NASA JOHNSON SPACE CENTER ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

NEIL A. ARMSTRONG

INTERVIEWED BY DR. STEPHEN E. AMBROSE AND DR. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

HOUSTON, TEXAS – 19 SEPTEMBER 2001 

 

[This oral history with Neil Armstrong was conducted on September 19, 2001, for the Johnson 

Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Interviewers were Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose

and Dr. Douglas Brinkley. Assisting with the session were team members of the Johnson Space 

Center Oral History Project.] 

BRINKLEY: I wanted to start a little bit about growing up in Ohio. Ohio is an aviation state. I read 

somewhere that when you were very young, your father took you to the National Air Races in 

Cleveland. You were so young, do you have any recollection?

ARMSTRONG: I was two the first time I went to the Air Races. Of course I have no recollection of 

that now. 

BRINKLEY: Did your father have an interest in flight? Is that why he would take you there, or was it

just in the air at that time, it was so exciting?

ARMSTRONG: I don't think he had a particular interest in flight, but just an opportunity to take

children to new experiences, I guess. 

BRINKLEY: You got to ride in your first plane when you were age six, in one of the Ford TriMotors. Do you have recollections of that? 

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ARMSTRONG: I do not. 

BRINKLEY: You don't? 

ARMSTRONG: No. 

AMBROSE: When did you first hear of [Charles A.] Lindbergh?

ARMSTRONG: I can't remember when the first time was, but I'm sure it was when I was a schoolboy, 

in elementary school. 

AMBROSE: Everybody in America knew. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. Schoolboys always talked about heroes of flight. 

BRINKLEY: Did you later have an opportunity to meet Lindbergh? Was he somebody that had been 

in your mind when you were becoming a pilot, thinking about Lindbergh? Did he mean a great deal

to you as an American icon?

ARMSTRONG: I did have the opportunity to meet him on several occasions. Had enormous

admiration for him as a pilot. I'd read some of his books. I was aware of the controversial position 

he took on certain issues. But I was very pleased to have had the chance to meet him, and I think 

his wife [Anne Morrow Lindbergh] was a wonderful person and quite an [eloquent] writer. 

AMBROSE: Yes.

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BRINKLEY: Did you ever correspond with him at the time of the Apollo? Was there any kind of 

wishing you well before the Apollo 11 mission, wishing you luck sort of— 

ARMSTRONG: I can't recall that. I think I have some letters from him in my file, though. 

AMBROSE: When did you begin building things? Your interest and your concern with engineering, 

your wanting to build things, is that a part of your memory from when you were five or six years

old? Did you have a special bent towards that?

ARMSTRONG: I began to focus on aviation probably at age eight or nine, and inspired by what I'd 

read and seen about aviation and building model aircraft, why, I determined at an early age—and I

don't know exactly what age, while I was still in elementary school—that that was the field I wanted

to go into, although my intention was to be—or hope was to be an aircraft designer. I later went

into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane. 

AMBROSE: Were you good in mathematics?

ARMSTRONG: Everything's relative. I was good in my small classes. However, I've since met many

people who have far better mastery of mathematics than I will ever have. 

AMBROSE: Did you have physics in high school?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I did. 

AMBROSE: Do you remember your teacher? 

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ARMSTRONG: Yes, it was John Crites. I remember him very well, because he was sort of an 

unconventional teacher. He allowed a few students in each of his classes to do special projects, and

so we didn't go to class very much. We were always off working on our projects. 

AMBROSE: What was your project? 

ARMSTRONG: In physics we had two. One was building a Tesla coil. I think it was probably about 

a 50,000 volt Tesla coil, good enough to light up fluorescent bulbs in the next room. Then a wind

tunnel. That project was by myself. The Tesla coil I did with another student. 

AMBROSE: Tell us about the wind tunnel. 

ARMSTRONG: Well, my knowledge of aerodynamics was not good enough to match the quality of

the Wright Brothers' tunnel, and at that point I suppose I was equally educated to them. But it was a 

fun project. Blew out a lot of fuses in my home. [Chuckles] Because I tried to build a rheostat 

which would allow the electric motor to change speed and then get various air flows through the

tunnel, not altogether successfully.

BRINKLEY: During this period you were traveling around Ohio to a lot of different cities. Is there

one beyond Wapakoneta, other cities that you really identified with? Did you go to different

schools in all those different towns?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. I went to ... half a dozen schools. 

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BRINKLEY: Were you able to develop friendships when you were going to that many different

schools, or was it the family life become—?

ARMSTRONG: I'm certain I had friendships in every one of the schools I was in, but I don't 

remember those friends prior to probably the junior high school age. I still have friends that I see

and remember from that time period and subsequent. 

AMBROSE: Beyond your physics class and the projects, were you an avid reader? Were you reading

engineering and aerodynamics or history or what?

ARMSTRONG: I was an avid reader, yes, and I read all kinds of things. I spent a lot of time in the 

library and took a lot of books out of the library, both fiction and nonfiction. However, when I was

building things, like models and so on, they were predominantly focused on aviation-related “stuff.” 

AMBROSE: Do you remember any specific book you read about aviation that—"Wow!" kind of

response?

ARMSTRONG: I recall that I read a lot of the aviation magazines of the time, Flight and Air Trails

and Model Airplane News, and anything I could get my hands on. 

BRINKLEY: What about like Robert [H.] Goddard in science fiction, things about space? Did you

ever read any of the science fiction writers of that time? 

ARMSTRONG: As a young boy I don't recall reading much science fiction. I did come to enjoy it

when I was perhaps late high school and college age. 

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AMBROSE: When you were very small, did you have any interest in [General William] Billy 

Mitchell's trial? 

ARMSTRONG: I don't recall. I knew the name Billy Mitchell and I knew about his demonstration of 

the effectiveness of air power, but I don't recall things about his trial. I may have known, but I don't

remember. 

AMBROSE: You were what, a sophomore in high school when World War II ended? 

ARMSTRONG: That's approximately—let's see. Yes, I was between my sophomore and junior year. 

AMBROSE: The assumption among young men at that time was, "As soon as I graduate or as soon 

as I get to be eighteen, I'm going into the service." But then the war ended when you were fifteen. 

So you completed the high school without any "I'm going to enlist" kind of feeling. 

ARMSTRONG: That's correct. We had a few people in my school who had either lied about their age

or were a little older than the class, who had gone into the service, and came back and finished high 

school after the war was over. We had several of those fellows in our school, but the youngest of 

those would probably be two years older than I was. 

AMBROSE: You got a Navy scholarship to Purdue [University, West Lafayette, Indiana] 

immediately after graduating high school, I gather. 

ARMSTRONG: I believe that the test for what was called the Hollaway Plan, the Naval Aviation

College [Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, NROTC] Program, were administered nationwide

while I was still in high school, probably shortly before graduation, although I cannot remember the

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precise date. It was early enough so that we could pick a school. If we were accepted into this 

program, we could pick any accredited school in the nation to attend. 

AMBROSE: Was the test on one of those IBM [International Business Machines] sheets where you,

you know, one, two, three, four, five, and you have a lead pencil and you— 

ARMSTRONG: I don't think so. I believe it was predominantly—I shouldn't really say, because I

confuse that. But my recollection is that it was a pencil-and-paper exam with a variety of different

kinds of questions and sections. 

AMBROSE: Mainly mathematics or mathematics and physics?

ARMSTRONG: I'm sure they had a focus on things that would be appropriate to aviation, because it 

was an aviation-directed program, but I can't remember the details of the test, except that I recall it 

was quite long. [Laughter] 

AMBROSE: What do you mean by long? All day?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, it was an all-day test. 

AMBROSE: That's the way they used to do it, I know. [Laughter] I've been through that myself. 

So you came out well, obviously, and the Navy offered you, and the "Holly" Plan—it was 

like Naval ROTC, that you would get tuition and a stipend of twenty-five bucks a month or

something like that, I suppose. 

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ARMSTRONG: Fortunately, it was a little more than that. They would pay tuition fees and books, 

plus a stipend for board and room. 

AMBROSE: So when you were accepted in this program, you were signing up, in effect, accepting a

call from the navy. 

ARMSTRONG: A seven-year program, yes. Two years of [university study], then go to the navy, go 

through flight training, get a commission, and then serve in the regular navy for a total then of three 

years of active duty, after which the plan would be to return to university and finish the last two 

years. The intent of this program, named after Admiral [James L.] Holloway [Jr.], who, if memory

serves, was [astronaut Walter M.] Wally Schirra's father-in-law, and the intent was to build up the

naval air reserve strength, which they felt was going downhill because people after the war really

didn't want to do that stuff anymore. That was my understanding at the time. 

AMBROSE: So you were called up for flight training after what, one year at Purdue or two years? 

ARMSTRONG: A year and a half. It was supposed to be two years, but I suppose they saw [the] 

Korea[n War] coming or something, and they needed to ratchet the volume up a little bit, so they 

called us in early. 

AMBROSE: So now you're in uniform, but not yet commissioned, being trained as a pilot, is that

correct? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I was in naval flight school. 

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AMBROSE: Tell me about training. How did the navy go about training you?

ARMSTRONG: Well, they found that the way I had learned to fly before wasn't nearly what they 

expected. [Laughter]

BRINKLEY: Just to backtrack for one second, you got your pilot's license at age sixteen in Ohio. 

Could you have gotten it any earlier? Is that almost like getting an auto license back when you're

fourteen, fifteen? 

ARMSTRONG: I believe you could get it in a glider at age fourteen, but in a powered aircraft you had 

to wait till you reached your sixteenth birthday, and then the license you got was called a student

pilot's license, which allowed you to fly solo, but not take passengers with you. 

BRINKLEY: Do you remember your first solo flight over the land in Ohio when you actually could 

be up in the air on your own? Do you have any recollections of that? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I have vague recollections. A very exciting time when you go on your first solo. 

BRINKLEY: Where was the location?

ARMSTRONG: It was in Wapakoneta, at a grass field there. 

AMBROSE: Who was your first instructor? 

ARMSTRONG: Oh, let's see. I had three. The first one's name escapes me at the minute [Frank 

Lucie]. The second one was named Aubrey Knudegard. The third was Chuck Finkenbine . 

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BRINKLEY: They lived in that area, in Wapakoneta area?

ARMSTRONG: I don't know where they lived, but I'm sure they didn't live far away. 

BRINKLEY: Was this unusual for a young man your age? Were a lot of contemporaries of yours 

wanting to get pilot's license?

ARMSTRONG: I was in a class of maybe about seventy students, about half boys. We had three in 

my class that learned to fly at the same time I did. So I don't know how unusual that is, three out of 

thirty five, 10 percent. Not very unusual. 

BRINKLEY: Before we get back to the navy, can I ask one Ohio question? I'm curious because of

living in Ohio. Do you remember the towns that you lived in? Research says you lived in a lot of 

different towns, but they never say the names of them. 

ARMSTRONG: I moved a lot before I entered school, and when I entered school, the rate of change 

of towns slowed down somewhat, but still about every couple of years it seemed like we were 

moving. 

BRINKLEY: What were the names of some of the other towns besides—

ARMSTRONG: First school was in Warren, Ohio; and then Jefferson, Ohio; Moulton, Ohio; then St.

Mary's, Ohio; [Upper Sandusky Ohio]; then Wapakoneta, Ohio. 

BRINKLEY: I never knew those other towns. Thank you. 

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AMBROSE: Okay. When you began with the navy is training you to be a pilot, you had been up in a

single-engine plane for some soloing, but now you're with the United States Navy. How did they 

train you?

ARMSTRONG: Training was divided into three parts. The first was a [four]-month nonflying ground 

school and physical training regimen. The second part was called basic training, which was all

flight students went through the exact same protocol, did the exact same kinds of things, learning to

fly, getting some experience soloing, learning to do cross-country flight, navigation, that sort of 

thing, learning to fly instruments, learning to fly acrobatics, learning to fly formation, learning to

drop bombs, learning to fire guns, and learning to land on an aircraft carrier. 

After that, went to advanced training, where— 

AMBROSE: On an actual carrier? 

ARMSTRONG: On a real carrier. [In] advanced training, you [were selected to become the pilot of

single engine aircraft (fighters and attack aircraft) or multiengine patrol aircraft]. In my case, I 

asked for fighters and got fighters. 

Then we went to Corpus Christi, Texas, and went through training there in single-occupant 

aircraft, in my case F8F Bearcat. We went through ... the same kinds of things, learning to fly on

instruments and learning to do advanced navigation, over-water navigation. 

AMBROSE: Navigation by the stars or navigation by radio or navigation by compass or what?

ARMSTRONG: We had learned in the earlier part, ... the ground school part, how to navigate and use

celestial navigation. ... Celestial navigation was used by multi-engine pilots predominantly, while 

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single-engine fighters and attack aircraft required the full attention of the sole occupant on the

flying, and so he couldn't be taking sextant shots and things like that. So the navigation was

somewhat more rudimentary, but it required dead reckoning and use of radio aids and whatever

might be available at sea.... 

AMBROSE: How do you dead-reckon at sea? 

ARMSTRONG: By computing your true speed over the ground, by using your air speed, altitude, and 

outside temperature, and noting the direction of the wind however you could by wave action or

cloud shadow movements. 

AMBROSE: Guessing, in other words.

ARMSTRONG: Guessing. At least you'd hopefully be in the right direction, probably weren't always. 

And then the pilots had to be able to return to their carrier, so there were certain kinds of electronic 

aids that were peculiar to a carrier you wouldn't find anywhere else, wouldn't find in land-based 

navigation. So it was a matter of learning those and, of course, learning to use the aircraft as a

weapon defensively and offensively, and learn tactics, and then finally qualify again on a carrier in

advanced aircraft.... Other students went into multi-engine flight in either patrol bombers or 

transports or some variety of other craft. Everyone went their separate ways. 

AMBROSE: In the army air force in 1942, '43, '44, only the very best got to be fighter pilots. If you 

weren't quite up to that standard, then they put you in a two-engine or a four-engine. Was that also

true in the navy?

ARMSTRONG: The fighter pilots always said that was true. [Laughter] 

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AMBROSE: I'm not asking you to brag on yourself. 

ARMSTRONG: But I don't know what the naval officers, the commanding officer of the training 

command would say about that. I was not privy to what process they used in deciding. My own 

guess is that a large part of it had to do with what needs they had at the time you graduated, because

in my particular class, most of my classmates happened to get what they asked for, while I can

recall people from a different generation saying nobody got what they asked for. So I can't really

know. 

AMBROSE: I've read that you told your mother you didn't want to be responsible for others; that's

why you wanted a single-engine fighter. Is that story accurate?

ARMSTRONG: I don't know that I ever told her that. You know, I might have said something like 

that, but I don't remember saying that. 

AMBROSE: When did you get your wings and commission? What was the date? 

ARMSTRONG: I got my wings in August of 1950, but that was about seventeen or eighteen months

after I'd begun my active duty service, so I still had another six months to go. So I was one of those 

rare birds, a midshipman with wings. So I went to the fleet squadron, was in a standby unit for a

while, then assigned to a jet fighter squadron, still was a midshipman making seventy-five bucks a

month plus flight pay, 50 percent of seventy-five bucks. 

BRINKLEY: Landing on carriers at night, that was extraordinarily difficult to learn. Was there one

aspect of this period that was a hard thing for you to conquer something like that? 

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ARMSTRONG: I happened to be a day fighter pilot. We had night fighter pilots on the ship I was on, 

and I thought they were crazy. [Laughter]

BRINKLEY: Did you ever have to do a night landing?

ARMSTRONG: I did it only in practice. I never did it on a carrier. All my landings on a carrier were

in day. I was always happy about that. 

AMBROSE: So, August of '50, the Korean War is now a couple of months old. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, just started. 

AMBROSE: And you're completing your basic. Did they send you right off?

ARMSTRONG: I asked for the Pacific Fleet and was given the Pacific Fleet. But as I say, I was first 

sent out to a squadron called FASRON, Fleet Air Service Squadron, which is a utility squadron,

handled all kinds of miscellaneous jobs that needed to be done around a large naval air station. That 

sort of was a holding position. They would typically take new entrants that come to that base and 

stick them there for a time period until there was a squadron opening for assignment, so I was in that 

squadron for probably three or four months, until there was an opening for me in Fighter Squadron 

51 [VF-51]. 

AMBROSE: That would have been at the end of 1950. 

ARMSTRONG: That was the end of '50. November or December, as I remember. 

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AMBROSE: And then off to the fleet? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. We immediately prepared to be assigned to the Korean action, and so a matter

of the squadron training everyone in an operational sense to do the job that they would be expected 

to do, so that period. Again, you sort of do the same sorts of things as you did in training. Now

you're in a new aircraft, but you have a much more specific objective because you sort of know 

what kind of an environment you're going into. 

We didn't know to what extent we would be offensive, in the sense that we would be

dropping bombs or shooting guns, or to what extent we might be defending the fleet against Chinese

or Russian incoming aircraft, to what extent it might be air-to-air or air-to-ground. So we had to

prepare for sort of all of those, plus become carrier-qualified in jet aircraft and doing a lot of 

practice with weapons delivery, instrument flying, and so on, the things that we would be facing 

when we got in operation. I was very young, very green. 

AMBROSE: You were very young. Which coast of Korea were you on when you flew your first 

mission?

ARMSTRONG: All the time we flew off the eastern coast of North Korea, off Wonsan Bay, about 

100 miles out, something like that. Had two kinds of flights. One would be called combat air 

patrol, which was defense of the fleet, basically. And the other was predominantly interdiction 

flights, flying against bridges and railroads and trying to find an occasional tank— 

AMBROSE: Bombs and bullets? 

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ARMSTRONG: Bombs, bullets, and rockets sometimes, depending on what target it was. We had a

combination of two jet fighter squadrons, F4U Corsair squadron, of course, air squadron, and an

AD [Skyraider] squadron. [They] could carry the 2,000-pounders and really do some damage. 

BRINKLEY: Seven in a squadron? 

ARMSTRONG: I can't speak specifically to the numbers in each squadron. In our squadron we had 

twenty-four pilots and sixteen aircraft. 

AMBROSE: Sixteen. But only twenty-four pilots. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. Started with twenty-four.

AMBROSE: Started with, yeah. The army liked to have two pilots for every airplane. 

Tell us about your first mission. 

ARMSTRONG: I can't recall it. 

AMBROSE: I know you did a lot of them. Did you ever, in flying combat air patrol, did they ever

come in and try to attack the fleet at night? 

ARMSTRONG: No, and I'm glad they didn't.

AMBROSE: By air?

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ARMSTRONG: No. I would not have enjoyed trying to go—well, I probably would have enjoyed it, 

but I don't know that I would have won against a MiG in an old Panther. It was a pretty primitive

airplane. Of course, the MiG was pretty primitive too, but had a little better performance. 

BRINKLEY: How did the F9F Panther perform?

ARMSTRONG: It was a very solid airplane. We thought it was wonderful. In retrospect, it was an

airplane of the time and it didn't fly [particularly] well.... But we didn't know that at the time.... 

BRINKLEY: What were the weak points? 

ARMSTRONG: It didn't have particularly good handling qualities. Pretty good lateral directional 

controls, but very stiff in pitch. Its performance both in absolute altitude, max speed, and climb rate

were inferior to the MiG by substantial amount. 

BRINKLEY: There's a story about September 3rd, 1951, when you had to eject yourself from a

Panther after receiving antiaircraft fire. Was that one of the moments of the Korean War where you 

really feel your life is being put on the line? 

ARMSTRONG: I do remember that one. It wasn't antiaircraft fire, although antiaircraft fire was 

ubiquitous at the time. I don't know to what extent that antiaircraft fire played a part in it, but I 

actually ran through a cable, an antiaircraft cable, and knocked off about six or eight feet of my right 

wing. If you're going fast, a cable will make a very good knife.

BRINKLEY: And what happened at that point?

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ARMSTRONG: I didn't think that I could risk slowing the airplane down to landing speed, because

once— 

AMBROSE: You must have been almost right on the deck. 

ARMSTRONG: Well, these are strung between mountains, so I was up maybe 500 feet or something, 

not an unusual altitude for the kind of things we were doing. I don't remember exactly what the 

altitude was, but they didn't put those big balls on the cables so that you could see they were there in 

those days. 

BRINKLEY: What happened after that moment?

ARMSTRONG: I was flying on the wing of John Carpenter. He was an air force major, on an 

exchange program with us. We talked it over and decided not to try to land it, because if I got a 

little bit too slow and started to snap, I would have no [ability] to control it after that, so

consequently decided it would be better to jump out. So, took it down south into friendly territory

and jumped out in the vicinity of Pohang Airport, K-3, which was operated by U.S. marines.

AMBROSE: Could you eject or did you jump? 

ARMSTRONG: I ejected. The old-style shotgun-shell-powered ejection seat, 22 G seat. 

AMBROSE: Were you always wearing the parachute or did you have to put it on?

ARMSTRONG: We always had it on. 

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AMBROSE: Strapped into the small of your back?

ARMSTRONG: Exactly. 

AMBROSE: Had you had any parachute training?

ARMSTRONG: No, we had not, but one of the gentlemen in the squadron, one of my classmates, 

actually, was assigned a collateral duty of being the equipment and escape officer, so he went over

to parachute school, as I remember, in El Centro, California, and came back and told us how to do 

it, if the need ever arose. 

BRINKLEY: Did you get rescued quickly once you landed, with no problem? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. A jeep drove up just as I was landing, from K-3. The driver was a roommate of 

mine in flight school. 

BRINKLEY: A roommate from where? 

ARMSTRONG: In flight school. He was now a marine lieutenant operating out of that field. 

BRINKLEY: What was his name? 

ARMSTRONG: His name was Goodell Warren. 

BRINKLEY: Did you ever during the war receive other heavy damage flying, from ground fire?

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ARMSTRONG: Yes, we had a lot of bullet holes in our airplanes when we brought them back. We'd 

patch them up. 

AMBROSE: Put a little duct tape over that hole. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. Made them look pretty good, painted it over. 

BRINKLEY: After your first month on the [USS] Essex [CV-9], then you had liberty in Japan when

you'd get to spend time there?

ARMSTRONG: Usually we'd spend four or five weeks at sea and then they would take the entire ship 

back to Yokosuka for a week of refurbishing and reprovisioning and things like that. About one day 

a week we did some reprovisioning at sea (fuel) ..., but on a monthly basis, five weeks or

something like that, we'd go back in for five days or six days, something like that. 

AMBROSE: You could get aviation gasoline [av gas] while you were at sea? Or when you say fuel,

you mean fuel for the carrier? 

ARMSTRONG: You know, I don't really know what all kinds of fuel, but they had a pipe, a hose that

they could put over from the provisioning ship to the carrier. I assume they had both diesel and jet

fuel, and maybe av gas, too. 

AMBROSE: Tell me about weather. North Korea, the whole of Korea is notorious for bad weather,

and you're doing interdiction runs, so the weather is critical. Did you ever go off on a mission and 

you just couldn't find the target? Could you land carrying bombs?

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ARMSTRONG: No, we'd— 

AMBROSE: Or you'd jettison them in the sea? 

ARMSTRONG: We would usually jettison armaments prior to returning, and we tried to jettison on 

targets of opportunity at the end of the flight when we had either found or not found our primary 

target, due to, in some cases, weather. Normally we'd have alternates, so if there was weather, we

would divert to another target. We had some weather information, because we had Allied forces in

the south of Korea and we had other sources of information, so they were able to give us not a bad 

weather briefing of what we could expect in the target area. It wasn't always right, just like it isn't 

always right here. 

BRINKLEY: The teamwork and camaraderie experience on the Essex, is there any way to compare 

that at all to being in the astronaut corps or with engineers and contractors in the space program?

The concept of teamwork now, this something that became a big part of your life from this point on. 

What was the teamwork aboard the Essex? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, it was [a] teamwork operation, certainly. We had very few occasions when we

would do anything on a solo basis. Almost everything we did as teams, and in our case we usually 

liked flights of four at least, to help each other out. Eight eyes are better than two in looking for

trouble and looking for targets. 

AMBROSE: A diamond formation with the four? 

ARMSTRONG: We used a formation, usually an echelon two airplanes each, separated by probably a

quarter to a half mile. That would allow us to see a broad panorama both to the rear of the other—

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we would be looking after their tail and they would be looking after ours. That was a different

approach than had been earlier introduced, or at least attributed to [Commander] Jimmy Thatch, the 

so-called Thatch Weave.... We did not use that technique. 

BRINKLEY: Can you characterize your air group commander, Marsh Beebe and your squadron 

leader, E. M. Beauchamp? Did they have a big impact on you, teaching you, or did you get to learn 

from them new ways of flight that you hadn't previously on your on-the-job training on the Essex? 

ARMSTRONG: I flew with Commander Beebe some, and thought he was quite a good air group 

commander, the first I'd known and certainly the first in any operational circumstances or any 

combat circumstances. So I wasn't in a position to be critical anyway. I was, one, inexperienced; 

two, a junior officer. I was delighted when I had the chance to fly with him. 

Ernie Beauchamp, a wonderful skipper, [I] had enormous respect for him. I thought he

was—and is; he is alive today—a superior leader. I think if there was anything I learned from our

skipper was that it's not how you look; it's how you perform. 

BRINKLEY: Do you stay in touch with any of the men from your unit, or do they stay in touch with

you?

ARMSTRONG: We have periodic reunions, yes.

BRINKLEY: Do you ever attend any of those? 

ARMSTRONG: I was at one two months ago. 

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BRINKLEY: Were you really. They must be very proud, following your work with Apollo. But I

guess to them you're just another one of the group. 

ARMSTRONG: They've forgiven me for my errors. [Laughter] 

AMBROSE: So, you came home from Korea and you'd completed your obligatory time in the navy,

and you went right back to Purdue to finish school. Is that right?

ARMSTRONG: Actually, my time expired when I was flying off the Essex, and so my options were

to either extend or swim home. [Laughter] So I extended. 

BRINKLEY: This is a question that I sense you may not like, but the Air Group 5's operation became 

the basis for that [James S.] Michener's book, The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Have you read the book? 

ARMSTRONG: Oh yes. 

BRINKLEY: Did you like it? 

ARMSTRONG: I thought it was an excellent representation of the kinds of flying that we were doing 

there. It was identical, same kind of aircraft and the same class carrier. They put girls in the movie, 

which I didn't remember from my experience. [Laughter] Actually, Michener was on our ship. I 

think he went on three tours, two or three tours, you know, at four or five weeks at a crack, and 

would just sit around the wardroom in the evening or in the ready room in the daytime and listen to

guys tell the actual stories. He didn't ask questions much or anything; he just kind of absorbed it all. 

So most of the things that happened in the book, which was quite a different book from any other

book he's written in many ways, were actual events. Maybe he strung them together with different

19 September 2001 23
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characters so they didn't happen precisely the way it would have been described in his novel, but,

nevertheless, they were basically all adaptations of true stories that he used. 

BRINKLEY: Can you recognize yourself in any of those? 

ARMSTRONG: No, but one of my colleagues, named Leonard Cheshire, "Chet," we called him, he 

didn't return. But I believe there [were] a lot of Chet Cheshire's stories in Bridges at Toko-Ri. 

BRINKLEY: In the time you did spend in Japan, do you have any memories of your time in Japan?

Here's the boy from Ohio going to a foreign country and experiencing Japanese life. 

ARMSTRONG: We usually went to these R&R [rest and recreation] facilities that the navy had 

organized and set up for our use, going to the Fujiya Hotel a number of times in the shadow of 

Mount Fuji. 

BRINKLEY: Did you feel your time in the Korean War, which it's talked about as the forgotten war?

You weren't questioning the politics involved in any way, with the cold war on?

ARMSTRONG: The naval aviators that I knew, first: were determined to do a first-class job. Second, 

most of them really enjoyed the combat experience in many ways. They'd rather be flying than not 

be flying. Lastly, they questioned everything. They'd talk about the Korean action and the reason 

for things and why certain targets might be available and others not be available, the same things 

that I suppose military people, it's the kind of questions they've asked themselves and talked among 

themselves throughout history. You're very much involved in the experience and questioning it is

part of the natural things to do.

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BRINKLEY: Were you excited to return to civilian life after the war and get on with getting back to

going to Purdue and back to finishing your college degree? You must have been older now, right, 

going back to college. You were one of the youngest pilots. 

ARMSTRONG: I was twenty-two. I was really getting old. [Laughter] When I went back to

university, kids looked so young. [Laughter] 

AMBROSE: Did you have a decision to make or did you always say, "I'm going back to Purdue and 

I'm going to finish this degree"?

ARMSTRONG: Well, there were tempting options, but I decided— 

AMBROSE: To stay in the navy, for one. 

ARMSTRONG: To stay in the navy or otherwise use the skills that the navy had taught me. Those

opportunities showed up periodically, but I thought it was important to go back and finish my

education, so I put that in first position. 

BRINKLEY: Then you joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics [NACA] at that 

point. Did you then move to Cleveland [Ohio]?

ARMSTRONG: I did. That was my first job out of college. 

BRINKLEY: And that was at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory. 

ARMSTRONG: Right. 

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BRINKLEY: You just rented an apartment on your own or how did you— 

ARMSTRONG: I rented a room at first, in a private home, and later met one of the other young 

bachelor engineers there, and then we rented a small place for the two of us. 

BRINKLEY: Was this close to the laboratory or in downtown Cleveland?

ARMSTRONG: Well, it was not far from the—I don't think we were more than ten minutes from 

work. 

BRINKLEY: Did you acquire an automobile? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

BRINKLEY: So you could go back home, too, to Cleveland or to Wapakoneta, to visit family. 

ARMSTRONG: I could, yes. 

BRINKLEY: And return back. What were your general duties and responsibilities there at the 

laboratory in Cleveland?

ARMSTRONG: A dual job as a research pilot and a research engineer. Actually, I think at that point 

they called them research scientists. The flying involved doing work with new anti-icing systems

for aircraft, which we had a C-47 (or R-4D or DC-3) with various kinds of anti-icing equipment that

19 September 2001 26
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we would fly out in the worst weather we could find out [over] Lake Erie and try to pick up a lot of 

ice and find out which were the most efficient ways of shedding it. 

We also did some work in high Reynolds number, high Mach number heat transfer, and this 

project involved flying an F-82, which was a Twin Mustang, and flying out to the Atlantic Ocean 

and going to high altitude and launching a multi-stage rocket downward into the atmosphere to get 

very high mach numbers at very low altitudes, and therefore very high heat transfer rates. The nose 

cone was instrumented to measure those kinds of things. 

I did a lot of work in that area, also on my scientist or engineer job, in analyzing that data

and also designing components for advanced versions of the rockets that we were using to fire in 

those days. But I wasn't there long, and I'd originally applied to Edwards [Air Force Base,

California] for my first job. They didn't have a spot. 

Unbeknownst to me, they had transferred my application to the other NACA laboratories,

and it was as a result of that, that the Lewis Laboratory talked to me about coming up there and 

filling an opening that they had. It was the lowest-paying job that I was offered coming out of 

college, but I think, in retrospect, it was the right one. 

BRINKLEY: Were there any memorable incidents or things that occurred in your time in Cleveland 

in flying? Were there any things in your mind where you said, "I want an opportunity to test this?"

Were you anxious, with all the technology changes in aviation, were you wanting always to be

headed for the newest research that was being done? 

ARMSTRONG: The only product of the NACA was research reports and papers. So when you 

prepared something for publication, either as a principal or associate author of some sort, you had to

face the "Inquisition," which was the review of said paper by experts who were predominantly lady 

English teachers or librarians who were absolutely unbearably critical of the tiniest punctuation or 

grammatical error, and that is what NASA needs today. [Laughter] Because it really made a good

19 September 2001 27
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product. The rigor of the language, which I never mastered, but I appreciated after being exposed to

those charming ladies who were so tough. 

AMBROSE: I know exactly what you mean. That's my wife that you're talking about. [Armstrong 

laughs.] And I get asked, "What's the secret to being a successful writer?" I say, "Marry an English 

major." 

BRINKLEY: When you left Cleveland, did you drive from Cleveland to California with your car?

ARMSTRONG: I did. 

BRINKLEY: And you're married at this time, so you're driving together? 

ARMSTRONG: I was not married, no. 

BRINKLEY: Was this your first cross-country trek, seeing the Rockies? 

ARMSTRONG: No, no, because I'd driven—I first got my car when I was in the navy, so I had driven

from the West Coast across the country before, to and from. 

BRINKLEY: Where did you go immediately when you went to California? What was your

destination city? You were going to Edwards?

ARMSTRONG: Edwards, yes. 

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BRINKLEY: But you're also eventually going to the University of Southern California [Los Angeles, 

California]? 

ARMSTRONG: That was later. That was later. I went directly to my job at Edwards.

AMBROSE: So you started flying X-15s when you got there? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, at the time, I went there in '55, summer of '55, and the X-15 was just put under 

contract in November of '55. It wouldn't be completed [till] four years later. 

BRINKLEY: What were your first projects there when you got to Edwards? 

ARMSTRONG: I'd have to look in my log to be sure. First they wanted me to learn a little bit of the 

NACA techniques for data collection and so on, and they had a P-51 [Mustang] that they had very

rudimentary instruments and data-collection techniques for. They made me go out there and do a

lot of flights and practice a lot of maneuvers for test purposes, and turn in the results so they could

see whether I was starting to get the hang of it. Took me a while, but it was a good experience— 

AMBROSE: Did I hear you say P-51?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, yes. 

AMBROSE: Tell me about that plane. 

ARMSTRONG: It's no F8F, but it's not a bad airplane. 

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AMBROSE: I was interviewing one of the Tuskegee Airmen who flew P-51s in Italy, and he said, 

"That was such a honey of an airplane, if it had been a girl, I'd have married it." 

ARMSTRONG: [Laughter] It is a nice airplane, and wonderful sound, particularly when you retarded 

the throttle and you got those stacks putt-putt-putting. It was quite elegant. I enjoyed flying the

airplane. Just didn't have the performance of an F8F, but it was built [to fly at] high altitude. Well, 

it first was built to be an attack airplane, not a fighter, but a fighter version of it became 

predominantly a high-altitude escort long-range aircraft. 

AMBROSE: So, continue with— 

ARMSTRONG: Other airplanes? They flew some other jets. They had a YRF-84F [Thunderflash]. 

When I got there, I was the fifth pilot. One was going to leave. [A.] Scott Crossfield had 

announced that he was going to go be the pilot on the X-15 program, whoever won it. He was

going to go there and had agreements with all the different bidders, that if they won the contract, he

would get the job. So told them he was going to leave, and that's what gave me the opportunity to 

transfer there. 

They had five pilots, and, if memory serves, seventeen aircraft, pretty much all different. A 

lot of X-airplanes [experimental] and fighters, the B-47 [Stratojet] and R4D and a couple of B-29s 

[Superfortress], all kinds of exotic aircraft. So they let me fly a few of these at first, and as they 

became more confident in my abilities and as I became more experienced, why, they gave me more

and more jobs. 

I did a lot of different test programs in those days. That was the first time I ever flew 

supersonically, when I got an F-100 [Super Sabre], and I flew that aircraft a lot, a very nice early F100. 

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AMBROSE: And you flew a B-29?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

AMBROSE: That's a big plane. 

ARMSTRONG: We had two that we used for dropping rocket aircraft, the X-1s and the [Douglas D558-2] Skyrockets. So I, either as the right-seat or the left-seat guy in the B-29, launched over 100 

rocket airplanes in the fifties. 

BRINKLEY: A couple of your X-15 flights became pretty well known, one in which you lost your

stability and had to recover, and then there's also the mission which you ended with the longest X15 flight on record, when you had to fly back to Edwards from the south. Do you mind just 

commenting on particularly those two flights?

ARMSTRONG: I can remember several different system problems in the flights. You almost always 

had something. I can't recall the details of the SAS [Stability Augmentation System]—OUT 

problems. I would have it in my notes someplace, but I don't have it in memory. 

The [other] flight was an altitude flight. I had done a lot of the development work on a new 

type of flight control system that was installed in the number three aircraft and different from the

ones they numbered number one and number two. That system was developed by Minneapolis

Honeywell in Minneapolis [Minnesota], and I would go up there and fly an F-101 [Voodoo] they 

had outfitted with a prototype version of this system. 

Because the X-15 covered such a wide speed range and altitude range, it was impossible to 

set the gains in the flight control system to a single value that was optimum for all flight conditions. 

The one and two airplanes you had to continually be changing the gains because at one minute

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you're at Mach 1, the next minute you're at Mach 5, and the airplane responds quite differently

under those two conditions. So you were continually having to do this. So we were [trying] to ... 

develop a system that would avoid that requirement of continually changing gain. So Minneapolis

Honeywell system was designed and built for the number three X-15. 

In addition to automatically changing the gains by very unique and complex, even surprising 

method, which I won't burden you with, in addition to that, it would blend the aerodynamic and the

reaction controls when you're outside the atmosphere. So in [number] one and two airplanes, when 

you're in the atmosphere you flew with the regular center stick, and when you're outside the

atmosphere you flew with the reaction controls with a separate stick on the left side. With this

system we hoped to be able to fly the same way all the time, with one stick. 

This particular flight you mentioned, we went to somewhat above 200,000 feet, well outside 

the atmosphere, so that we were completely flying on reaction controls up there aerodynamic

controls were completely ineffective, like flying in a vacuum. 

Then we had a system limit built into the flight control system that would automatically 

prevent you from exceeding 5Gs. If you hit 5Gs, it would automatically put controls in to hold it 

below 5Gs, and one of the things I wanted to do was demonstrate that that part of the system 

worked. It had never been yet demonstrated in flight. That was my responsibility to do that. We

tried this many times in the simulator without any difficulty, but when we really did it in flight, I

couldn't [quite achieve 5 g’s], so I [kept] pulling to try to get the G limiter to work. 

In the process, I got the nose up above the horizon. We'd done this in the simulator, never 

had any problem with it. But I found when I did it in real flight, I was actually skipping outside the

atmosphere again. I had no aerodynamic controls. That was not a particular problem, because I still 

have reaction controls to use, but what I couldn't do is get back down in the atmosphere. ... I 

[rolled] over ... and tried to [drop back into] the atmosphere, but [the aircraft] wasn't going down 

because there was no air to bite into. So I just had to wait until I [fell low enough] to have 

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aerodynamic control and some lift on the wings, [then] immediately started making a turn back. 

But by that time I'd gone well south of Edwards. 

It wasn't clear at the time I made the turn whether I would be able to get back to Edwards. 

That wasn't a great concern to me because there were other dry lakes available there. I wouldn't

want to go into another one, but I certainly would if I needed to. [Eventually], I could see that we

were going to make it back to Edwards, so I landed without incident on the south part of the lake. 

BRINKLEY: Did you have to glide in at that point?

ARMSTRONG: You always do. There's no power on the aircraft, so you're always a glider after the

rocket burns out. The rocket only [burned for] a minute and a half. 

BRINKLEY: Did any of these difficulties you had at Edwards, later with Dave [David R.] Scott and 

Gemini [VIII], did any of these experiences teach you kind of grace under pressure? When you had

later problems with Mr. Scott and Gemini, how did these things— 

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. 

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BRINKLEY: Have you ever read, would you like commenting on Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? 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... 

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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?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I did. 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. 

We had the F5D aircraft, which I determined could be configured to have a similar glide

angle or lift/drag ratio to the Dyna-Soar for similar flight conditions, and devise a way of flying the

aircraft to the point at which the pusher escape rocket would burn out, so you would start with the

identical flight conditions that the Dyna-Soar would find itself [with] after a rocket abort from the 

19 September 2001 35
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launch pad. 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.] Dana and Milt 

[Milton O.] Thompson both continued [that program] after I transferred from Edwards to Houston 

.... 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. 

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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. But I wouldn't say that I knew them very well, not nearly as well as I knew the other

NASA pilots and NASA engineers, for that matter. 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-104 [Starfighter] 

or something. 

BRINKLEY: In this period, the notion of space in the ‘50s is starting to be talked about. NASA is

officially now NASA. [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower administration. 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? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, before it was Dryden, before it was Flight Research Center, it was called 

NACA High Speed Flight Station, and they were working on the problems of high-speed, highaltitude flight. 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. 

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BRINKLEY: With Sputnik, do you recall where you were when you heard about that?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. The Society of Experimental Test Pilots was holding a symposium in the 

Beverly Hilton Hotel [California] in October of '57, and I was working on—I think I may have been 

program chairman—I'm not sure about that now—for the symposium. 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." But I'm sure that was a facade behind which he had substantial concerns, because if

they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United

States, because the navigation requirements were quite similar. 

19 September 2001 38
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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 1945. 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." That was

instantaneous, that possibility. 

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-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 DynaSoar, 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

19 September 2001 39
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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.] Yeager during this period at all?

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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. [Laughter] Not necessarily fun. Survivable. 

BRINKLEY: You obviously passed all those with flying colors. 

ARMSTRONG: I don't know what the results were. 

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Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Neil A. Armstrong 

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? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, a lot of the people in Space Task Group I'd known for some years. They 

mostly came from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], although some actually came 

from Edwards. Some came from Ames [Research Center, Mountain View, California], but

predominantly Langley. 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.] Gilruth was a wonderful man, who was a superb handling-qualities expert, 

[among] the best in the world. I knew Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] and Max [Maxime A.]

Faget. 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. 

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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 

19 September 2001 43
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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. 

About the time of the early ‘60s, digital computers were getting faster and they were much 

more precise, slow but very precise. 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.] and at North American [Aviation, Inc.] and McDonnell [Aircraft Corp.] also were doing 

similar kinds of things that contribute to that. 

The result was that in the late ‘60s our computer simulations were really quite excellent.

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?

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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.] Kennedy made his great challenge to put a

man on the Moon in that speech, not just yourself, but the whole team you were with? 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.] Nixon. 

AMBROSE: Against Nixon, too, of course. Against Eisenhower, really. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

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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?" Because the president can 

proclaim, but it's the Congress that makes things happen. 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." You were a combat pilot in the Korean War. 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

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be a part of it, and what we're aiming at right now, what we're trying to do is like yesterday's

newspaper."?

ARMSTRONG: Exactly. 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, 2001]. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. Just carry on. 

BRINKLEY: Where were you when Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] made his famous flight?

ARMSTRONG: I was at Edwards at the time, but I can't remember where specifically I was. 

BRINKLEY: The same question with John [H.] Glenn [Jr.]. Do you remember?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I was at home at the time, I remember.

BRINKLEY: Watching it on the television news, reading about it?

ARMSTRONG: Right. 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?

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ARMSTRONG: Well, I was really pleased to be assigned to a flight, and quite satisfied to be in that

position of backing up [L.] Gordon Cooper. 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.] See was my associate on the backup crew. [Charles] Pete Conrad [Jr.] was 

flying the right seat in that flight. 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?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. We ate together. Not when we were in St. Louis. 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. 

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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. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

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 

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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-38, 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. 

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ARMSTRONG: Yes. 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? "Hey, you don't realize what we're dealing 

with, guys?" 

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"?

ARMSTRONG: No. It's "we" and "we." 

BRINKLEY: Can you describe a little bit your training for the Gemini VIII mission? 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

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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.] Gordon. 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 wasn’t for that particular mission they felt one of you had a better skill? It was

just to rotate you all and give you equal experience?

ARMSTRONG: Well, Deke [Donald K.] Slayton was responsible for assigning the crews, and I don't

know what technique he used to do that. 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

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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. 

BRINKLEY: With the Gemini VIII mission, how concerned were you with the success of the 

docking maneuvers, considering it this was really NASA's first attempt? 

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. 

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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." And we weren't hearing anything, so

we didn't think it was our spacecraft. 

Dave ... had the control panel for the Agena. [Through the] docking adapter [was] an 

electrical connection ... that allowed Dave to send [signals] to the Agena control system. 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. If you're in steady flight, you 

can disengage and ... predict what the relative paths will be, but when you're tumbling, [it’s] not

predictable, so it was a bit dicey. 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. 

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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. Sometimes it

could be a whole battalion and sometimes a squad or sometimes a crew of a ship or whatever. What 

I get more often than anything else is, "What were you thinking? How did you come to this

conclusion?" Or, "God, that was really gutsy of you to have done that," or so on, I'll say. Almost

always they'll say, "That's where the training comes in, and you just follow your training. And this

situation demanded that I do that, and I had learned that in training, so I did it." Now, I'm not 

putting any words in your mouth and I'm not putting those into your mouth, but in your case, it's

certainly something you thought about since. What do you attribute that decision and the action that

you took to?

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can't make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as

you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At

some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can't take the risk of pursuing my goal

further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the

folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. 

BRINKLEY: What was the reaction in mission control when you reentered communications with 

them? Were they quickly able to adapt to the situation? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, we didn't have much communication with mission control. You see, Murphy's

Law says bad things always happen at worst possible times. In this case, we were in [orbits that] 

didn't go over any stations. We were sort of out of radio contact most of the time, and when we

were [in contact], it was over the Rose Knot Victor or the Coastal Sentry Quebec, the ships that 

were at sea. They had limited ability to communicate back with mission control and transmit data

to them. So our communication was just with the people on those ships, and they were trying as

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best they could to be helpful and identify things, but it was a real challenge for them, because there

wasn't much to be gained. They could see that we had a problem, but as far as deciphering that

problem, I think they were, in general, as much mystified as we were. 

BRINKLEY: When you started heading back towards Earth, did you start worrying about now you're

going to have to land in some remote location, have to have a splashdown, or "Are we going to be

found?" I would think I'd almost be more terrified with splashing down into the ocean and being

unfound in a capsule there that might have a leak or something. Or you just keep trying to go over?

ARMSTRONG: Being an old navy guy, I much preferred coming down in the water to coming down

in Red China at the time. 

BRINKLEY: And they found you okay. Was there a lot of lag time between your rescue and pickup?

ARMSTRONG: We heard the sound of the propeller airplane—I think it was a C-54—as we were

coming down in the chute. We assumed it was friendly. 

BRINKLEY: I guess what I'm getting at is, I'm just trying to put in these moments, an X-15 when 

you're not sure you're going to be able to land. I guess the skills of astronauts is that ability to 

respond without panic in the most unbelievable situations imaginable, the thought that at any minute

you might be unconscious in space. That's happening, and at the same time you're seeing the most

spectacular scenery. I can't even imagine seeing Earth for the first time. It seems to—what a rush 

of adrenaline and emotion, and yet with all that happening, it seems the astronauts, by and large,

kept things in check. Is that a testimony to the training or the intelligence of NASA to find the right 

men who had, to use the cliché, "the right stuff"?

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ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but 

having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become

accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise ..., and particularly test pilots who get

a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I'm not saying that we did it 

perfectly in every case; I'm sure we didn't. But the experience that we'd had in flying a variety of 

different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a 

situation, ... analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you 

have to deviate from that best course. It's not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to

have worked. 

AMBROSE: It's a quite wonderful answer, and it's got me to think, the men of World War II whom

I've interviewed, almost none of them, not even the regular army officers, nobody had ever been in

anything like World War II before it came about, and they had to rely on their training, but you had 

experience and you did as you just said. So if you're leading a squad forward into an attack on a

terrain that is different from any other, there's no experience you can draw on, on that. It's got to be

training. But in your case—that's just quite a wonderful answer.

And it also got me thinking of you're afraid you're going to pass out and you're reeling 

around in space and all the rest, made me think about that guy last Tuesday on that plane that

crashed, that he sent down in Pennsylvania, and he just made this news, "Screw this. I'm going to 

die anyway."

ARMSTRONG: I think that's what happened. 

AMBROSE: "I'm going to act on that basis." 

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ARMSTRONG: Yes. There are a lot of scenarios you can conjure about that, but one of them is right, 

because they did decide to try to regain control of the aircraft, and there was some kind of a battle

between the people on board and it didn't end up the way they wanted. Could have ended up worse,

too. 

AMBROSE: Those are real heroes.

ARMSTRONG: Absolutely. 

BRINKLEY: All this training, as exciting as it is to hear your career, there's a lot of sacrifice you're 

making constantly. You're living in far flung, in the desert, in California, in Houston as it's just

starting to really grow, and difficulty— 

AMBROSE: Some people would think it's a sacrifice to live in Houston. 

BRINKLEY: And raising children, and different hours. 

ARMSTRONG: Just in August, though. 

 

BRINKLEY: Well, I would think anything's worth it just to see Earth, just to see Earth from that 

perspective for a pilot. That must have been something that's so awesome. 

ARMSTRONG: You can see these pictures [points to book The Infinite Journey: Eyewitness

Accounts of NASA and the Age of Space by William E. Burrows] and kind of get an idea, but you 

can take a picture of the Grand Canyon, too, and it's not the same as standing on the rim and looking 

down there. I think it's the same here. A picture does a great job, but it's not nearly like being there. 

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BRINKLEY: I can't imagine. [Laughter] At that moment, did a kind of calm come over you when 

you see Earth like that? Is it almost a religious experience? 

ARMSTRONG: I don't know how to answer that. It probably affects different people in different 

ways. It is spectacular, and I think everyone is touched by it when they have the experience, but I

don't know what goes on in other people's minds.

BRINKLEY: Let's move into the early Apollo program. The Apollo program started off with a 

tragedy. Can you share with us how the AS-204, Apollo 1 fire affected you personally, if you have

any memories of that?

ARMSTRONG: Oh yes, I remember it very well. I'd known Gus [Virgil I. Grissom] for a long time. 

Ed [Edward H.] White [II] and I bought some property together and split it. I built my house on 

one-half of it, and he built his house on the other. We were good friends, neighbors. Some very

traumatic times. You know, I suppose you're much more likely to accept loss of a friend in flight, 

but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test. That was an indictment of ourselves. I mean, [it

happened] because we didn't do the right thing somehow. That's doubly, doubly traumatic. 

BRINKLEY: Were you involved in the investigation of what occurred?

ARMSTRONG: No, I was not. If I remember correctly, Frank Borman was involved in the leadership 

of that investigation. 

BRINKLEY: There are some people that say that that tragedy in many ways started helping get a

better sense of focus and discipline with NASA in exactly what it would take to make a lunar 

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landing. Did you find a change around NASA in general, a more seriousness of intent, more triplechecking of everything before, taking nothing for granted?

ARMSTRONG: Partly that. Secondarily, and perhaps even more importantly, we were given the gift

of time. We didn't want that gift, but we were given months and months to not only fix the

spacecraft, but rethink all our previous decisions, plans, and strategies, and change a lot of things, 

hopefully for the better.

Same thing happened after the Challenger [51-L] explosion. They got time and they fixed a

lot of things that needed to be fixed and they never had time to do it before. So we get an added 

benefit, but we regret the price we had to pay. 

AMBROSE: Let me interrupt for this second. Test pilots are losing friends often. And you must

have lost some friends. 

ARMSTRONG: Many, many. 

AMBROSE: You hit me hard with that, "This was on the ground." Whew. 

ARMSTRONG: That's not the way you want it to happen. Not that it's any less noble. 

AMBROSE: Of course not. 

ARMSTRONG: It just hurts. 

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BRINKLEY: I'm just wondering how the Apollo missions were different from the previous ones, the

training for the Apollo program, especially since the possibility was that you're training for the

Moon. How did the training change?

ARMSTRONG: It was the same, in that it was very goal-oriented. We tried to define it as narrowly as

we [could], rather than as broadly as you would in research, because with the time constraints that

we were facing then, the desire to get there as fast as we can, we were in a race and that was very

evident to us all the time. You wanted to not be diverting your attention in any way to things that

you really did not need to worry about. You wanted to focus on all the things that you knew you 

had to do and had to master. That was the principal difference as we went into the Apollo flights. 

BRINKLEY: First, on the Apollo 1, on the tragedy, do you remember where you were when you— 

ARMSTRONG: I was in Washington [D.C.]. The President was signing the [Outer Space] Treaty 

with other nations that kept the Moon as the property of all people. It was a non-staking-a-claim 

treaty. 

BRINKLEY: So you were there at the White House? 

ARMSTRONG: I was at the White House. I think it was at the White House. I believe it was. 

BRINKLEY: At a ceremony, and then suddenly the news came through to everybody there, or on

your way out?

ARMSTRONG: I think it was after the ceremony, but I don't remember exactly. 

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BRINKLEY: You were with a group of people representing NASA that had come up to be part of the

ceremony, then you got the news, then you came back to Houston after you got the news?

ARMSTRONG: Probably the next day. That's a bit hazy. 

BRINKLEY: No, no, that's helpful to just put you in a place. How did you react when you first

learned of NASA's decision to send Apollo 8 to the Moon? Do you recall the feelings of which one 

of these was going to go to the Moon? They were talking about sending Apollo 8 to the Moon. 

ARMSTRONG: We were very excited about it. We thought it was very bold, because we still had the 

Pogo problem on the Saturn and we'd had a couple of problems with [both] Saturn V launches, so to 

take the next one, and without those problems being demonstrated as solved, and put men, a crew

on it, not just take it into orbit, to take it to the Moon, it seemed incredibly aggressive. But we were

for it. We thought that was a wonderful opportunity. If we could make it work, why, it would make

us a giant jump ahead. You remember it was kind of complex because we had to switch crews

around and switch some spacecraft and change the order completely. It was kind of a complex

process, but it showed a lot of courage on the part of NASA management to make that step. 

BRINKLEY: What was the impetus for that decision to speed it up to that degree?

ARMSTRONG: The lunar module was falling behind, wasn't ready to fly, and they were saying, 

"What can we do?" We'd been in Earth orbit. What can we do without a lunar module? I don't 

know which minds first came up with the idea of, "Well, why don't we think about a circumlunar

flight with it and leave the lunar module behind." 

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BRINKLEY: What immediate new concerns would somebody like yourself have, let's just say that

you're a pilot, a top-flight pilot would have about leaving Earth's immediate gravitational influence?

What would frighten a pilot about that?

ARMSTRONG: Well, I suppose that everyone would have concerns, but I don't know that they'd all 

be the same. People would worry about different things. I remember that one of the things that I 

was concerned with at the time was whether our navigation was sufficiently accurate, that we could, 

in fact, devise a trajectory that would get us around the Moon at the right distance without, say,

hitting the Moon on the back side or something like that, and if we lost communication with Earth,

for whatever reason, could we navigate by ourselves using celestial navigation. We thought we

could, but these were undemonstrated skills. 

BRINKLEY: That’s something to think about. [Laughter] 

AMBROSE: You've got me thinking about—you didn't have a very big window to look out of to do 

celestial navigation. 

ARMSTRONG: NASA's probably the only organization in history that's been sold a one-power

telescope. And that's what we used for doing the sextant shots and doing the star shots. 

BRINKLEY: What were your thoughts when you were finally—and where were you—I'm sorry 

sometimes I try to put things in locations personally. But what were your thoughts and where were

you when you were chosen for the lunar landing mission for Apollo 11 when you first got the word?

ARMSTRONG: It was during the flight of Apollo 8. 

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AMBROSE: While it was up there? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, and during the flight of Apollo 8 I had three or four meetings with Deke Slayton

about, first, would I take the third one down and then we had a lot of talks about who might be

available and be right to be on that crew, that sort of thing. 

AMBROSE: So you participated in a discussion of who. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

AMBROSE: It was his decision, but he wanted your input. 

ARMSTRONG: It was his decision, absolutely. 

BRINKLEY: And [Michael] Collins and [Edwin E. "Buzz"] Aldrin [Jr.] were two people you thought

would be— 

ARMSTRONG: We didn't have very many choices, but we had several other people that we could 

make available, so we spent a lot of time talking about that. 

BRINKLEY: How well—

AMBROSE: Wait. What characteristics mattered? Level-headedness, quick-wittedness, eye-hand 

coordination?

ARMSTRONG: Experience. 

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BRINKLEY: General knowledge? Experience. 

ARMSTRONG: Experience and what these people were particularly skilled at, had some knowledge

or flight experience related to those jobs and so on. There were other considerations, like if we 

switch things around too much, you're going to get other people's nose out of joint because they

stole somebody from somebody else's crew. I mean, there were a lot of typical kinds of things that 

you would concern yourself with. 

BRINKLEY: Personality?

ARMSTRONG: Sure, we talked about those things. Talked about everything that you might expect. 

BRINKLEY: You must have been quite touched that Slayton asked you. It must have made you—

"My goodness, this is happening now." The excitement, the reality that this could be the big 

moment. 

ARMSTRONG: Well, it was going to be a big moment, no matter what the flight objective was, but

there wasn't any way you could know what it was going to be at that point in time, because the lunar

module had not flown, hadn't even been in Earth orbit. We didn't know if we could communicate 

with two vehicles simultaneously at lunar distance. We didn't know whether the radar ranging

would work. A lot of things we just didn't know at that point, and I think at that point in time I did 

not really expect that we'd get the chance to try a lunar landing on that flight. Too many things

could go wrong on [Apollo] 8 or 9 or 10, whatever. 

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BRINKLEY: What was your relationship? Did you know Collins and Aldrin fairly well before this

assignment?

ARMSTRONG: I'd never worked on a crew with them [during Gemini], but part of the time I had in 

the early days of Apollo 8, Michael was first on [the prime crew of] that flight. And I had ... 

worked with Buzz [on the Apollo 8 back-up crew]. But I'd known them pretty well [before that] 

because ... we were still a pretty small group. We knew some of the people a lot better than others, 

because we worked with them a lot, spent a lot more hours in the middle of the night testing 

spacecraft. You get to know each other very well in those periods. 

BRINKLEY: Who ended up picking the names Eagle and Columbia for your spacecraft? What is the

symbolism, do you feel?

ARMSTRONG: The crew. We, as a crew, did that. We all participated. I think Mike probably was

as convincing as anyone, as we deliberated. 

BRINKLEY: Was it one of your fun recreational things, making a list of what we should call them?

ARMSTRONG: We had lots of those little things which we considered to be non-operational 

decisions. They were kind of a pain to have to deal with all those, but we had to do it. 

BRINKLEY: Did you have a name that you preferred to the Eagle and the Columbia? 

ARMSTRONG: No, I thought we came out with the right ones. 

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AMBROSE: While we're on these naming, these are famous names, of course, it was [British Prime 

Minister] Winston Churchill who picked Overlord.

1

ARMSTRONG: Was it? 

AMBROSE: And then how did they get Sword, Juno, Gold, Utah, and Omaha Beach? They drew

them out of a hat. 

ARMSTRONG: Is that right?

AMBROSE: Yes.

ARMSTRONG: Interesting. 

BRINKLEY: Okay. Once the decision had been made on Apollo 11 to be the first one to attempt a 

lunar landing, how much emphasis did the mission planners and manager place on public-relation 

issues? How much of your time was consumed with "How are we going to market this to the 

American public" for all the reasons that you’d have?

ARMSTRONG: I didn't think there was very much of that. There were some things that were done 

specifically for the benefit of giving the press the opportunity to either talk with us or take pictures

of our activities in preparation, and there were other normal things that we were doing, where some

access was granted. We probably resented that to some extent, but at the same time we recognized

that it was not an unreasonable requirement, and we were certainly willing to accommodate those 

requirements.

 

1 Operation Overlord was the code name for the World War II Allied invasion of Normandy, commonly known as DDay, on 6 June 1944. The beaches the soldiers landed on were code named Sword, Juno, Gold, Utah, and Omaha. 

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BRINKLEY: Did you find the intense media focus disrupting, a disruptive force in any way or for

your concentration or training? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, it might have been a burden if we'd had time to notice it. [Laughter] But we 

were going full blast trying to be ready on time, and we just tried to shut anything out of our mind

that wasn't focused on our principal objective.

BRINKLEY: Describe your training with the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle [LLRV] and the 

Lunar Landing Training Vehicle [LLTV]. What was it like to try to fly it, and how valuable was

that experience during your mission? 

ARMSTRONG: Start at the end and work back. It turned out to be very valuable. Originally, when 

they started first talking about lunar landing, it wasn't known what technique would be used to go

there. I was at Edwards, and we started thinking about how you would simulate flying over the

Moon. That was a natural thing for us because in-flight simulation was our thing out at Edwards. 

We did lots of in-flight simulations, tried to duplicate other vehicles or duplicate trajectories or

duplicate this or duplicate that, make something fly like something else. It was just what we did. 

Don [Donald] Bellman and Gene Matranga, two engineers, and myself, to some extent,

started talking about how you might do this. Our first idea was, if we ever needed it for training, 

was to have the spacecraft—and we didn't know what the spacecraft would look like—but have the

spacecraft carried on another vehicle and make that other vehicle be something that would create the

conditions that would duplicate the lunar gravity and lunar vacuum and so on. 

...Our thought was, when the vehicle gets built, we can put it on top of this carrier and they

can actually fly it just like they would over the Moon, and they could do it at Edwards or wherever, 

and learn how it flies. 

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Then we decided that was going to be a pretty complicated project, and what we should do

before we did that was build a little device, a little one-man device which would just investigate the 

qualities and requirements of flying in a lunar [environment]—to build the database from which we 

would build the bigger thing to carry the real spacecraft. 

So we actually devised such a craft. It looked like a tin Campbell Soup can sitting on top of

some legs, with a gimbaled engine underneath it. That became the basis for what went out as a 

requirement for bid to build the LLRV, lunar landing research vehicle. It was not known at this 

time that there would be a lunar module. It was direct descent, and Earth orbiting rendezvous and 

other strategies were still being considered. Matter of fact, the lunar module came after the lunar 

landing research vehicle. 

 Fortunately, the characteristics and the size [and] in the inertias and so on of this training 

device were very much like the lunar module. That was strictly fortuitous. So it turned out that the 

people—this is after I'd left there—Joe Walker, Don Mallick, and so on, went through the project to 

fly this thing, and finding out what the characteristics of a machine flying in a lunar environment

would be. 

... At that time it was decided to go the lunar orbital rendezvous method and build a lunar

module, and it turned out that [the LLRV] was just about the right size. After that, they made the

lunar landing training vehicle, which was designed to be even more LM-like, so it would give you a

good representation. In fact, it did. All the pilots, I think, to my knowledge, ... thought it was an 

extremely important part of their preparation for the lunar landing attempt. As you know, as you

may know, the lunar module was designed to be able to make an automatic landing, but, to my 

knowledge, no one ever did. 

BRINKLEY: So the simulation—how close a simulation was this training to the actual landing? 

Were you in for any surprises when you actually had to land it differently than the simulation?

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ARMSTRONG: It was harder to fly than the lunar module, more complicated, and subject to the

problems that wind and gusts and turbulence and so on introduce, that you don't have on the Moon. 

The systems were somewhat choppier or less smooth than the actual lunar module, both propulsion 

and attitude control systems were so. The lunar module was a pleasant surprise. 

BRINKLEY: Do you mind discussing the incident you had with the lunar landing research vehicle

when it crashed? What was your involvement in the investigation and recovery process in that?

Were you part of all that?

ARMSTRONG: Well, it's fairly well covered in a variety of documents. Just say that for an unknown 

reason, the pressurant gas—I was conducting a simulated lunar approach and lost the pressure and 

gas to the attitude control rockets, and when you lost attitude control...it diverges—not very slowly. 

And there was very little time to analyze alternatives at that point. It was just because I was so close 

to the ground, below 100 feet in altitude. So again, time when you make a quick decision. You 

departed. 

I did not participate in the investigation of that, because I had otherwise assigned duties at

the time, so others did that. We lost three of those vehicles, and it was a contrary machine and a 

risky machine, but a very useful one. 

BRINKLEY: How did your training for Apollo 11 differ from your training, say, for Apollo 8? 

Briefly, if you could, what did your training consist of?

ARMSTRONG: Well, on the training part of our activities, the addition was the lunar module, which

we had not had on Apollo 8. ... Michael Collins spent all of his time mastering the command 

module. Buzz Aldrin and myself focused a great deal of our time on mastering the lunar module, 

knowing it inside out, and then we had, of course, to learn the experiments and the lunar surface

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science work and the installation of equipment on the Moon, and all that kind of stuff. It took a lot

of time. I suppose we would have liked a little more time, but when the time came, we had to say, 

yes, we were ready to go. 

BRINKLEY: Were there any specific incidents during the training of Apollo 11 that made a 

significant impact on you or your crew members or your mission, something that occurred during 

training that when you were in space and heading to the Moon, was of extraordinarily beneficial

nature? I know there were many things that were. I just wondered if something— 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, there were a lot of complexities. We were most concerned with mastering the 

times like when we separated the vehicles, making certain that the computer knew what the 

velocities and directions of each vehicle were before and after that separation. It's a very difficult, 

complex procedure to make sure the computer isn't fooled somehow, or loses information in that

process.

Then the navigation system was dependent on the alignment of the inertial unit, and 

anytime, once you turn that loose, it drifts at a very slow rate, so we wanted to be sure that it didn't

drift outside limits. [We developed] procedures that we could use to confirm that we would still 

have adequate quality navigation information to complete the lunar landing.

I'm afraid it's a complex subject that's not easily described. But from the time we last 

aligned the platform until landing was some substantial number of hours, so we wanted shortly 

before landing to confirm that that platform hadn't drifted off too far as our attitude reference, so we

took a sun shot—had the computer point us at the sun, our telescope at the sun, and made sure that it

cut the sun just exactly through the middle. If it didn't the error would be due to the alignment...

(the drift) of our navigation system. A lot of little things like that which were extremely important 

and painfully tedious, but absolutely necessary. 

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BRINKLEY: How did you cope, as the flight day got closer and closer, with the just overwhelming 

interest that developed for the Apollo flight and the first man on the Moon, crowds of people 

everywhere, the whole world watching? Here you are, a young man from Ohio that's gone through

all these programs. How did you numb out all those external forces that are happening all around 

you? Just experience?

ARMSTRONG: I don't know the answer to the question. We tried to provide some information that

would allow that public exposure to the kinds of things we were doing, and beyond that, when those 

thing were done, we just turned back inwards to our own problems, our own schedules, our own list

of things that we had to get done and get a confidence level that we were ready to go. So we just

sort of shut that out all the time that it was outside those spaces that we specifically allocated to the 

public exposure. 

AMBROSE: To follow up on Doug's question, I don't know if it was the most anticipated event of the 

20th Century, there have been a lot of events in the 20th Century, and many of them have changed 

the world and so on. But nobody knew that [Adolf] Hitler was going to invade Poland. Hitler and 

his general staff knew it; nobody else in the rest of the world knew it. Nobody knew about Pearl 

Harbor except [Admiral Isoroku] Yamamoto and a few pilots. Nobody knew about last Tuesday 

except this small handful of people. This [first lunar landing] had to have been just about the most 

anticipated event, maybe even ever. 

A heavyweight boxing champion going into Muhammad Ali versus [Joe] Frazier, there's a

lot of pressure on those guys and a lot of buildup and they've got to learn to do exactly as you've just 

said, you've just got to freeze it out and you've got to—and you look at their eyes, these 

heavyweight boxers, and their concentration is total.

But you went through the most anticipated—because it was so anticipated, the most, and yet

what you've said reminded me of Muhammad Ali. This wasn’t a sporting event or anything else, 

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but I don't know what the hell else you do except you just try to screen it all out and concentrate—

and I'm trying to put words in your mouth, and I don't mean to do that. But—

ARMSTRONG: I think you're right. We tried to be as focused as we could, work on the things we

could do something about, and not worry about the things that were beyond our ability to change. 

BRINKLEY: If you can really capture yourself back, as the day clock's ticking for takeoff, would you 

every night, or most nights, just go out quietly and look at the Moon? I mean did it become

something like “my goodness.” 

ARMSTRONG: No, I never did that. 

BRINKLEY: Really? [Laughter]

ARMSTRONG: You know, we'd look at the books or we'd talk about strategies or "What are we 

going to do if this happens?" Or, "Are you sure you know how to handle this?" That's where we 

spent our time. 

AMBROSE: A lot of "what if" talk? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, yes, that's our business. You know, normally...a lot of unexpected things

happen, and usually they're not the ones you practice, but the fact that you practiced a lot of 

different things puts you in the proper mindset to handle whatever it is that comes along, even if it 

isn't the one that you've experienced before. And I think that happened on a lot of the flights. 

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BRINKLEY: Did you develop a relationship of studying the Moon, the maps of the Moon as they

were at the time, and learning everything you could about its makeup? Part of your reading, if

you're not just looking at the Moon, you had to become an expert on the Moon? Or was it that

important?

ARMSTRONG: You know, we'd been doing that part of it now for three or four years, working on 

just background information. In the last months before flight, we didn't do much of that except to

look specifically at our landing areas and landmarks and things that we would actually be using or

to which we would be referring during the progress of the flight. Those things we looked at, but the

broader picture we didn't spend much time on... 

BRINKLEY: I was curious if you had any geologic—I guess I was getting to this on the question

about the Moon itself, but did NASA require geological training for the Apollo 11 mission so you 

could notice things that you might see? Or was—

ARMSTRONG: Yes, we spent a lot of time in geology training, predominantly before we had a flight

assignment, not exclusively before, but predominantly before. Had very fine group of instructors, 

very knowledgeable about the subject of astrogeology or selenology or various things that might 

most be applicable to what we might encounter on the lunar surface. 

Some had the opportunity and the interest to become very good geologists. I never put

myself in that category. I enjoyed geology, and it was certainly appropriate to understanding what

we were seeing on the surface of the Moon, but our time was quite limited there. We had a lot of

things to do. Had I been a better geologist, I might have seen some things that were important, that

I missed. If that's true, I regret it. But in the time we had available, I think everyone did a pretty

credible job of being able to see things that were important and know which samples to pick up and 

be able to describe to people back on Earth what they were seeing. 

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Certainly the knowledge of the lunar surface has increased immensely as a consequence of 

those observations and those samples. Of course, as you know, that work continues yet today in

labs around the world. 

BRINKLEY: Was there a debate whether you would find water on the Moon? Was that something

that was— 

ARMSTRONG: There was not an expectation that we would, and I don't remember what our thinking 

might have been, looking for things that might disclose the possibility of either past or hidden water. 

I just don't remember that very well. 

AMBROSE: Let me ask a layman's question on this. Now I understand there is some feeling in 

NASA that there may be water. The question is, how could there be water without clouds? If 

there's water, there's going to be clouds, it seems to me. 

ARMSTRONG: The thinking is, if it's in perpetual darkness, that is, in a polar crater or low spot so 

that it never sees the sun, sublimation rates will be extremely low, and there well might be bodies of 

[ice] there. There's some spectral data that indicates that that may be true. But it's not yet proven, to

my knowledge. 

BRINKLEY: Was there anything about the takeoff Apollo 11 launch that was different from the

feeling that—I'm talking about just the immediate seconds after launch, that was different than other

missions you were on? 

[This question may have been directed toward the Saturn launch from Earth. 

Note: The answer below applies to the launch from the Moon.] 

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ARMSTRONG: Yes, it was one—well, a couple of things. One is, the acceleration is at a very low G 

level. Starts at—well, I don't know, I think less than half a G. I've forgotten exactly, but it appears

to be quite rapid. But it would be substantially less than the acceleration of a rock that you'd drop, 

so it's kind of a slow ascent. 

The thing that surprised me—and we knew this ahead of time—the attitude control in space,

to pitch the craft you use a—say you wanted to pitch up, you would use a down-pointing rocket in

the front and an up-pointing rocket in the back. That would pitch the craft up. But we didn't want

any rockets firing up when we're accelerating away from the Moon, because that would be wasting 

fuel. So we would only use the down-pointing rockets because they would be adding to our

velocity, would be fuel-efficient. 

But the result of that is that there's a substantial rocking motion. As you pitch forward, the

pitch-up thruster fires, lifts your nose up, then it stops, then the nose falls down again and the rocket

fires as though you're in a rocking chair. 

Now, we knew this, but the simulators never included this in their representation of the 

motions. So consequently, it's quite, I thought, an unusual motion, and perhaps I should have

expected it, but we'd never seen it in our preparation. 

BRINKLEY: How serious a concern was there over contamination on return to the Earth? Was that

something not just NASA, but yourself—how serious was that concern?

ARMSTRONG: I don't know that I can say. As you know, the National Academy of Science was 

given the task of evaluating the potential danger from lunar contaminants on the Earth, and it was 

they who, I think, said the chances are extremely unlikely, and they gave a statistic which I won't 

attempt to quote, because I'm sure I'd have it wrong at this point. 

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Nevertheless, they decided to go ahead and have a decontamination facility and put us in 

quarantine for a period of time equal to the expected incubation time of any disease that could 

provide an epidemic, twenty-one days from the time we left the surface of the Moon until they let us 

out. 

As you know, they used samples of the soil and put it in [earth] soil that plants were 

growing in and exposed it to animals and various kinds of things to see if there were any reaction 

whatsoever. I don't know to what extent they found anything, but certainly if they found anything, 

it wasn't serious. After a couple of flights with that quarantine, they discontinued that protection 

system. 

BRINKLEY: During the actual landing on the Moon, when the program alarms sounded, what was 

your reaction? How did you respond?

ARMSTRONG: You're always concerned when any kind of alarm comes on, but it wasn't a serious

concern because there wasn't anything obviously wrong. The vehicle was flying well, it was going

down the trajectory we expected, no abnormalities in anything that we saw, other than the computer 

said, "There's a problem, and it's not my fault." 

The people here on the ground were right on top of that, and of course, the computer

continued in a contrary manner periodically all the way to the surface. But my own feeling was, as

long as everything was going well and looked right, the engine was operating right, I had control,

and we weren't getting into any unusual attitudes or things that looked like they were out of place, I 

would be in favor of continuing, no matter what the computer was complaining about.

BRINKLEY: As much as you've talked about your experience and duty in propelling this mission 

forward, there's a real chance of death and failure here, and not just failure for you—and death for 

yourself and failure for the United States, the whole world watching this kind of mission. 

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ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

BRINKLEY: Did you read lately that they released that Nixon had William Safire write a death letter 

about what would happen if you, the three astronauts died on this mission? Did you get a chance to

see that document? 

ARMSTRONG: I have heard that, but I have not seen it. 

BRINKLEY: You just have to numb yourself from that kind of concern at the grandness of all this?

Or is this with—I guess what I'm saying is, is Apollo 11 due to the, as Steve said, it was perhaps the

most watched event in the history of, certainly the century, of the world. How does—you didn't

treat it differently mentally at all, as you would something—one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 

people over a decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the

results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our 

job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we

could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to

that. 

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters

would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, "Go talk to

[General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. 

That's where the real story is. This is a team effort," and he would never allow it to concentrate on 

him. It was inevitable that it was going to happen, but that was his—and then, after VE [Victory in

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Europe] Day, Churchill arranged a big event in London that Eisenhower went to to be awarded, I 

think, the keys to the city, that said you're now a citizen of London, and all this concentration on

Eisenhower. And in his speech he talked about the closeness between Abilene [Kansas] and

London, which was a nice touch, the way we all believe in freedom and we're going to fight for it, 

and so on. But he also said, "If I'd had the wisdom of Solomon, if I'd had the character of 

[Abraham] Lincoln, I never could have done any of this by myself. This is a team effort." 

And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so 

long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 

mission. 

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability

specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, 

which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every 

component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about 

[1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, 

[substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have. 

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench

building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking

the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going 

to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have

hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an 

improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. 

AMBROSE: Let me invite you to also make an observation, if you wish. It is a part of the popular

culture that anytime a government gets involved in a project, they're going to screw it up. Talking 

to Moira [Buckley Ambrose, his wife] this morning, I was thinking about some of the great events

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of this century, or the Twentieth century or the Nineteenth century, the atomic bomb, the 

[Meriwether] Lewis and [William] Clark expedition, the Louisiana purchase, Dr. [Jonas] Salk. It's

almost always the government that gets behind this, and you certainly, or Apollo 11, were at the

very cutting edge of an enormous spear that was built by the government. I would just wonder what

comments you might or might not have on that. 

ARMSTRONG: When I was working here at the Johnson Space Center [JSC], then the Manned 

Spacecraft Center [MSC], you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting 

time was, because people didn't leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they 

worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o'clock or seven

o'clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went

home. So four o'clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn't see anybody leaving.

Everybody was still working. 

The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the

government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which 

everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and, three, fascinated by the job they were 

doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a 

retail store, you're going to win. 

BRINKLEY: Probably the question you must get tired of the most is the most famous words of the 

twentieth century, and that is "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," and whether

you've answered this question so many times before, but do you find it curious that NASA didn't

script a line for you to say, that they allowed you the kind of personal freedom to—you know, I

almost—if I had put myself in NASA's position, I would almost want to say, "Neil, here's the line 

we'd like you to say," and yet they gave you that freedom. 

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ARMSTRONG: Well, in retrospect, they might have wished that. [Laughter] But the late Julian 

Scheer, who really led the NASA relations with the outside world in many ways, was absolutely

adamant that Headquarters never put words in the mouths of their people, not just astronauts, but

anybody, that they let people speak for themselves. They made it known sort of what the party line

was and what the NASA position was, but beyond that, they never, to my knowledge, controlled the

... public statements of others. Certainly they insisted, in the case of the flight crews, that they not

be told what to say, that their statements be their own elocution of what they saw and what they 

wanted to say. As far as I know, that prohibition was never violated. 

BRINKLEY: And with you actually crafting that line, that was just something you were thinking

about as the moment approached when you knew this was going to happen, did you think about in 

your head? Or did you think maybe, "I should just say 'Man is now on the Moon,'" or did you 

realize—I think that's a magnificent line. I think most people do. Everybody, I really think, does. 

How did that come about? Were you—had some time while you were getting prepared for the—

you know, to leave the Eagle that you knew that that would be the proper line, the line you wanted

to say?

ARMSTRONG: Yes, I thought about it after landing, and because we had a lot of other things to do, it

was not something that I really concentrated on but just something that was kind of passing around 

subliminally or in the background. But it, you know, was a pretty simple statement, talking about 

stepping off something. Why, it wasn't a very complex thing. It was what it was. 

AMBROSE: As Doug said, everybody in the world knows the line, and everybody in the world are so

grateful that you didn't say, "That's one giant leap forward for the United States." 

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BRINKLEY: I guess now you must realize how often that news clip of you descending, the television 

image. When you see that now, this many years later, that image, does it still affect you in any way, 

like, "Wow, that's me back then?" 

ARMSTRONG: No. No. 

BRINKLEY: When you crafted the line when you were coming down, were you—I mean, how much

of a concern is that? I mean, you had a lot of things running—also you're hoping just to get that

footprint put on the Moon. 

ARMSTRONG: I didn't think of it as being as important as others. I didn't want to be dumb, but it

was contrived in a way, and I was guilty of that. 

BRINKLEY: When you were on the Moon, there are not that many photographs or you on the Moon. 

There seem to be much more of Buzz Aldrin. That's because you were taking more of the 

photographs?

ARMSTRONG: He's a lot more photogenic than I am. [Laughter] I had the job of taking a lot of the 

pictures. That was part of my assigned responsibility. There was a short time in the middle where I

transferred the camera to Buzz and he took some pictures, and we each had assigned objectives that

we were supposed to catch. I think we probably caught a fair share of the things we were supposed 

to take pictures of, and not too many really bad shots. [Laughter] 

AMBROSE: I'm struck by—coming down here, there had to be a lot of wonderment, a lot of

excitement as you took that last step onto the lunar surface, then you guys went to work. Insofar as

there are critics, they said, "Why did we send men to the Moon? We should have sent up machines

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to gather up things." I'm struck by something you said earlier when you were talking about 

geology. There is no computer in the world that can match the human eye and the human brain.

The things that you saw you hadn't expected to see, that's worth it. I mean, no machine in the world

can do that. 

ARMSTRONG: Machines are getting better and better, but fortunately, there's still a place for us 

homo sapiens, some reason for us to continue to exist. [Laughter] 

BRINKLEY: I guess we should mention—we jumped the story a little—but when the landing 

occurred, you had to pilot to make sure it didn't go into a crater. How damaging would that have 

been if you couldn't and you landed in—would that have been the end of the mission?

ARMSTRONG: We could have tried to land there, and we might have gotten away with it. It was a 

fairly steep slope and it was covered with very big rocks, and it just wasn't a good place to go. You 

know, if I'd run out of fuel, why, I would have put down right there, but if I had any choice of a

more promising spot, I was going to take it. There were some attractive areas far more level, far 

less occupied by boulders and things, a half mile ahead or so, so that's where I went. 

I wanted to make it as easy for myself as I could on that first—there's a lot of concern about

coming close to running out of fuel, and I was very cognizant of that. But I did know that if I could 

have my speed stabilized and attitude stabilized, I could fall from a fairly good height, perhaps 

maybe forty feet or more in the low lunar gravity, the gear would absorb that much fall. So I was 

perhaps probably less concerned about it than a lot of people watching down here on Earth. That's

not to say I wasn't thinking about it, though, because I certainly was, but I thought it was important 

to try to get it down smoothly on the first try. We didn't know how that landing was actually going 

to go until that point. So I wanted to make it as gentle as I could. 

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BRINKLEY: Was there anything about your Moon walk and collecting of rocks and the like that 

surprised you at that time when you were on the Moon, like, "I did not expect to encounter this," or, 

"I did not expect it to look like this"? Or included in that, the view of the rest of space from the

Moon must have been quite an awesome thing to experience. 

ARMSTRONG: I was surprised by a number of things, and I'm not sure—I can't recall them all now. 

I was surprised by the apparent closeness of the horizon. I was surprised by the trajectory of dust

that you kicked up with your boot, and I was surprised that even though logic would have told me 

that there shouldn't be any, there was no dust when you kicked. You never had a cloud of dust

there. That's a product of having an atmosphere, and when you don't have an atmosphere, you don't 

have any clouds of dust. 

I was absolutely dumbfounded when I shut the rocket engine off and the particles that were 

going out radially from the bottom of the engine fell all the way out over the horizon, and when I

shut the engine off, they just raced out over the horizon and instantaneously disappeared, you know, 

just like it had been shut off for a week. That was remarkable. I'd never seen that. I'd never seen

anything like that. And logic says, yes, that's the way it ought to be there, but I hadn't thought about

it and I was surprised. 

BRINKLEY: And the collection of rocks that you gathered and things were pretty much what you 

expected? There was no—nothing that— 

ARMSTRONG: We didn't do a very good job, and I particularly didn't do as good a job as I would 

have liked to have done in collecting rock samples. It was at the end of our [time] period on the

surface, ... we were running low on time, and the geologists, properly, would have liked us to

authenticate each sample with photographs from different directions before selecting it so they can 

identify it. I thought, since we didn't have time to do it, the better part of valor was to just pick up

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all the different kinds of samples I could as quickly as I could, stick them in the bag and get them

back in the craft, and button up shop. 

BRINKLEY: When the American flag was planted on the Moon and the famous photograph of Buzz 

Aldrin was taken and other places, but just reflect on how important did you feel at that point and

any—I know it's so hard to put you back in that moment, really, but this was now the mission was 

accomplished, the United States had gone to the Moon, that all this work had counted, in other 

words, a sense of patriotism, the flag there of the United States. On the other hand, you're looking 

at Earth as one unity, and there's sort of a pride of American nationalism but also that sense of, 

"Jeez, we're all on that little planet in the sky together." 

ARMSTRONG: There were a lot of proposals for what to do on the lunar surface by different people. 

Some people thought a U.N. [United Nations] flag should be there, and some people thought there

should be flags of a lot of nations. In the end, it was decided—and I think the Congress had 

something to do with it—that this was a United States project and we're not going to stake a claim 

here, but we ought to let people know that we were here and put a U.S. flag. 

My job was to get the flag there. I was less concerned about whether that was the right

artifact to place. I let other, wiser minds than mine make those kind of decisions, and I had no 

problem with it. 

BRINKLEY: When you finally—I guess what was the most harrowing part of Apollo 11 was getting 

the lunar module off of the Moon to reconnect with Michael Collins. Is that the part of the mission 

that you were most concerned about? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, I'll take that in two steps. Fortunately, there were no really harrowing parts of 

the flight. The most difficult part from my perspective, and the one that gave me the most pause,

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was the final descent to landing. That was far and away the most complex part of the flight. The

systems were very heavily loaded at that time. The unknowns were rampant. The systems in this

mode had only been tested on Earth and never in the real environment. There were just a thousand 

things to worry about in the final descent. It was hardest for the system and it was hardest for the 

crews to complete that part of the flight successfully. 

But having said that, it wasn't too hard, because six crews were successfully able to do that.

So perhaps my concern at that point was more than it should have been. But it was the thing that I

worried about, just because it was so difficult. Walking around on the surface, you know, on a ten 

scale, was one, and I thought that the lunar descent on a ten scale was probably a thirteen. 

[Laughter] 

BRINKLEY: Steve, do you have anything on the Moon?

AMBROSE: I wanted to ask, I have heard or read somewhere that there are only two man-made 

objects on Earth that can be seen from the Moon, and that one of these is the Chinese [Great] Wall 

and the other is the Fort Peck Dam [Montana]. 

ARMSTRONG: I would challenge both. We could see continents, could see Greenland. It stands out, 

just like it does on the globe in your library, all white. Antarctica we couldn't see because there

were clouds over Antarctica. Africa was quite visible, and we could see sun glint off a lake. It

might have been Lake Chad. I'm not certain which lake it was, but we could catch that reflection, 

sun reflection.... But I do not believe that, at least with my eyes, there would be any man-made 

object that I could see. I have not yet found somebody who has told me they've seen the Wall of 

China from Earth orbit. I'm not going to say there aren't people, but I personally haven't talked to 

them. I've asked various people, particularly Shuttle guys, that have been many orbits around China

in the daytime, and the ones I've talked to didn't see it. 

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AMBROSE: I've read interviews in which astronauts have used the word how "fragile" it is, looking

at the Earth. It's a lovely phrase. 

ARMSTRONG: And I think everybody shares that observation, and I don't know why you have that 

impression, but it's so small, it's very colorful—you know, you see an ocean and gaseous layer, a

little bit, just a tiny bit, of atmosphere around it, and compared with all the other celestial objects,

which in many cases are much more massive, more terrifying, it just looks like it couldn't put up a 

very good defense against a celestial onslaught. 

BRINKLEY: When you came back, and you had the quarantine and—well, let me—I mean, did you 

realize your life was going to be changed forever now, you were now the first man on the Moon, 

that the President of the United States would want to talk with you and they'd want you to tour

American cities and travel the world? 

ARMSTRONG: I don't know how much I—I don't remember how much I might have expected that, 

but in Gemini, President [Lyndon B.] Johnson had sent me on a goodwill tour of South America. 

So I'd had some experience with what the nature of those kinds of activities were. And of course we

were so happy that we had completed that flight and essentially got almost all our objectives on it, 

and it allowed the guys in the next flight, subsequent flights, to do far more aggressive science and 

exploration and so on. So we didn't care what they wanted us to do. We'd have been pleased to do

anything at that point. 

BRINKLEY: You’ve had what I consider to be one of the most fascinating parts about your career is

why you were the absolute right person to be the first person on the Moon, because you've kept a 

kind of dignity to your mission, which is, it seems to me, that you did your job and then you did not

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keep in the face of the public eye. Armstrong is known with Apollo 11 all over the world, but I 

don't think anybody in a grocery store would recognize you in America, and that's something you

must have had to work at to achieve. 

ARMSTRONG: Well, I recognize that I'm portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my

perspective it doesn't seem that way, because I do so many things, I go so many places, I give so

many talks, I write so many papers that, from my point of view, it seems like I don't know how I

could do more. But I recognize that from another perspective, outside, I'm only able to accept less

than 1 percent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I'm not doing anything. But I

can't change that. 

BRINKLEY: I've seen a thing of the number of honorary doctorates you're offered and how few you 

take, and you really are very select in what you do. And you also seem to— 

ARMSTRONG: It's very difficult to turn down Sister Frances Marie [Thrailkill, College of Mount St. 

Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio]. [Laughter]

BRINKLEY: You can turn Harvard [University, Cambridge, Massachusetts] down, but not Sister

Frances Marie. [Laughter] 

Well, after that, did you play any role—well, after you left the astronaut corps, shortly after

Apollo 11, you took a position as Associate Administrator of Aerospace. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes, Deputy Associate Administrator of Aeronautics [at NASA Headquarters,

Washington D.C.]. I went back to aeronautics, from whence I came. 

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BRINKLEY: Yes. Was that something that you had premeditated all along, that, "When I'm finished

with this mission, I'd like to get back to doing that," or did it evolve after seeing a bit of the—you 

wanted to get back to your roots in a way?

ARMSTRONG: No, no, no. It didn't come that way. It wasn't anything I desired. It was the

Administrator [asking] if I would help him in that area, and it was an area I felt comfortable with

and knowledgeable about, and I was glad to have the experience, although I think everybody should

have to go to Washington and spend a little time, just to see how difficult it is to run this country

and do penance there. 

It's a frustrating place for me because so much coordination and greasing the skids goes on 

in Washington that by the time you've gotten around to everybody, the first guy's forgotten what the 

subject was. It's really hard to get things done there, and it's amazing to me that anybody can get

things rolling from Washington, just because of the nature of the place. 

AMBROSE: Let me ask—we're both academics. That's where I've made my career. That's where

Doug has made his career. You've been an academic. Tell us about that. How did you decide to go

to [University of] Cincinnati and do you enjoy the teaching and the research, and what part of the

academic life was what you expected it to be? 

ARMSTRONG: I'd always said to colleagues and friends that one day I'd go back to the university. 

I've done a little teaching before. There were a lot of opportunities, but the University of Cincinnati 

invited me to go there as a faculty member and pretty much gave me carte blanche to do what I

wanted to do. I spent nearly a decade there teaching engineering. I really enjoyed it. I love to

teach. I love the kids, only they were smarter than I was, which made it a challenge. 

But I found the governance unexpectedly difficult, and I was poorly prepared and trained to

handle some of the aspects, not the teaching, but just the—universities operate differently than the 

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world I came from, and after doing it—and actually, I stayed in that job longer than any job I'd ever

had up to that point, but I decided it was time for me to go on and try some other things. 

AMBROSE: Well, dealing with administrators and then dealing with your colleagues, I know—but 

Dwight Eisenhower was convinced to take the presidency of Columbia [University, New York, 

New York] by Tom Watson when he retired as chief of staff in 1948, and he once told me, he said, 

"You know, I thought there was a lot of red tape in the army, then I became a college president." 

He said, "I thought we used to have awful arguments in there about who to put into what position." 

Have you ever been with a bunch of deans when they're talking about— 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. And, you know, there's a lot of constituencies, all with different perspectives, 

and it's quite a challenge. Nevertheless, it's one of the strengths of our country. 

AMBROSE: Oh, I love being a teacher, and I never would have done it any other way. But I

remember once being with some colleagues, and they were complaining about, you know, we're not

getting paid enough and they're overworking us, and so on, and I just exploded. I said, "Listen,"—

this was at LSU [Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana]—"you've got the state as 

your patron, and they're paying you to teach nine hours a week on exactly what you want to be

doing, what you want to be teaching, and they're paying you to read exactly what you want to read, 

the literature of your field. And you're telling me that you're being browbeaten?" They never could

get the point of what I was saying. 

BRINKLEY: I was curious, did you play any role in planning at all after Apollo 11 in Skylab or the

Shuttle, Space Station, or even future missions to Mars? 

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ARMSTRONG: Not very much. I was on the Apollo 13 Accident Board, and during that time period 

was when I was invited to go up to Washington. So then I was sort of overwhelmed by my new 

duties in that new role, which I enjoyed, but gave me little time to be concerned about the problems 

of the day at Houston. 

BRINKLEY: Would you like to see us go to Mars? 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

BRINKLEY: Do you think it's possible?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. I think it's doable now, but very expensive and probably not within reasonable

expectation of being able to be budgeted in the near future.... I guess the great hope is that we have 

a breakthrough someplace that would make that problem much less awesome than it appears at this 

point. 

AMBROSE: Or space out the time a bit. It's not the cold war anymore, and it's not a race. So you 

could space out the time frame and cut your annual cost quite a bit by doing that, I would think. 

ARMSTRONG: Still, it's still a big number— 

AMBROSE: Still a big number, yes. 

ARMSTRONG: And— 

AMBROSE: It's a big effort. It's got to be done. 

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ARMSTRONG: I hope. 

BRINKLEY: Were you disappointed, Mr. Armstrong, after Apollo 11, after the halcyon days of the

Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and now it's the early Nixon years and you're going to the 

Moon, that the Nixon administration started cutting NASA budgets and there's starting to be due to

Vietnam and other concerns in society? After Apollo 11 and all that interest, it started becoming

almost commonplace to walk on the Moon and for NASA to go, and the program kind of petered 

out and lost interest instead of continuing to ride the wave. What do you attribute that to?

ARMSTRONG: Oh, I think it's predominantly the responsibility of the human character. We don't 

have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a 

difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the

future. We're very "now" oriented. I'm not surprised by that. I think we'll always be in space, but it 

will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases it will take 

external factors or forces which we can't control and can't anticipate that will cause things to happen 

or not happen. Nevertheless, looking back, we were really very privileged to live in that thin slice 

of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he

might go. So I'm very thankful that we got to see that and be part of it. 

BRINKLEY: Do you ever hope to go back in space? Is that something that you'd like to do one more

time after watching John Glenn go back up recently as a—

ARMSTRONG: If they offered me command of a Mars mission, I'd jump at it. [Laughter]

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AMBROSE: But I read in one of the interviews that it's going to be two and a half years, was one of

the astronauts'—and that the proper models to look at are not Apollo 11, but look at Lewis and

Clark or Vasco da Gama. 

ARMSTRONG: Exactly. That's awfully good advice. Yes. Yes. Exactly right. 

BRINKLEY: We're almost finished here, but I did want to touch on the presidential commission on

the Challenger, and you were one of the commission members picked. How and when were you 

asked to participate on that?

ARMSTRONG: It was very soon after the incident, and I can't remember the exact date, but it was a 

matter of a few days later. The president was very interested—I shouldn't say "interested." He was

content with the use of presidential commissions to look at various issues, and sort of in keeping 

with that viewpoint that he had on how to look at various problems, he jumped on the chance to use 

a presidential commission. 

He selected Bill [William P.] Rogers to chair it and asked me to vice-chair. I had enormous 

admiration for the way the chairman conducted his job. He sort of had a very good appreciation of

Washington and what the needs of the public and the press and the Congress and all these

constituencies who each had their own interests from different angles, so he was able to understand 

what their needs were and try to find ways to accommodate them, and asked me to head the 

investigation of the accident itself. So he was "Mr. Outside" and asked me to stay inside and come

up with what happened. 

We had 120 days to come out with a report, which we met. It was a very hard-working 

commission. I think we came up with the right answers. It's never been effectively challenged. It 

was a national tragedy, but we learned a great deal from it, and the subsequent Shuttle program has 

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benefited greatly from the things that we learned and the things that we were able to do in

improving the Shuttle during the time period that it was being redesigned. 

BRINKLEY: Were you very familiar with the Shuttle program and the inner workings of NASA

before you joined the commission, or had you kind of punched out into the private sector so much 

that you weren't that much on top of what was happening?

ARMSTRONG: I didn't know the inner workings of the Shuttle's systems, components. I knew the 

program in a macro sense—objectives, techniques, and general strategies. But I didn't find that to

be an extreme disadvantage. We had the availability on the commission and reporting to the 

commission of very knowledgeable people from every aspect of the technical side of the business, 

and it didn't take the commission long to get up to speed and understand what the elements of the 

problem were. 

BRINKLEY: The Apollo program closed in 1972. Is it surprising that we haven't gone back to the

Moon in so long, and did you ever imagine that it would take so long for people to return, for us to

return? 

ARMSTRONG: Well, had you asked me that question thirty years ago, I probably would have said, 

no, I can't imagine that we'll make such a small number of steps over the next three decades. But

looking back on it, I find it fairly understandable in the light of conflicting requirements for

resources that the country has. It has a lot of other important challenges. I suspect that we'll get 

some chances. 

And there have been remarkable things done. If you look back and see where we've gone in 

the unmanned side, the probes that we've investigated the outer planets and comets, landed on an 

asteroid, just what opened up with the Hubble [Space Telescope] and others, the known volume of 

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our environment by millions of light years, it's remarkable what has happened in the last thirty 

years, and I think we'll get some more chances. 

BRINKLEY: In Ohio do you have your own telescope? Do you ever look up and use your telescope 

in a recreational kind of way?

ARMSTRONG: [No, but I often enjoy looking at the night sky.] 

AMBROSE: When you were talking about how remarkable it was, this has been pretty remarkable,

too [holding book Shuttle-Mir: The United States and Russia Share History’s Highest Stage by 

Clay Morgan]. That's a political development that would have been unpredictable in 1969. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. That's quite true. That's quite true. 

BRINKLEY: Well, in closing here, I just wanted to ask you, what do you see for the future of 

manned and unmanned space flight? Do you have any feelings of where it's headed? Maybe a 

better question is, where would you like to see manned and unmanned space flight head, to keep

pushing the envelope?

ARMSTRONG: There's an increasing interest to go back to the Moon. There's been enough time now 

that there are a lot of persuasive reasons why we could benefit from a return visit. 

I personally hope that we'll go on to Mars. I think that will create enormous excitement and 

increased understanding of at least the near part of the solar system. 

But I can't predict what will happen. What happens is going to depend on a variety of forces

and functions that can't be controlled. It's like herding cats.

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BRINKLEY: Although you're an engineer and proud of it, do you ever use your imagination for 

reading science fiction books and trying to envision what it might be like 1,000 years from now or

500 years from now or 200, or do you try to always deal with what seems to be the next step in the 

practical world? 

ARMSTRONG: I'm having a little trouble with next month right now. [Laughter] It's fun to look

ahead, but candidly, I don't have the ability that some of those wonderful science fiction writers of

past generations had. They turned out to be quite perceptive in many ways, and I wish I had a

fraction of that ability. 

BRINKLEY: Are there any of them in particular that you read, like Jules Verne, or somebody that

you learned to admire, in retrospect, their writing?

ARMSTRONG: Well, I have a complete set of H. G. Wells, and in reading it now, I find I'm less

enthusiastic about his writings than I was when I was a much younger man. But nevertheless, the 

creative ideas that they have put forth, that have caused a thousand ... of other people to think in

new ways, has been very important to the progress of civilization. 

BRINKLEY: Do you ever get—well, when these movies come out, like Star Wars or any sort of

space films, are you attracted to watching them just to see, you know, how they're portraying space

in the future? Do you take the time to, out of your curiosity just to see, look at those sort of things?

ARMSTRONG: I thought 2001, which was many decades ago now, was a very fine film, very 

authentic in terms of the way space looks and the way vehicles move and trajectories and so on. 

Many of the more recent space fiction movies have much less realism than 2001 did. They're more

exciting, but not realistic. 

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AMBROSE: Students ask me, "Doc, there's nowhere left to discover. We've had Lewis and Clark,

we've had [Ferdinand] Magellan and so on," and I say, "Listen, the Twenty-First Century is going to

be the great age of discovery. Ninety-seven percent of the ocean's floors have never been looked at. 

Where Bob [Robert D.] Ballard is right now is just the cutting edge of it, and Mars, and then who 

knows what after that? The Twenty-First Century is going to be the great age of discovery." 

ARMSTRONG: I think you're right. I hope you're right. My expectation is that we're not going to run 

out of new stuff to look at. 

AMBROSE: No. Ninety-six percent of the world's plants have never been described by a botanist.

ARMSTRONG: I didn't know that. 

AMBROSE: It's just amazing. You want a cure for Alzheimer's? It's growing out there, right behind 

us. We just haven't discovered it yet. [Laughter]

Well, a little quick story on that. Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in for every disease

of mankind, there's a cure growing here on Earth, we've just got to find it. So one of his instructions

to Lewis was, "Tell us what those Indians use for medicine." Lewis' mother was a folk doctor, 

herbs and so on. So Lewis, from Ft. Mandan [North Dakota], the first winter out, wrote back to

Jefferson to report on what had been discovered so far. He said, "When the Indians get a toothache,

they chew the bark of the willow." The bark of the willow is aspirin. That's all in the world aspirin 

is, is the bark of the willow.

ARMSTRONG: I didn't know that. 

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AMBROSE: Yes. So I know there's a plant out there that's going to cure Alzheimer's. I just don't

know what the name of the plant is. 

BRINKLEY: I guess we should, I think, get ready to wrap this up. My last question is, you seem to 

have always gone through your life in your own kind of very methodical way, and you've had a lot 

of people that have been part of your team or that you've worked with. Has there ever been an 

individual who's really had a major effect on the way that you've decided to look at life and the way 

that you want to live your life and carry yourself, whether as a teacher or father or—?

ARMSTRONG: I think it's the summation of the influence of twenty or fifty people, each of which 

was significant, but not overpowering. 

REBECCA WRIGHT: Well, if you don't mind, before we end, one of the efforts of our team as a team

is that usually, because we're all oral historians, at the end of our oral history, the person who is

facilitating usually asks the rest of the team members [if they have questions], because sometimes 

some issues might come up that we didn't get a chance to [talk about] — would you object if I asked 

our space historians if they have a question or two for you?

ARMSTRONG: Okay. 

CAROL BUTLER: I have a couple of questions, actually. Early on, you mentioned that during the

space program you were 98 percent focused on your job. I was curious as to how much you were 

aware of situations in the country around you as you were going about your daily job—so much was

going on in the ‘60s—and whether that impacted you at all.

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ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware of the traumas that the country was experiencing at that time, 

and I believed that those problems were ones with which I was poorly equipped to contribute. They

were outside my experience, outside my training, and I've always believed that however attractive it

might be to get into areas that are interesting, you shouldn't do it if you're not qualified. 

BUTLER: The other question that I wanted to follow up on was that you had mentioned that you 

were involved for a short time in the Apollo 13 investigation before you went to D.C. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

BUTLER: So I wanted to follow up and ask, first, while the mission was going on, if you had any 

involvement during those efforts, and then what your specific role was in that investigation. 

ARMSTRONG: I think everybody that was here was involved, not just crew members, but there were

people all over the center that were involved in many ways. I was involved in simulator work and

in several different things that we were trying to do, alignments and burns and things that were 

outside our experience base in the past. There were a lot of people doing that. 

I'm reminded of the Apollo 13 movie, which I thought was an exceptionally good movie. I

thought in all the essential elements of that flight and its aftermath ... were accurate. They did take

literary license, and appropriately so, because there's no way an audience can follow as many people 

as we had working on the problem. You have to cut it down to some ten or fifteen people so that

the audience can remember who's doing what. I thought that they did a good job of that. But each 

of those one individuals who was doing something in the movie was probably really fifteen people

doing that kind of stuff. 

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BUTLER: And after the accident, then, what was your involvement in the investigation as to what 

happened and what were some of those findings?

ARMSTRONG: As I said, in the middle of that investigation I got transferred out to Washington and 

no longer participated in the day-to-day activities of that commission. But they had good people,

and they did come up with the answers. 

BUTLER: And had quite a successful rest of the program.

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

BUTLER: That was all the questions I had. Thank you. 

KEVIN RUSNAK: I had a couple, too. While we're talking about the investigation board, you gave us

an overview of your involvement with the Challenger presidential commission, and one of the

things that's been said about that is the Challenger investigation was very different than Apollo 1 

because that was sort of an internal investigation— 

ARMSTRONG: That's right. 

RUSNAK: —and they kept the politics out of it. A lot of the NASA guys we've talked to said that

was really a better way to do it than the way Challenger was handled. Could you give us your

perspective, as someone who was around for both of those events?

ARMSTRONG: I agree with those gentlemen that it would have been preferable to do it internally, 

and I think it could have been done well. But the reality was that there was a national involvement. 

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It was so striking. It was on the news. Everybody in the country saw that happen or at least saw the

replay of it in the news that day, and the possibility of keeping it internal was remote. I'm happy 

that the commission took a diligent responsibility and acted, I think, in a responsible manner and did

a credible job of spending a lot of money in finding out what happened, and it probably was well

spent. 

RUSNAK: Well, during the course of the investigation, you probably had a good chance to see what

NASA was like in the mid-1980s internally, how they were functioning. Can you compare that to

the NASA you had left over a decade earlier, in the 1970s?

ARMSTRONG: NASA, like many organizations, [has] a continually evolving character. It centralizes

and then decentralizes, and centralizes then it decentralizes. In my recollection, it probably went

through five cycles like that. When the new guy comes in, why, he thinks we ought to do

something a little different than we have, and changes the reporting relationships or the 

responsibilities' allocation. It's no different in the commercial world. They do similar things in 

industry, go through the same cycles, and that's neither right nor wrong. It's just the way things are.

RUSNAK: Well, then I had a few specific questions. One of the gentlemen we had in here some 

months ago was Bob [Robert L.] Carlton, who was a flight controller, who was on the LM Control

console. He was recalling the lunar landing and the events shortly thereafter where he and his

colleagues were having quite a few moments of tension because there was a problem with the LM

descent engine. There was a piece of ice stuck in one of the fuel lines. So they were thinking some

real problems were going on. I was wondering if you could give us your perspective, what you 

knew sitting there in the LM, and what you knew of what was going on on the ground. 

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ARMSTRONG: Well, we were spring loaded to the suspicion position at that point. We recognized 

that right after landing, where you had to do thermal conditioning surrounding the craft, that it 

hadn't seen before with all that hot surface underneath it and cold on top, that there were going to be

all kinds of conceivable difficulties with plumbing and valves and pressure systems, relief valves 

and so on. So we were ready to leave if we had to, and we were listening carefully to their

instructions. But I can't remember the details of what we were thinking at that point in time.

RUSNAK: Were you at least concerned enough that, "Yeah, we might actually have to abort"?

ARMSTRONG: We ... were quite cognizant of the fact that we might have to do that, and we were

prepared to do so, and we were going through all the procedures that would allow us to do so if we

were required. But I think the problem was isolated in a reasonably short period of time, as I

remember, and the pressure was off then to really start sweating out a takeoff. 

RUSNAK: As I said, I think the guys on the ground ended up a lot more nervous than you and Buzz

did in the LM. 

ARMSTRONG: Yes. 

RUSNAK: Once you got out of the LM and you're going down the ladder, you're in this environment

that requires you to have a space suit. I mean, you've got to have this protective garment on to keep

some internal pressure and protect you from micrometeoroids and heat and the cold of space, all of 

that. How did actually functioning in the suit compare to how you were trained for, and what were

some of the difficulties in operating on the Moon in this, learning to walk around, pick up rocks, all 

of that? 

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ARMSTRONG: Everything was easier than expected. It was easier to walk. It was easier to maintain 

balance. We didn't have as much trouble with the temperatures inside the suit as we thought we

might have. I can hardly say good enough things about the way the suit and the backpack, the socalled PLSS [portable life support system], operated, fully up to our expectations and better. 

RUSNAK: Had you had any input in the development of the suit, other than your usual training, that

sort of thing? 

ARMSTRONG: Not so much in the development of the suit, no, but we had participated in a lot of

testing and spent many, many, many hours inside our suits before flight, in the chamber and under

vacuum and temperature and all kinds of conditions. So we felt pretty comfortable and confident 

that the suits were going to work okay. 

RUSNAK: And on all the flights, I don't think they had a single problem with any of the suits, at least 

that was mission-critical. 

ARMSTRONG: I'm not aware of any serious problem. 

RUSNAK: Just one final question for me. As our colleagues here pointed out earlier, you seem to

take great pride in being an engineer. So I was wondering, through your career as an astronaut, how

much time did you find to actually be able to do engineering types of things, to get your hands or 

your mind around these engineering sorts of problems that you would be facing, either as a flight

crew member or in some other technical assignment?

ARMSTRONG: I'd say throughout my seventeen years at NACA and NASA, a very large percentage

of my time was involved in real engineering work throughout that entire time period. I found that

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other former engineers who had become senior managers at NASA still occasionally tried to be 

engineers now and then. [Laughter]

RUSNAK: I guess a follow up to that just before we go on. Did you have much work with Max 

Faget and everyone over in Engineering and Development Directorate? 

ARMSTRONG: Some of the guys in the [astronaut] office had more work with that directorate than I 

did. My collateral responsibility usually was in the simulation and training area, so I spent more 

time with FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Division] than I did with Max's gang, but others spent a

lot of time there. 

RUSNAK: That was all I had. Thank you. 

SUMMER CHICK BERGEN: I have a couple. If I may ask you to reflect again on Gemini VIII, in

history we find that Gemini VIII tends to be overshadowed by later things, the Gemini program as a 

whole even, but as we've talked to so many people, engineers and people that worked in mission 

control, I oftentimes ask them about the—they cite Gemini VIII as probably the closest call, 

overshadowing even Apollo 13. 

In light of what was accomplished in that mission, the docking, which was so important, and

then the critical incident of the nearly fatal craft malfunction, yet the human element able to 

overcome that malfunction, what were the consequences of that for the Gemini program and later

program and maybe the lessons learned from that important mission?

ARMSTRONG: Well, the requirement was to fix that so it didn't happen again, and they did alter the

systems such—they changed the wiring on the control system so that they could isolate all that kind 

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of systems and allowed a more deliberate ... diagnosis of the problem. So that was the hardware 

side. 

To me, it re-emphasized the fact that you've got to expect some of these things are going to 

go wrong, and we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected. And you just hope

those unexpected things aren't something that you can't cope with. 

So throughout Apollo, everybody I knew was always saying, "What if?" and, "Is it possible 

that this could happen?" And, "What will we do?" Just that process of continually questioning built 

your confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes along. 

BERGEN: I have one more, a little bit broader-perspective question. I'm from a generation that has 

no living memory of the Apollo program. What we learn is from watching the videotapes, what's

written in history. You've talked about how you've enjoyed teaching students. What would you 

like people of my generation and those to come, that don't have a memory of the space program

during the time you were involved, what would you like for us to take from that part of history?

ARMSTRONG: I can't be critical of your generation, because I recall when I was a teenager, a boy, I

thought that everything that happened before I was born was old ancient history, and I really didn't 

think I needed to know all about it. But with respect to aviation history, I really enjoyed it. I really

learned all I could. But I wasn't a big fan necessarily of everything else. So I can't be critical of

some other generation. I suspect you'll come along, given a little chance. [Laughter]

WRIGHT: If you have no more, I certainly would like to thank you gentlemen, on behalf of the

Johnson Space Center and Mr. [George W. S.] Abbey, for taking your day and spending it with our

project. You certainly have made an historic impact on our project, and we thank you all for your

time. 

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[End of Interview]

[Also assisting with the interview was Sandra Johnson of the Johnson Space Center Oral History

Project team.]

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