when it got to that fork in the road. In my case, a three-way fork. Brinkley: Some of the other test pilots that didn't go into the Apollo program, that stayed at Edwards, that believed, "We're flying our own planes," and had that attitude, did you ever catch like "Space, that's for like the dog that went up or the monkeys. Armstrong: Monkeys. Brinkley: Is that kind of an attitude that prevailed? Armstrong: On the part of some, yes.
At the time the Mercury program was started, it might well have gone that way. In a sense it did, in that they had a lot of monkey flights and so on, chimp flights. But I believe that the reason it did not keep that characterization was that the Mercury crewmen insisted on making it an airplane-like device, have the same conventions as normal airplanes, so that your natural instincts were proper, and insist that the crewmen be able to perceive enough and see enough and have sufficient information available, … that he could make reasonable choices about proper alternatives in how to control the craft in a manner that would maximize the ability to get toward the objective.
So I think that was a great contribution on the part of the Mercury guys, who were probably abrasive to some of the engineering managers in that time in their demands that the craft be built in this way. So that certainly was important. Brinkley: Did you have any encounters with Chuck [Charles E. Armstrong: Oh, I've known Chuck for, you know, forty-something years.
Brinkley: I'm just curious, is he somebody that other pilots look up to as this extraordinary pilot, or is he just another one of the guys? Armstrong: I think people recognize that he was a good pilot, a stick and rudder man. Brinkley: He's become almost a mythological pilot. The legend of Chuck Yeager has become—do you think that's just through books and media, things like that?
Armstrong: I'll pass. Brinkley: What was the astronaut selection progress like, and what kinds of physical and psychological tests were you subjected to once you made that decision on your part? Armstrong: Well, I don't think the community of flight medicine and flight physiology knew very much what they needed to do at that point. There were widespread predictions that humans could not survive in space, for a variety of reasons, both physical, physiological and mental and psychological, all kinds of reasons.
So they didn't really know exactly what to test for, I think, so they did everything. They didn't miss anything, as far as I know. They did every test known to man. Brinkley: You obviously passed all those with flying colors. Armstrong: I don't know what the results were. Brinkley: What was your first experience? Suddenly you're now in the astronaut ranks.
What became your impressions of the Space Task Group, and how did that differ from being out in California? I had known them in my work at Edwards, because they were very much involved in the analytical and the wind tunnel work that supported the kind of work that we were doing.
Bob [Robert R. I knew Chris [Christopher C. I remember the discussions earlier that we'd had at conferences on these subjects of blunt shapes and flying bodies and winged vehicles and so on, which were the best configurations and what were the pluses and minuses of different routes to go into space.
So I came in with a high confidence level that these were people who I could respect, and knew had the background and the inclination and the determination to do what would lie ahead. Brinkley: How did your job now as an astronaut differ from being a test pilot what were the first things that you realized were going to be different for you? Armstrong: Well, it was very different. There were some similarities in the sense that we were planning and we were trying to solve problems and devise approaches, but since we were trying to do an operational job, we were extremely focused.
A research project tends to be more broad, generic, cover a range so that you have indications as to which might be the best path. The Apollo and Gemini programs—Mercury I really wasn't involved in the early parts of that, but in the germination of Gemini and Apollo, we were looking for not a range of stuff, but the best method that we could find that would give us ability to go at the earliest possible time, maximum speed, and with the highest level of confidence.
Quite a different responsibility, yet the skills, the engineering approaches and the equipment available to us was really quite similar. Brinkley: I'm trying to picture training and simulation, which are all part of getting ready for a successful space flight. How did you help determine what should be simulated and how?
In retrospect, how realistic were these training sessions and simulations from what you ended up encountering? Armstrong: I think training was about one-third of our time and effort. A third had to do with planning, figuring out techniques and methods that would allow us to achieve the trajectories and the sequence of events and the ways of picking from the available strategies the one that might work the best.
The last part was testing, and that's probably equal to thousands of hours in the labs and in the spacecraft and running systems tests, all kinds of stuff, seeing whether it would work and getting to know the systems very well. So the one-third that was training is training in a different sense than most people think of training, because, after all, there wasn't anybody that had done this and could tell us how to do it, because nobody had the experience.
But they could tell us what they did know, and some became systems experts and would know the details of how the inertial guidance system or the computer or certain kind of engine valves and so on would operate and how we might handle malfunctions.
So we spent enormous amounts of time gleaning everything we could from the people who were experts in these particular smaller components of the spacecraft or the launch vehicle.
We also spent a lot of time in simulations. Simulators have gotten better over the years at a prodigious rate. In my days at Edwards, we did a lot of simulations of flight characteristics and aircraft trajectories and things of that sort. We did them all with analog computers, because digital computers were just far too slow to use for simulations. So then we started marrying analog and digital computers. We used the digital to do the precise calculations, and used the analog part to do the actual aircraft response things, which had to be a lot faster.
Then by the middle of the sixties, … computers were getting to be fast enough that you could actually do simulations of aircraft flight motions with them.
So because I worked a lot on the simulations as collateral duty while I was here at Houston, I spent a lot of time evaluating the authenticity and appropriateness of the simulation models that they were using.
You'd usually find that the simulator didn't behave properly like it should in some regions of life, so it was incumbent on us to uncover the problems that simulation had and try to make it as accurate as we could. There was some danger in that, because you might not be right about your conclusions about the appropriateness of the simulation, but it was an important part of our function, and certainly the astronauts' crews weren't the only people doing that. Test pilots at Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.
They were quite adequate to do most all the things that we were doing. There's an old perception that simulators are always more difficult to fly than the craft themselves. In general, that is true, and it's certainly turned out to be true in Apollo, particularly the lunar module [LM], which was to our benefit that it was easier to fly than the simulator, because we were expecting something that was somewhat more cantankerous and contrary than it actually turned out to be.
Brinkley: Did you stay in involved with operations and training even after you became a backup commander on Gemini V? Armstrong: To a lesser extent, because once you get on a flight crew, a very large percentage of your time is committed. So at that point in time, and before we had many new guys come in, we had a bit of a gap, in my perspective. Too many people were—they were gladly assigned to flight crews, but it left some openings behind us and some things weren't covered to the degree we would have liked them to have been.
Brinkley: How did you feel when President [John F. Was that a moment where you really—can you recall Kennedy's speech and can you recall that kind of commitment that came out of President Kennedy? Armstrong: Well, yes, I certainly remember it, but it's a big hazy because I've heard recordings of it so many times since, that you're not certain whether you're remembering or you're remembering what you're remembering.
So I'm not certain what it was. And, of course, it's been colored by the fact that I read so many stories of how that process actually occurred and what led to his conclusion to do that. I guess I've been persuaded by historians that it wouldn't have been his first choice, but he didn't find any other good options to go against the Soviets with. The world was caught up in what the Soviets were doing. And he'd campaigned against Lyndon [Baines Johnson] on the basis that we were behind in rocketry.
And [Richard M. Ambrose: Against Nixon, too, of course. Against Eisenhower, really. Brinkley: I guess I'm thinking of the youngness of all of you, and here's this young president saying that. Did you feel like he was part of the team, like he was a leader now? With President Kennedy we really had a leader that wanted to put the space program on the forefront of the American agenda? Armstrong: Our concern always was, "What will the Congress do?
So that's really where the question was. As it turned out, they were motivated to support the president in this area, which I'm not sure I necessarily would have guessed at that point, based on my recollection of priorities—.
Ambrose: Let me go back for a second to the event that got the president to say, "We're going to get to the Moon. That was only a decade earlier. You were at the very cutting edge of test pilot and working on all the things that you were working on at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Did you guys pay much attention to that? Was there a feeling of, "God almighty! We want to be in on this! Armstrong: Yes, there was, because you remember at the time it was a time of such incredibly high tension nationally and internationally, and I think everyone felt we were right on the brink of potential World War III.
I don't think anybody, even the people in the back woods of Montana, were unaware of this tension, this heightened sense of tension.
I was very aware of it. I thought that we could shove aside all the work we're doing in favor of other things that the country decided were more important from a strategic point of view. Ambrose: What about you and the people you were working with? Did you feel like, "What are we doing this for? Because we need to be a part—if there's going to be World War III, we want to be a part of it, and what we're aiming at right now, what we're trying to do is like yesterday's newspaper.
That was a concern, but at the time I think the reality was, you've got your job to do and you just go ahead and do it, and keep doing it and hope for the best.
Ambrose: As in the events of last Tuesday [September 11, ]. Just carry on. Brinkley: Where were you when Alan [B. Armstrong: I was at Edwards at the time, but I can't remember where specifically I was.
Brinkley: The same question with John [H. Do you remember? Armstrong: Yes, I was at home at the time, I remember. Brinkley: Watching it on the television news, reading about it?
It was very early in the morning. I was in California, as I remember. I think it was dark. Brinkley: Do you recall when it was you were assigned to the Gemini V mission? And what were your thoughts at that time? How was training for that mission different than your general training? How did your life change when you suddenly were assigned to the mission? Armstrong: Well, I was really pleased to be assigned to a flight, and quite satisfied to be in that position of backing up [L.
It was quite a change from the time before, when we were working lots of general projects and trying to build pieces here and there, to all of a sudden having a pretty much complete focus on achieving the objectives of that flight, which was originally intended to be a one-week-long flight, [the first] long-duration flight. There were a lot of other [parts] besides just long-duration, but that was the principal objective. Elliot [M. We were a very close team. We spent almost all our time together for months on end, getting ready for that flight, both going back and forth between Houston—spent a lot of time at the [McDonnell] plant in St.
Louis [Missouri], working with the spacecraft as it was nearing completion, and participating in the testing of that spacecraft. So we all knew it very well by the time it was shipped to the Cape. Ambrose: When you say "spent almost all our time," your meals, too? We ate together. Not when we were in St. We certainly were at home. We'd get home sometimes. But the reality of the world in those days is that a lot of the testing took place at two o'clock in the morning or four-thirty in the morning, and we were spelling each other off.
We would spend enormous amounts of time together, working out the details. Ambrose: And this was single-minded. You weren't bullshitting about the latest play that you saw or the latest novel you'd read. Armstrong: No, no. I would not say that we never cracked a joke or talked about something off the project, but we were 98 percent focused on the job we had to do. I was and my perception of my colleagues was the same. Ambrose: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.
Ambrose: And a lot of tension about who's going to get on this mission or that mission, who's going to be backup, etc. Your reputation is the exact opposite of that. I would like to hear you speak about that. Armstrong: Well, I was so pleased to be associated with the program, because it was going, it was happening, it was exciting.
The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It's probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they're all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject.
It wasn't as obvious to me as some of the stories I've read have portrayed it. I looked forward to an actual flight assignment as much as anyone, as opposed to being in the backup role, but the backup role, I thought, was an important job, and just might turn out that we had to be ready, and we were going to be ready. As you know, in some flights it did turn out that the backup crews, or members of them, had to step in.
Brinkley: During the mission, how closely were you involved with evaluating various problems, like fuel cell problems or the thruster excess water production? What were your duties in assisting evaluation for, say, fuel cell problems?
Did you have a specialty that you really knew more than the others? Armstrong: I was not a fuel cell expert. We were at the Cape. Elliot See and [I] came back immediately after launch and actually talked to the spacecraft when it went overhead at the end of the first orbit, from our T, on VHF [very high frequency], and came back and landed immediately, went to mission control and made ourselves available to help with the flight.
So we were both involved throughout that entire flight. Certainly all the various problems that they bumped into on that flight, we were very much involved, but I can't recall any specific aspects of it. Brinkley: What were, then, the different requirements for the commander as opposed to a pilot on these missions? What made the commander—what different responsibilities did the commander have?
Armstrong: Well, we tried to divide the responsibilities such that each crew person was about equally loaded. We tried for each person to be able to know how to do everything if they had to, but we divided the responsibilities such that each would go into their area in [substantially] more depth. That worked pretty well. I don't think it was practical or maybe even possible for both crew men to know everything in the same degree of depth on every subject.
So it was a shared responsibility situation. The commander, I guess, principally differs because he has the responsibility for the decisions, just as the commander of a ship or commander of an airliner or anything.
Ambrose: If necessary, the commander can override. He's always responsible for his craft. There was probably more concern as to when there were differences of opinion, would be the differences of opinion between those in flight and those in mission control, but I think we worked that out pretty well.
We had great respect [for] the guys down there, the guys and gals in mission control. Brinkley: I was going to ask about the relations between mission controllers and the astronaut corps.
You just characterized it during this period—I guess you did—as pretty good. You felt there was respect for each other's job. But did tensions flare? Armstrong: Sometimes it did. We were fortunate that on the flights I was involved in, I don't think we had any problems of any significant magnitude in that category. Generally the people in flight and the people in mission control were on the same frequency most of the time. Ambrose: There was not a "we" and "them"?
It's "we" and "we. How was that different from your other training? Armstrong: Well, I'd already been through one cycle with Gemini V. I knew generally the content of the preparation. The differences were those things that would be different between the flights. We were going to have a rendezvous, which Gemini V did not have. We were going to have an extravehicular backpack in the back.
We had experiments that were different than the experiments on Gemini V. So we probably concentrated somewhat more on the things that were different.
We still did practice the rendezvous and practiced the launches and practiced the entry steering and all those kinds of thing.
You had to sort of fill the squares and make sure you had done enough of those that you felt confident in your ability and people that were watching you on the ground, and…grading how you did. You also felt confident that you were in control of your destiny. Brinkley: How well did you know Dave Scott at the time?
Armstrong: I had not known Dave well at all at Edwards, so I only got to know him when he came to Houston, but I liked working with Dave. He was very good at what he did. He was diligent and he was hard working. I felt confident in his ability to handle his part of the responsibilities. Brinkley: Then the backup crew, Conrad and [Richard F. I was just wondering how—I've never quite understood this.
How did NASA decide who was going to be in which position and which mission? It was just to rotate you all and give you equal experience? Armstrong: Well, Deke [Donald K. He gave me the assignment of determining how many crews were needed throughout the entire Gemini program, how many people were needed, with assignments for primary and backup or alternate flight crews.
Some people off, some people on vacations, some people sick. And so I built a schedule for him of my perspective on what was required. And it's my belief that he used that kind of a schematic to determine when additional crews needed to be brought into the program and used that kind of thing …, in assigning individuals to crews, because you couldn't just take one person and decide where he's going to be without knowing what he would be doing next or before and how that interfered with or interconnected with other crew assignments.
It was quite a complex job. We actually had so few people, that almost everybody was assigned all the time. In that period I would come off one crew assignment, and within a few weeks I'd be assigned to something else, and that endured throughout the entire Gemini program.
Armstrong: We had a docking simulator which was quite, quite [realistic]. We felt it was a good representation of what we could expect, and indeed it turned out to be quite similar to what we encountered in flight.
I really believed that we wouldn't have any trouble with the docking, based on the simulations we did. Indeed, that turned out to be the truth. Brinkley: What was going to your mind, however, when your [space]craft started to spin at that moment? You'd had a lot of close calls from Korea to Edwards. How do you maintain your cool under such harrowing conditions? Armstrong: We first suspected that the Agena was the culprit. We had shut our own control system off, and we were on the dark side of the Earth, so we really didn't have any outside reference, or very good reference.
I didn't actually notice when it started to deviate from the planned attitude. Dave first noticed it. Neither of us thought that Gemini might be the culprit, because you could easily hear the Gemini thrusters whenever they fired. They were out right in the nose, in the back. Every time one fired, it was just like a popgun, "crack, crack, crack, crack. Dave … had the control panel for the Agena. He was trying everything he knew, without success.
When the rates became quite violent, I concluded that we couldn't continue, that we had to [separate from the Agena]. I was afraid we might lose consciousness, because our spin rate had gotten pretty high, and I wanted to make sure that we got away before that happened. Of course, once we [separated] and found out we couldn't … regain control in a normal manner, we recognized that it was a failure in our craft, not [in] the Agena.
The reason we didn't hear it is, you only hear [the thruster] when it fires; you don't hear it when it's running steadily. I didn't … know that at the time, but I figured it out. Brinkley: So was there concern about colliding with the Agena? Armstrong: Sure we were, because we didn't know exactly what our relative trajectories would be, because at the time we disengaged, we weren't in steady flight.
It was a great disappointment to us, to have to cut that flight short. We had so many things we wanted to do, and I know Dave wanted to do an EVA [extravehicular activity] and try out the backpack and do all that kind of stuff. It was very disappointing to have to call it quits and come home.
Ambrose: But you made a decision and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others' were at stake. To browse the listings, please click here. All records are visually graded by our experienced staff, using a bright lamp and a well-calibrated turntable.
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