An Audience with Neil Armstrong (2011 interview)

I thought there was an element of risk in pinning my hopes on Neil Armstrong doing this, so when we finally caught up it was really incredible. I knew something that a lot of people didn't know about Neil Armstrong and that was his dad was an auditor, I think for people who are leaders and for people who aspire to be leaders, listening to Neil Armstrong is much better than doing any mba educational program that exists in the world today, we choose, but because they are tough, Neil Armstrong is very warm. Welcome to Australia. Thank you so much.

The words determination and destiny keep coming to me and the way your life unfolded. Sometimes I'm not really sure of the order of those words, but certainly your first air show at two years old. Your father. I took you on your first airplane flight with your dad at age seven and your pilot's license at age 15 tells me a lot about determination. Yes, I had been fascinated by the world of flight when I was an elementary school student and determined that somehow I wanted to get involved in that and as I learned more about aviation I thought that design would be the epitome of an aeronautical career to be a designer and that's why what I struggle with and in terms of um, your mom and your dad.

Stephen and Viola, your father was a public servant in Ohio and traveled a lot in his capacity, what did your parents collectively teach you and give you as a foundation? Well, they, my father, was an auditor and he audited the books of uh, county governments throughout the state where we lived in the state of Ohio and uh, so we were a transient group, my father moved the family along with him while moved around the state when we were young and uh and uh, I think they were very accommodating, they allowed me to pursue my own interests and uh, and I'm forever grateful that they gave me that freedom.

They didn't try to dictate to me what I should do or where I should go and your childhood, but rather what fascinates me. I wonder about this and we've had these conversations before about his fairly heightened fear of death as a child and his concern that if a pet died he didn't really want to face it, he's not necessarily what the man would appear to be. who would take all the risks he took in adult life, I mean, that's pretty fascinating. Well, I think a lot of younger people are uncomfortable with the idea of ​​death, whether it's themselves, their family members, or their pets, and I've shared that concern. about facing the reality of death and it took me a few years to get around that worry, so of course Neil, you went, you flew 78 missions in the Korean War and again you took some risks, what are your reflections? about the risks that you and your colleagues had to endure, the risks in combat are substantial and I believe that, in general, they are greater risks than those that I faced in my work as a test pilot or in my work as an astronaut and the consequences are severe and there is a good side and a bad side, the bad side is that you lose colleagues and that is painful.

The good side is that you create very strong bonds with your surviving colleagues and those bonds exist throughout your life and I value them. very high experiences because they build a lot of character, they build a lot of backbone and you are a better person for having learned to endure that environment and that situation and those risks, so Neil, your test pilot career, um, was, you know, like everything else in your career is distinguished, but tell me what a test pilot feels and what it feels like to get on those planes like you did so many times, the euphoria in the moment the responsibility in which the test pilot is solving problems, is looking for deficiencies or deficiencies or barriers to substantial safety and increased performance in flight and your job is to identify those problems and help find a solution, so it's a problem-solving job and you're always working with the unknown and I found that a fascinating part of In my professional career, I really enjoyed the opportunity to contribute in some way to the solution of the problems that the history of humanity has been slowly increasing the limits of knowledge and knowing more and more and more and I feel comfortable there within, but at the limits it is always going to be an absolute challenge and up to those limits your first flight, one of your first flights in your b29, now I am an accountant and I can do the numbers and if one in four engines works, I would be worried and that's without any pilot experience, what happened that day and how did you function through the problems?

I was a pilot of one of the two pilots of the B-29 that took a rocket to an altitude where the plane would be released and it would go to do the we were conducting tests and we were providing the service to take the rocket plane to a starting point and we were somewhere above 30,000 feet when the regulator on one of the propellers failed and the propeller started to move away, going faster and faster and faster and of course at some point it's going to explode, so we had the option to slow down to try to reduce the speed of the propeller or accelerate to be able to release the rocket, we chose the ladder, we dropped the rocket and almost instantly.

Instantly after, the propeller exploded and the blades sheared off the rightmost engine, sheared off engine number three, sheared off the fuselage and engine number two and left only engine number one running, uh, that's an awkward position, uh, one outside. of four, but fortunately we had a lot of altitude and we had a big dry lake bed not too far away where we could land so we could make very smooth turns, make very smooth turns and maintain power and something like that. make a gliding approach towards the landing area now the second pilot then his control cables had been cut by the propeller so his controls were of no use, I still had control so I was flying the plane and he was thinking and When we got to the ground and looked at the plane afterwards, we discovered that my cables had also been cut, but there were still some strands of the cable left, so we were very lucky to have survived that extraordinary situation and look at another example.

I guess it was in lunar training when you had to eject from the rocket within seconds of your life, as I understand it, take us through that, well, we needed something to simulate landing on the moon, the moon has no atmosphere, so that you are flying in a vacuum and the gravity is much lower, so the characteristics of the flying machine in that environment are very different than here on Earth and we felt that we had to understand those variations and be able to feel comfortable flying the lunar module to uh. to the surface of the moon in real conditions, so this device provided very good training and experience in that mode, unfortunately it was a complicated machine with many different rockets and cables and nonsense of all this and, consequently, it was subject to a malfunction and one of those malfunctions happened to me one day and I lost my control system and you know very quickly that it's time to go and separate from your friend and I did and the ejection seat worked very well fortunately. and I bit my tongue, but that was the only real damage and as I understand it, as legend goes, you know it's a term I like to use when I talk to you, you basically went back to work, well, yeah, there was work.

It has to be done in the office, so I thought I'd better move on. I'm trying to align that with the modern era of occupational health and safety and it's just not working for me right now. Neil, that's extraordinary. We have some images that I want to show you. John F. Kennedy was talking about the mission and about the vision. This was in the early 60's, but why do some say the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? We may well ask why climb the highest mountain why 35 years ago we flew across the Atlantic why Rice plays Texas we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because are easy but because they are difficult because that objective will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and abilities because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one that we are not willing to postpone and one that we intend to win and the others too, the extraordinary time in the US at that time, you had that guy's president, you had the politics, the science, the community, everyone singing for this vision, everyone singing for that plan, how was that, well, you have You have to appreciate the context.

The Soviet Union had successfully put, first, an artificial satellite into space and, second, had put a man into orbit around the Earth that we were following. We had just put one Alan Shepard flight on a short 20 minute suborbital flight to about 100 miles altitude. and coming back to the ocean there was never a person in orbit and now the president was challenging us to go to the moon, the gap between 20 minutes, a 20 minute up and down flight and going to the moon was something that was technically almost unbelievable. . but NASA was a new organization that was only about four years old.

At that time they had thought a lot about this and identified the moon landing as perhaps the only way we could catch up with the Soviet Union and as the president said, we were going to get into this game he was saying this is a new ocean around this It is the new ocean and we must sail on it and we must be leaders in it and that captured the imagination of the people because at that time we had the ideology The competition between East and West and the concerns about the future of all humanity on Earth, so it was something very big, not only technically, but sociologically, and the challenge was enormous to achieve the agreement. from uh, not just the government but the willingness of the people to accept that idea was quite surprising, sorry for my crude summaries, but someone is outlining all the Apollo missions in advance saying, well, if we're going to get there, it's going to happen. to take so many missions and you knew that you were involved in the missions, you fundamentally didn't know at that time who the person would be who would ever walk on the moon, if he ever walked on the moon, and how fluid that was the plan. .

It was very, very smooth at first, the first Apollo spacecraft was in a pre-flight test with the crew in the module on top of the rocket on the Kennedy Space Center pad, but then it was at Cape Canaveral, the cabin was pressurized to the a. atmosphere with pure oxygen a little and a spark ignited some of the flammable material in the cabin. The hatch was an inward opening hatch and the crew was unable to open it quickly and the crew died in the fire. It was a tragedy and it was going to take us a long time to recover from that, we clearly had an unsafe spacecraft, we had to redesign and rebuild it and it was a two year delay, now it was only four years until the end of the decade at that time.

So is this it? We are losing half the time in the race to the moon, but there was a benefit. Every advantage is accompanied by a disadvantage. And every downside, every cloud has a silver lining, so we were looking. The silver line, the silver extraction that we got was that we could. We had two years to re-upgrade the spacecraft, not just the fire resistance, but a lot of other things in the system that really needed to be improved so we could attack them and make a gigantic improvement. In the quality of the spacecraft design and its construction, all the flights changed a little during the evolution of those flight periods, the second flight, after the first flight, was an 11-day flight to ensure that the command had systems that would last the duration of a lunar mission, so they flew 11 days and that worked well and the next flight was going to have a command module and also a lunar lander, but the lunar lander was delayed and not They were not ready for a flight in 1968, so they made a very bold decision: they decided to take the next flight on a third flight of the big Saturn rocket.

The first two had not been manned and were not perfect, but there were some problems that they solved not only. taking the third one and flying it with humans on it, but flying it around the moon, an enormously bold decision, but one that took our program much further because now we knew that we could sail to prove that we could sail to the moon and that we could communicate. at the distance of the moon and if they could, the crew could take pictures of possible landing sites and see what might be a good plan for future flights.

It is extraordinary to hear all this and know in what short period of time this knowledge is known. There was growth going on, oh it was multiplying like mushrooms, yeah I'm surprised you were ever able to sleep so what, yeah what happened, so I mean how long was it before you knew the probability or the team knew the probability that eleven was going to do it? It was going to be Earth and well, I was the deputy or backup commander for the Apollo 8 flight around the moon and as soon as they took off, I was at work, of course, and the boss called me in a few days later and He said: would you take the third flight down the highway? 11.

There were no eight in the air, nine were in the hangar, it had not yet begun to fly.You came back and you know there is someone to talk to and you didn't say it. Look, I'm busy when you took the call I made and who he was. It was the president of the United States who was speaking from his office in the White House and, uh, a very, very nice congratulatory message from the president on behalf of everyone who had worked on the project and uh and that was a surprise, a very pleasant surprise and uh and uh again there was work to do, so I went back to work and then you on takeoff to return a problem with the ignition that required some rudimentary innovation, yeah, uh, when you're in it with the suit space and it's pressurized, it's very cumbersome, you're like Frankenstein's monster and you have this big backpack right in the back. and if you turn that backpack it swings and uh and my colleague and one of these movements he hit the circuit breaker panel with his backpack and and many, many, many circuit breakers there, many, so he could have He picked something that wasn't very important but it crashed against the circuit breaker that controlled the screen motor that put us back into orbit.

I think when we recognized it we thought it would probably hold up, but maybe we'd better see if there's a way to increase our chances of making sure the circuit breaker didn't trip automatically, so we grabbed a piece of plastic pen, a type of ballpoint pen. magic marker, and we invented a little crutch to keep it in place, I think if they had asked any of the 400+ million. that they were seeing that they're about to insert part of a pin to make sure they got home, they wouldn't have believed it, they wouldn't have believed it, you know, I really believe that if we hadn't done it, It was still okay, but it was just insurance .

It's good to have a little bit of insurance when landing, of course, there was a celebration that, to a large extent, I think never stopped and since then there have been people who have claimed that that. that never happened and imagine that after all the effort and all the passion there are still people who would say that, what was your initial response to that when I spoke to you you said something fascinating about the number of people who were involved in that project, well, I don't remember what I said, but people love conspiracy theories, I mean they're very attractive, but it was never a concern for me because I know one day someone will fly back there and pick it up.

I left that camera and uh, so I'll be sure that well, look, I remember it and I think it was a fantastic response, uh, and that was because I'm hanging every word you say, I almost see it, I remember it and it was about the fact that eight hundred thousand NASA employees couldn't keep a secret, that's true, and knowing how people work, I think it's so compelling that I can't tell you, but in that conversation you also alerted me to the fact that Someone has gathered the most wonderful combination of its landing with Google's lunar mapping, which side by side clearly supports not only that, but every crater, the flag, there has been no real estate development, we just decide when we look at the images, it's an opportunity , Yeah come on. just take a quick look at it this slide shows the trajectory to the surface the actual power descent of the lunar module to the surface took 12 minutes and 32 seconds and this is just the last three minutes, the part that's really interesting as you get closer the surface of the moon now on the left screen you will see the original 1969 film we took from the window of the lunar module Eagle and on the right side you will see what the crew saw looking out the window in front of them now.

There is a shaded area there that shows the exact duplicate of the area on the left so you can compare the craters and see if they are duplicates of each other. The one on the left took place 42 years ago. This image on the right took place. for the last two years, okay, we've been descending, I should tell you that you'll hear the crew member talking, they're my co-pilot giving altitude and descent rates and you'll hear the people in the background, talking from mission control. on the ground we have been descending at about 2,000 meters per minute now we are below a thousand meters altitude 33 degrees uh, he is my uh my computer tells me that he is taking us to a landing right on the right side of that big crater in the upper left corner, the slopes are steep and the rocks seem very big, the size of the cars is certainly not a place I want to land, so I took control manually from the computer, autopilot and flew.

It's like a helicopter heading west to try to find a softer, more level landing spot. The computer complains from time to time you will hear caution alarms 1202 and 1201, which tells us that the computer is a little worried about its operation, but everything looks fine and the people in mission control tell us that we can keep looking down, at this 30 meter crater and about eight meters deep. It looks like a real geological trailer. A treasure. I want to go back there and see it if I ever get the chance. I'm on foot, we're looking for a smooth place beyond the crater.

I see a smooth spot right near the top of the screen. It seems like a good place to be and I'm running out of energy. fuel I have less than two minutes of fuel going down below about 70 meters now on the left side you will see in the old movie that the rocket engine is starting to kick up some dust from the surface to run the fuel for 30 seconds. get it down to the ground here real soon before we run out well, the picture on the left is more accurate, but there's more dust there. You see the shadow of my landing leg breaking the surface in the blowing dust, that's amazing and actually having you. to comment on it uh in a relaxed state, much more relaxed than you would have been 42 years ago, is very, very special, so Neil, since those wonderful days of being an astronaut, you have had a long and successful career, as that includes being a university professor president of a large wealthy company a series of presidencies on topics related to aerospace and all kinds of things how difficult or how easy it was to make the transition of your life from your early 40s being so focused and so deeply into their I drive into the next 40 years, well, the theme has always been similar.

I have designed by nature and throughout these years I have been dealing with engineering topics and I always feel fascinated by whatever we are investigating, uh, from an engineering perspective. From my point of view, I have to say that from time to time I miss the excitement of being in the cabin of an airplane and doing new things, but I have come to accept that and have found a lot of satisfaction. in problem solving, outside, outside the plane and in terms of this year, of course, it's a wonderful celebration of the anniversary of the landing and at about the same time, NASA made some people feel quite sad, certainly from the point of view of Australia and I'm sure.

From America's point of view, sad statements about what your plans are for the future, how do you feel about that? Well, I am substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency that are, in fact, directed by the administration and we have a situation in the states where the executive branch and the legislative branch, the White House and Congress are at odds over which should be the future direction and therefore they are playing a game and NASA is the shuttle they are fighting back and forth as both sides try to get NASA on the right path so I, along with many Of my colleagues, we have engaged in these discussions and presented our perspectives to the American people through newspaper editorials and to Congress through testimony and hearings and to the administration by correspondence that we are trying to take the best path here.

I think we have made some progress, but there is still a lot to do and I will continue to step into those roles. because this battle and I've mentioned it to you before when I'm in the US, I'm stunned by the world of instant news that's been created there, short-term thinking is kind of like a NASA project if you look at what made you as a country in the '60s, it would give you something to aspire to, that's beyond tomorrow, you know, beyond tomorrow and almost redefining the country again and giving it a good vision, plus NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students. to do well and to achieve everything that they can achieve uh and it's uh it's sad that we are steering the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation that it provides to young people and that is a big concern to me and that will never It's a good thing to do, but right now in the US, we wish you the best in that challenge and if there's anything we can do nationally to help you, just give me a call, thank you. do my bit, I will, I certainly will, it's your message that is so profound, Neil and I, and I want to tell you on a personal level, you know, I made some efforts to meet you and ask you to come to Australia.

I did it apparently because your courage together with your colleagues, your vision, your president of that time and everyone was an example of what we could do as a human race and you did it, then you became a very, you remained very humble man and there is So many things you need to keep talking about to ensure that today's leaders truly see what it is to be a leader. I know you don't like to talk about yourself, that's why I do it, but you really like it. You will play an extraordinarily important role in the next 20 years and I am so convinced that is the case that I will fly with you in a glider on your 100th birthday because I know you still do.

It's the risk I run. willing to accept because you have a lot of work to do

neil

armstrong

you are a wonderful man thank you very much thank you very much thank you you know

neil

armstrong

the courage the vision the process drives the ability the belief the dream that we were I will not miss Neil Armstrong's talk at our 125 anniversary. It was like sitting with my father telling me stories about his life with such enormous humility that I had never seen before. There are a whole host of special moments, but not the biggest ones. I mean, when we were saying goodbye to him at the airport and I had a couple of security guys who were a little bigger than me and when Neil was walking towards the door, he turned around and waved at the three of us and I kind of put my arms up. . around these very big boys and they said guys that it was for us and that it was a great moment, but they are of difficult quality.