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The Neil Armstrong I Knew

Neil Armstrong was the brave sort who would always take a chance if the reward was great enough

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As official engineering editor for the Mercury and Apollo manned-mission postflight reports, I knew most of the first three dozen astronauts. No one was braver than Neil Armstrong. He was an X-15 test pilot for NASA’s predecessor, NACA, and that rocket plane was very difficult to fly. He flew in Gemini and trained hard to land on the moon during Apollo. He had life-threatening incidents in all three but survived handily. He came within a few seconds of being asked by ground officials to abort his historic first lunar landing because of a computer problem. Fortunately, a computer geek from MIT was in the Mission Control and saw the warning lights in Neil’s spacecraft as inconsequential. At a 20th anniversary celebration of the lunar landing near NASA in Houston, I asked Neil if he would have aborted when commanded to do so by ground controllers. He gave me that famous Armstrong grin, saying “We’ll never know, will we?” That answer, to me, was tantamount to saying he would have taken over manually and landed successfully. He might never have flown again because of his insubordination, but he would still have been Neil Armstrong, the greatest hero of our times. He was the brave sort who would always take a chance if the reward was great enough. I’ll miss him … especially that toothy grin.

John Boynton, Rockland ME