28
“These brave men, Neil Armstrong and
Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope
for their recovery. But they also know
that there is hope for mankind in their
sacrifice.”
It never needed to be read; Aldrin and
Armstrong made it back to the command
module and to Earth, for Armstrong, in
particular, to be feted around the globe
and to bear the burden of fame until his
death, aged 82, in 2012.
He declined probably thousands of
media interviews and appearances. Inter-
viewing him, until he agreed to co-operate
with Hansen’s biography, was hard work.
Historian Douglas Brinkley quizzed
Armstrong in 2001 and put to him: “As
the day clock was ticking for take-off,
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’?”
“No, I never did that,” replied
Armstrong.
Many of those involved in the making
of First Man, including director Damien
Chazelle, actor Ryan Gosling (Armstrong),
scriptwriter Josh Singer and Claire Foy
(Janet Armstrong), were not born when
the Apollo missions were occurring.
“I knew the textbook narrative of the
mission to the moon – the success story
of an iconic achievement, but little else,”
admits Chazelle.
“Once I started digging, I grew
astounded by the sheer madness and
danger of the enterprise, the number of
times it circled failure as well as the toll it
took on all involved.”
As a historian, Barry is familiar with the
bright and shiny version of the Apollo
missions.
“From the perspective of 2018, people
tend to look back and go, ‘Oh, Nasa had
an infinite budget, everybody in America
was in favour of the space programme, it
was one triumph after another, the Soviets
dropped out and it really wasn’t a race to
the moon anyway’.
“Today, we have an image of astronauts
as knights in shining armour. They are
bulletproof, they are magic, they have the
perfect family and here’s Neil Armstrong
doing his pizza-chef thing posing for Life
magazine [in March 1969] with this per-
fect background story.”
In reality, says Barry, Nasa’s budget was
already falling as the Apollo missions wereGETTY IMAGESunder way, there was never unlimited
FIRST MAN ON THE MOON
public support and there was most defi-
nitely a race with the Soviets to land on
the moon.
“These guys were under a lot of stress;
they paid a price in terms of friends that
they lost and marriages that broke up and
other difficulties. I think it’s useful for
people to see [in the film] that the same
kinds of things we see today, with people
under pressure and facing hard times,
happened in Apollo.”
Nasa itself, with its contract with Life
magazine to photograph the astronauts
and their families, probably did more
than anyone to create the image of the all-
American heroes with perfect families.
As Barry alludes, the reality naturally
was different, and the new film, although
focusing on Nasa’s preparation for a moon
landing, captures Armstrong’s personal
story, while also contributing to newfiction.
A
s a pilot, including flying missions
during the Korean War, a test pilot
and then an astronaut, Armstrong’s
life was punctuated by the deaths of
his friends and colleagues. That did not
stop with the Apollo programme. Apollo
missions were designed to build up com-
petence in engineering design and crew
experience until Nasa felt ready to attempt
the first lunar landing. The challenge had
been set, in 1961, by US President John
F Kennedy, who thought America couldachieve it “before this decade is out”.
The programme began tragically when
astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and
Gus Grissom were training in the com-
mand module of Apollo 1 on January
27, 1967. Preparing for a launch in the
coming weeks, they were in the capsule
in an atmosphere of 100% pure oxygen
when a spark, probably from a wire that
had frayed from technicians getting
in and out of the capsule, ignited the
module; it burst into flames, killing all
three.
White and his wife, Pat, had been close
in every sense to the Armstrongs. They
were not only next-door neighbours
in their new subdivision in Houston,
but their wives supported each other
through the fears and absences that the
space programme generated. It was Janet
Armstrong who was waiting outside the
Whites’ house when Pat arrived back from
her daughter’s ballet lesson to hear that
“something had happened”.
But White was not Armstrong’s greatest
loss. In the spring of 1961, Neil and Janet
Armstrong’s younger child Karen, then
aged two, was diagnosed with a malig-
nant brain tumour. She made it through
Christmas that year but succumbed the
following month. In his book, Hansen
says that Armstrong was away on “work-
related travel” in the final week of Karen’s
life. She died on January 28, the day of the
couple’s sixth wedding anniversary. The
biography records that a family friend,
Grace Walker, said that at Karen’s funeral,
“Armstrong was very stoic and showed
little emotion, ‘in contrast to Janet, who
was visibly shaken’. Grace thought about
hugging Neil but stopped herself. ‘I thinkYounger child Karen
was diagnosed with a
malignant brain tumour.
She made it through
Christmas that year
but soon succumbed.
Dangerous enterprise:
Gus Grissom, Ed White
and Roger Chafee; right,
Neil Armstrong.