How Neil Armstrong Cheated Death Multiple Times Before Apollo 11 Mission.

According to legend the family name Armstrong was bestowed upon a Celtic

clan after a leading member displayed an amazing feat of heroism in battle using

just one of his arms if that's true it might suggest where centuries later

Pioneer pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong got his sense of adventure

from. 

By the time of the first manned moon mission Apollo 11 on the 22nd of

July 1969 he'd already cheated death on at least seven occasions in

vehicles provided to him by the American government. Neil Alden Armstrong was

born in Ohio on August 5th 1930 of Irish Scottish and German stock, he got the

flight bug when he attended for Cleveland Air Races at age 2 and he took

to the air for the first time when he was 5 he got his student flight

certificate age 16 and made his first ever solo flight before he could even

drive a car. 

His first brush with death came in August 1951 when the 21 year old

Armstrong was serving with the US Navy in the skies over North Korea. He'd first

flown a Grumman F9F-2B Panther just 5 days earlier, renowned as the first

U.S. jet fighter that operated well from aircraft carriers but his plane number

125122 was hit by anti-aircraft fire whilst he undertook a low

bombing run, he struck a pole sticking up out of the ground and it took off a

section of his right wing aiming to crash land in the sea, he ejected just

before losing control but high winds blew the ejector seat back onto short he

was rescued unharmed and went on to fly nearly 80 more missions during the

Korean War. 

Armstrong left the Navy in August 1952 and studied his Bachelor of

Science and Master of Science degrees achieving some of the highest marks ever

noted. In 1955 he applied to join the high-speed flight station at Edwards Air

Force Base operated by Annette the National Advisory Committee for

Aeronautics NACA which later became NASA in 1958.

He took off on his first experimental flight on his very first day to Edwards. His next near-fatal

experience came in March 1956 and he was co-piloting of Boeing b-29 Superfortress

that was carrying a Douglas D558-2 skyrocket slung under its fuselage.

During the flight number four engine of the Superfortress suddenly shut down. Now

if this occurred it was normal practice to lock the propeller to stop it from

spinning out of control and to prevent the risk of disintegration from over

speed but on this occasion he refused to lock. The B-29 couldn't land until the

skyrocket is launched, they had a choice speed up to release of a rocket and risk

damage in the plane or slow down to save the propeller. They chose to speed up and

launch the rocket just as the rocket launched the propeller exploded

launching its blades through for number three engine on through the fuselage and

into the number two engine on the other side of the plane.

Amazingly with just a few control cables still connected to Armstrongs side of the cockpit the B-29

managed to limp back to base with just one of its four engines working.

Armstrong's first journey in a rocket plane nearly ended in disaster - he took

off in Bell X-1 in August 1957 and all went well until he tries to land. As

he touched down the front landing gear disintegrated and he had no option but

to guide the plane into a controlled crash once again if you walked away

uninjured. The fearless Armstrong evaded death three more times in 1962.

In April of that year he flew a North American X-15 hypersonic rocket plane to an

altitude of 207,000 feet the highest any human

had reached but a fault in the control system sent the X-15 into a nose

dive and he struggled to regain control because at those altitudes Aero

dynamic design has almost no effect. Armstrong missed his landing strip as he

overshot it at 2,000 miles an hour and finally got the X-15 onto the ground

some 40 miles where we should have landed. Four days later he was in trouble

yet again this time alongside fellow test pilot icon Chuck Yeager the pair

flew a Lockheed T-33 shooting star into a dry lakebed with the aim of seeing

if it to be used as an emergency landing site, it couldn't

heavy rains meant that the lake bed wasn't dry and the plane got stuck in

mud.

Armstrong and Yeager later tried to blame each other for the incident. By the

time Armstrong joined the U.S. space program he'd already lived through at

least six near-death experiences however he very nearly didn't make it

into NASA because the application to join arrived after the deadline

fortunately a friend recognized his paperwork and slipped into the received

pile when no one was looking and so in September 1962 Armstrong became the

first civilian member of the astronaut corps.

The Gemini 8 mission of March 1966 was his first space mission and America's 12th manned

spaceflight as command pilot he and David Scott were to undertake the first ever docking of two

vehicles in space but no mission ended in the first-ever critical failure of an

American spacecraft and it happened during radio blackout when the

astronauts had no way of communicating with Mission Control. After several hours

of carefully lining up the Gemini 8 with the Agena target vehicle and finally

making a connection with combine spacecraft began spinning uncontrollably

in a nose-about-tail yawing motion. Armstrong activated these orbit attitude

and maneuvering system or OAMS thrusters and brought the movement under control

only for it to start again almost immediately following instructions to

abort the docking attempt if anything went wrong and concerned of the motion

might cause an explosion in the Agena fuel tank, Scott initiated the undock

command whilst Armstrong used the Gemini thrusters to move away from the other

vehicle but that through the Gemini into an end

over end pitching movement with the astronauts at risk of blacking out from

the centrifugal forces as they endured one revolution per second or 60 rpm.

Armstrong regained control using the RCS or reentry control system thrusters

after which they discovered that the number 8 OAMS thruster was refusing

commands to shut down. Mission rules stated but as soon as the RCS thrusters

had fired the flight should be aborted so Armstrong began preparations for an

emergency landing which took place 600 miles south of Yokosuka in Japan 10

hours and 41 minutes after takeoff. On May the 6th 1968 Armstrong was using the

lunar landing training vehicle also known as the flying bedstead in

preparation for the moon landings in the lunar module but because that would only

work in the moon's low gravity it couldn't be used here on earth. The LLTV

was basically a jet engine in a framework with thrusters to control it's

attitude.

Flying it was described as like trying to balance a dinner plate on

a broom handle during the flight one of the thrusters ran out of fuel and the

LLTV lost control. Armstrong ejected at a height of just 200 feet before it

crashed into a ball of flames. Having just four seconds on his full

parachute he suffered a cut lip on landing.

Of course Armstrong's most famous mission was as

commander of Apollo 11 in July 1969 and whilst he had to take control of the

Eagle Lander due to an overloaded flight computer as they approached the surface

of the moon and a broken ignition switch threatened to strand them on the moon

before its return to Earth he was never again in as much danger as

he had been during that Gemini mission or during the more than 900 flights as a

test pilot.

That's a remarkable survival rate for a man whose family gained their

name through an act of strength in an arm and throughout his remarkable career it

seems as though some of his ancestors were looking after him as he secured his

place in history as the first human to step foot on the Moon.

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