"The Life of Neil Armstrong: Myth and Reality," with James R. Hansen

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah I didn't I didn't tell you I just watched the Fidel Castro school yeah well you the guy who introduced Lincoln for a skinny burger dress for one hour [Laughter] all right I think we're okay making it work already I think we're gonna get going so I'd like to welcome everyone here to this this presentation of the Northcott lecture yes this is this is an annual event that's put on for the for the public and the people who attend the General Assembly of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Ruth Northcott was an outstanding member of our society in kind of the the middle of the 20th century who just she passed away about 50 years ago this year I I actually am old enough that I actually met her at one of these meetings back then now my name is Chris Gaynor I'm I have the honour of being the president of the our ESC and I also apply my trade as a space flight historian these days and today we've had a couple of outstanding presentations relating to the 50th anniversary of the the historic flight of Apollo 11 to the moon and one by by Randy at what our executive director I was going to give one but I don't need to give one because I have an article in the Sky News which talks about my area of expertise which is Canada's contributions to the Apollo program and to Apollo 11 so I'll just invite you to take a look at that when you have the chance in Sky News is an excellent magazine in any case but I think I'll just get to the cut to the chase and introduce our main speaker tonight dr. James Hansen Jim Hansen now of course he's best known today as the author of first band the biography of Neil Armstrong which recently was adapted into a a really fascinating movie and I'm sure most most of you have seen it and and dr. Hanson has actually written quite quite a bit about the history of NASA and and Space Flight but NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration and I would say that that dr. Hanson is the expert on the first a in NASA he has written several books about the history of aeronautical research aerodynamics he's written them a multi-volume history of the Langley Research Center at NASA which is where they do a lot of that research and I think that's an important reason why he was called upon to write this book with Neil Armstrong or about Neil Armstrong now the two astronauts who flew to the moon with Neil Armstrong Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin both wrote books on their own but Neil Armstrong did not but he basically agreed with dr. Hansen to write kind of his authorized biography and I think an important reason for that is kind of a part of Neil Armstrong's character Neil Armstrong and I'm no expert because I never met him but I've studied him a lot Neil Armstrong loved to fly he liked to fly anything I think and and so he was probably very up-to-date with the historical work that dr. Hanson's done about Aeronautics at NASA and I suspect that was a big reason why he agreed to to let dr. Hansen write his biography so dr. Hansen in his career he spent a lot of his career teaching the history of Technology especially in his specialty at Auburn University in Alabama he's actually from Indiana I believe and got his PhD in history from Ohio State University and then went on to Auburn so that's a little bit of an introduction to dr. Hanson so I'm going to invite him up to to the stage and he will give a talk and then later on he will be having a discussion with our own Nicole Marquis mortal aural so thank you you asked me to take this off okay well thank you so much for for coming this evening it's really an honor to be presenting Northcutt Memorial Lecture and for me to be here with you I visited Toronto maybe more than some Americans and much less than other smarter Americans than me I've been this is my fourth trip to Toronto and I think maybe the worst weather I've seen in Toronto but I'm still enjoying my visit a great deal I always like to get a sense of my audience I was a university professor for nearly 32 years and you know what you always need to find out where the troublemakers are you know in the classroom you know they're usually there the hands are in the bed always in the back of the room but I want to start by just asking you a question I want to see hands again and I'd probably be the same ones I think it'll probably have their hands up but how many of you were living on July 20th 1969 when the moon landing took place and most of you I can the white-haired people is pretty you were pretty certain so I let's just see how many of you were not living in July ignite 20 so it's a substantial number it's an audience that really isn't representative of the globe's population honestly I haven't done the calculation for a while but I think it's the last time I ran it somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of the world's population today was not alive on July 20th 1969 so that means that for most people talking about Apollo 11 and the moon landings is like you're talking about the War of the Roses it might as it might as well be medieval history to a lot of the younger people and of course you know unfortunately in inevitably time passes and you know there were six successful moon landings and of those six landings meaning there were six commanders there's only one commander still living and of the moon Walker's twelve different moon walkers there's only four that are still alive today and they range in age I think Charlie Duke is youngest II was with Apollo 16 I think he's about 85 and the oldest is Buzz Aldrin who's soon to be 90 and so hopefully they're gonna be around the survivors are gonna be around for a long long time but every time I make that speech I you know I mean then next months you know there's gonna come a time we don't have any of them with us anymore and and so it's been important to have the histories told and and not you know I've I've written obviously about an astronaut or two but one thing that Armstrong always would urge and emphasize is that it did take over 400,000 people to do this program and the talks we heard today which were great talks I learned a lot from them from from from the two gentlemen is that there are a lot of people that are unknown unknown to except for people that are really looking deeply into the history that deserve a lot of credit because the astronauts were just the tip of the spear and Neal always made sure and I think most the other astronauts have been pretty good about this too but Neal in particular wanted to make sure that that these other people got got their credit this picture was taken outside of Neal's home in 2004 15 years ago right after I finished we finished reviewing the last the final revision of my manuscript the book was originally published in 2005 now I still have the same hair today but I just lick it back more yeah if you believe if you believe that but of course this is my favorite picture is my only picture I asked for Neal to pose for because I felt so fortunate to do the book with him I had 55 hours of tape recorded interview with him over many many months and I spent a lot more time with him than that so you know I tried to keep you know I I didn't try to become his friend although we did become friends I think later and stayed in touch but it wasn't my job to be his friend I was supposed to write an independent scholarly biography of the man and that's what he wanted that's what makes him in in my view personal view you know really exceptional as as one of the astronauts because I can't really even think of one of the other astronauts that I've met who would trust in an historian academic to write their life story most of them have done it themselves or they've done it in conjunction with other authors and so they've wanted they've had some control over the content once Neel agreed and it took about two years I could I could do it give you a whole talk on how it all happened and all the challenges of getting this an agreement from him two years but after he agreed it was my book it was my book he was going to answer the questions that I asked him he was not going to direct me he'd never said to me Jim you need to ask me about this or we need to do this topic he just answered the questions so if I didn't know enough to ask him good questions it would have gone by the wayside so I had prepared you know III was about 20 years into my career at this point I had done a number of other books like Chris said I had done a lot of books about aeronautics as well as space and I think they were a factor I'll say something specifically about about that in just a minute but you know Neil is still with me he died in August of 2012 coming up on seven years ago he died after a quadruple bypass surgery heart surgery I had in a sense become his friend by then and I remember giving talks being asked to give talks in tribute to Neil after his death and the first couple I gave I had a hard time finishing I mean I really just choked me up some of the things I wanted to say about him he was a wonderful man complicated a simple but complicated man and one thing that I think I tried to do the biographer is I tried to portray him as honestly as I could from the most part letting him speak for himself but you know a biographer has to you know channel the evidence and put the story together and there's some and obviously analysand interpretation but I so many meanings had been projected on to Neil because Neil was kind of a sphinx like personality he didn't fill up you know he he was modest he was circumspect he wasn't he was articulate but he was very choosy about what he articulated and so he was the kind of the perfect or might one might say it was literally not a great thing for him but he was kind of the perfect vessel for iconography for people too because he became this global icon as soon as he stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969 and so because he didn't fill up his own space it meant people could fill up his space for him they could project into him what they wanted him to be and a lot of what they projected was I mean it's all interesting but what that those projections told told us as I came to feel they told us more about us in what we wanted from our heroes and our astronauts and our explorers from something as epic as the moon landing it told us more about us and it told about him so the book was both a biography where I was it was real Neil as well as I could and an iconography where I tried to understand the storytelling that has been made made a part of Armstrong's legacy I'm going to start with a story Neil grew up in us in a number of small towns in Ohio I flew over Ohio from Atlanta to get here so and I went to school at Ohio State I grew up in northeastern Indiana about 50 miles from the town of Wapakoneta which is is usually called Neil's hometown but in fact as a boy Neil livens his family lived in several different Ohio towns because his father was an auditor he was an accountant that worked for the state of Ohio and his father Stephen this was in the third Neil was born in 1930 so in the 30s and into the 40s Neil's father Stephen was given jobs by the state of Ohio to go audit the books of a particular County and it would take about a year to get the books done and Stephen had grown up on a farm himself and so and Ohio is largely agricultural except for three or four big cities and so he was sent out to County seats that were essentially rural counties and Neil lived in a number of towns as a boy moved around a lot until until he was really high school age and for him that was he skipped the second grade because when he was moving around so much they would evaluate him and one of the teachers thought he he didn't need to be in the second grade so he went from the first grade to the third grade he was such a good good reader but anyway so he lived in a number of towns but by the time he was ready for high school the family had settled in Wapakoneta which is in Northwestern Ohio well here's the story when he was named the commander of Apollo 11 this was in January of 1969 and when it then became known that the commander was going to be the first one to step out on the lunar surface and there was some question about who whether it was going to be Neil or Buzz and I can talk about that maybe a little bit later or in our conversations the process you can imagine all over the world certainly in the American press but really internationally they wanted to know well who is this Armstrong we knew he has been an astronaut for a while he was commander of Gemini eight and and and but they wanted more and so they the media descended upon this town of Wapakoneta which was probably twenty twenty-five thousand it's his capital it's the county seat of a glazed County so it's in a really small town for rural Ohio but it was it was a small town and so people writers descended on what the caneta and wanted to interview anybody that could tell them anything any stories about Neil you know high school felt people who went to high school with them teachers neighbors you know anybody let's if you got a Neil Armstrong story we want to hear it and so lots of feature stories in the spring and summer early summer of 1969 were written about neil and who he was what kind of life had he lived well as a historian you know one of the places I went was the Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta which kept that didn't have a lot of archival materials but they did have a great collection of newspaper clippings from the era and I so I remember being down in the bowels of this museum in reading newspaper article after newspaper article and one Wapakoneta person who got a lot of attention in these stories was a man named Jacobs int Z int Jacob sent here you see his house Jacobs int was an engineer he worked for Westinghouse up in Lima Ohio which was just up the road to the north ten 15 miles from Wapakoneta he was a bachelor and he lived in this house it was about a block and a half from the Armstrong home in Wapakoneta and zip told stories to the media about how Neil as a boy and here you see Neil in his Boy Scout uniform Boy Scouts were very important to me a lot of the early astronauts were Boy Scouts that Zent told the story of how Neil when he was a boy his Boy Scout Troop came to the house because Zent and this is my one story about astronomy and a telescope zenit had built a homemade telescope and an observatory at the top of his home in his attic and and I have never felt the need to really talk too much about the details of the telescope until speaking to you all and and here's the best I can do it was a homemade eight inch reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on rollerskate wheels that were put up in the Attic so what happened according to Zent was this boy scout troop with you know came to his home he took him up the attic he lectured to them about how he built the telescope he gave each one a chance to look through the telescope and at the end of the evening there was this little blonde boy was kind of you know it was clear he wanted to ask a question so and of course this was Neil Armstrong and he came up to mr. Sennett and he asked if he could come back and according to mr. Zend and there's story after story after story in the newspapers about this that they came back and they had these long conversations about the cosmos about the universe about the moon they shared theories and ideas and that misters didn't even told a reporter on the eve of the launch that Neil had sent him a message through a third party that when Neil got to the moon he was going to test some of the theories that he and Zent had come up with well this was a fascinating story and I can tell you that it had made it into every children's book about Neil that had been published up to that time and into the some of the adult books as well this was a really important story about young Neil Armstrong growing up fascinated you know with what he was seeing in this telescope in these conversations with mr. Zinn so in my conversations with deal and I took them chronologically I started with Neil's family life and background and boyhood and took it that way so I didn't talk to you about the moon for about 30 hours which was you know incredibly fortunate because if anybody had the good fortune to talk to Neil they probably had to go right to the moon landing because they didn't know how long they were gonna get with him but I wanted so I said Neil tell me more about mr. scientist it was really fascinating seemed like it was a really a form of influence you look down at the floor we sat in a study in a study for all of our interviews and he said to me it's not true I said well that's not true I said I've got all these clippings and he said well mr. Zinn didn't invite us to his home he told us how the telescope was built he wouldn't let any of us touch it or look through it and when we left that evening it was a brief evening I never saw him again he never saw me again I never visited his house and I said well how could this be and I pulled out one clipping from a folder mr. Zen after the Apollo 11 astronauts came back from their mission in each of their hometowns there was a big parade in Wapakoneta in Bob Hope the celebrity entertainer from Ohio the Purdue marching band Neil had gone to Purdue the Golden Girls from Purdue governor Rhodes from Ohio was a huge big deal mister cent got his own open convertible for being a notable contribution to and I said how could this happen you know and he said well you know and he said this literally he said I didn't want to rain on his parade and and and the story you know I have this story in the book and it's not too it's not to do any affront to the memory of mr. cent and I have a little story I'll have to tell you in just a second but I just the early in my research this showed me with great clarity that I was not going to be able to trust a lot of stuff that I read that you know I needed to go do you mean if and if I hadn't asked Neal about mr. Zinn this goes back to what I said earlier about him if I hadn't asked him specifically about mr. dent and these stories Neal would never have brought it up he would never have said you got to go back and clear this up and I'd never did this with mr. cent so it was important for me in terms of understanding how important the iconography and the storytelling the myth of Neil Armstrong was going to be obviously what mr. cent was doing is he wanted to be part of the history right he and he became part of Neil Armstrong's history maybe forevermore maybe not now in the way that he would have wanted it to be I was giving a talk early after the book was published I was doing a book talk first c-span in Dayton at alec library and my wife was with me on that visit and after the talk and I was signing some books there was a man that was sort of staying in the back of the room and my wife I saw could see my wife was talking to him and she came up to me she said there's a man back here though was to talk to you and I said oh really and so it was mister since nephew because mr. Zimm was a bachelor he never had children but was his nephew and and he told me how crushing this was for the family in fact he told me that and I think I already knew this but he said you know we donated and I think in the end they actually got paid for it the the telescope and the structure roller skates and stovepipe and all the mr. Zen had had used for that telescope had become the main exhibit in the all glazed County Museum because it was he was considered to be such a crucial personnage in Neil's life story so you know I thought it was important to get the truth told about this not just to show how you know the myths could could start and perpetuate but I also thought it was important in terms of the if you really want to understand Neil and who he was and this gets back to something Chris was saying if you accept the Zent story and then the trajectory of Neil's life story if you have a boy who was fascinated with you know with with it was a dreamer he was into astronomy he looked at and talked about the heavens he looked through telescopes he was talking to the moon and talking about the moon and the stars he was into science fiction literature all of that makes sense makes total sense if you're talking about the first man on the moon it just it seemed like that would be the trajectory problem is it's not true it's not Neil's trajectory and people that were accepting the Zen story were actually making this part and parcel of a trajectory of his life story that was just not not the way to understand who Neil was so I'm gonna show you in a bit and what a proper trajectory really would be and starting with this Neil from the time he was a boy was all about airplanes remember he's born in 1930 this is three years after the Lindbergh flight there's lots of Records and famous flights that are being made in the 1930s now in the 1940s as an early teen the war takes place he becomes his Boy Scout Troop is identifying aircraft types you know they've got let's that have been passed out to them to learn what all the payer plane platforms are what they look like Neal's a an avid model builder he's begging his mother viola for pennies and nickels that he saves to build models his this is their home in Wapakoneta and I've got a picture of his brother and sister over to the right Neal was the oldest of three children and I have to tell this is the proto engineer meaning he was even as a little boy he was just the way his his makeup was Neal would take a lot of the models that he built that weren't ones that he thought were necessarily his best made models and he would he was put them in a box and he would take him up to the upstairs bedroom window and he he taught his sister June and his brother Dean and a little bit older agent what you're seeing in this picture he'd show them what how he wanted them to toss them out the window and have them glide down to the driveway and Neal would have a bunch of popsicle sticks and a little notebook and when the airplane will glide landed he would put the popsicle stick in and he would mark he would write down which model airplane it was and he kept and then he'd gathered them up he'd take them back upstairs he'd have him do it again he kept it in the notebook he was doing systematic flight training flight testing you know as a ten-year-old he was a proto engineer he was thinking very systematically about how airplanes fly he wanted to become an aircraft designer he got his pilot's license on his 16th birthday he wasn't even interested in driving cars he that came later I think you didn't drive a car till he was you know well into his 17th but drive but airplanes he was riding his bicycle out to this grass airfield on the edge of Wapakoneta he was doing odd jobs to earn money and to just be around the mechanics and the pilots there were a couple of World War 2 pilots that were giving lessons and and that's who taught him how to fly I was lucky enough to interview one of them who was still living that told me about his teaching Neil how to fly Neil went to Purdue started in fall of 1947 to become an aircraft designer so he comes into an aeronautical engineering program he afforded college because he was he got a navy scholarship there was a Naval scholarship program that he benefited from and two years after he finished his second year of college at Purdue well the Korean War broke out and he had to stop his schooling go to Pensacola Florida go through naval aviation training and here he is this is my very favorite picture of him in March 2nd 1950 he's 19 years old he's made his first carrier landing this is out in the Gulf of Mexico I mean look at it look at that face as he is the 19 or is he 12 I mean he's just such a young fresh looking guy and he always always was so the war he's in there in the war he flies 78 combat missions he flies the Panther jet he's in all in an all jet fighter squadron one of the first Navy pilots and fighter squadrons that are flying jet planes if you've ever seen the movie and a lot of young people wouldn't have but there's a movie that was based on a James Michener novella called the bridges at toko-ri and that's very close to what Neal's experience was in the Korean War in fact James Michener spent time on the USS Essex the carrier that Neal Neal's Fighter Squadron was on and was in the wardroom often listening to pilot stories and so that story there's actually you know I wouldn't say there's a character that's supposed to be Neal but there are characters of her model and people that would Neal were in the old fighter squadron so if you've never seen it's got William Holden and Mickey Rooney and glit Grace Kelly and I think is a threat Uruk March it plays the captain of the ship it's a wonderful movie it captures Neal's experience 78 combat missions one of which involved him having about six feet of his port wing sheared off by a cable that the North Koreans had strung across although Valley and Neal was lucky to get the airplane back far enough south where he could eject and be picked up by you know an advanced Marine base personnel so after he does his Korean experience he goes back to Purdue and he graduates in 1955 and he's decided not to be an aircraft designer per se he wants to keep flying and he's learned that there's a way to be an engineer that real real test pilot piloting is done by engineering research pilots and he goes to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics the NACA which becomes the nucleus for NASA when NASA is established in the year after Sputnik in 1959 t57 October 1st 1958 so Neil goes to work one day as an NACA employee in the next day it comes home as a 10 AC employee the next day goes to work he's NASA person that's what all of them from NACA he did he started actually in Cleveland he was a test pilot for a few months in Cleveland basically flying up above Lake Erie into the ice clouds and doing icing research it sounds like a crazy thing going up and looking for ice to load down your airplane structure but that's what they were doing and then he got a chance to go out to edwards where the NACA had a their flight research station because Scott Crossfield the NACA pilot who was the first to fly Mach 2 was moving on to North American to be the company test pilot for the x-15 program so when Scottie Crossfield left for for his industry position had left an NA a position open in the NACA that Neil moved into in 1956 so he was out at Edwards on civilian side of Edwards doing lots and lots of test flying flew 50 different types of aircraft 24 hours 2400 hours of flying time a lot of it in jets and of all the astronauts up through all through quite a few of the classes he was the only one with any experience flying rocket he'd flown the excellen be and he of course he flew the x-15 seven times and that scene is flat flying the x-15 is the first scene in the movie by the way so that's what Neil is doing up into the time he decides to become an astronaut so this compare this trajectory with what you have if you buy the Jacobsen myth Neil's real trajectory was a boy passionate about airplanes thinking he might design airplanes self a proto engineer who goes to college in an engineering program who really first and foremost saw himself always as an engineer who has a formative military combat experience as a naval aviators naval aviator and one thing that doesn't often get mentioned and I don't know if it's more than coincidence I dress this in the book but six of the seven Apollo commanders were naval aviators and that wasn't because there was a bias in favor of naval aviators by the head of the astronaut program because that was deke Slayton who was an Air Force pilot so I I explore the issue of why were the naval aviators you know so popular as commanders for the Apollo missions but that experience obviously was crucial as was the x-15 Neil I remember Mike and Buzz Aldrin both telling me that they they were part of class three and Neil was class two that was selected in September 62 that Neil was everybody considered him a shoo-in Neil didn't think that necessarily but the others his Peters thought he was pretty much a shoo-in for selection as an astronaut so that's the real trajectory of his life story and anything that suggests otherwise is really kind of missing the boat this is a one of the most interesting quotes that I got from Neil and this I think goes to the point that I set a points I just made I think this is a really really insightful quotation in case you can't you probably read it yourself but in just in case you can't what I attend I asked him if he thought of himself as an explorer I mean all of us would think of him as an explorer he said not so much what I attended to is the progressive development of flight machinery my exploration came totally as a by-product of that I flew to the moon not so much to get there but it's part of developing the system that would allow it to happen I think that's a really important insight into Armstrong maybe not the heroic you know astronaut as cowboy that we might want but this is the reality the true reality so the first myth there's lots of myths I could if you want to invite me back sometime I can go through about 15 other myths that there are button you know I'm only gonna be able to deal with a couple of them but it is certainly I think a myth that Neal was a young stargazer I'm sorry to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada it'd be nice to say that he you know he was a fellow telescope lover I think he became one you know he certainly became one over the course of his training as an astronaut and beyond but that isn't how it started and that isn't what really motivated him my biography I think is largely myth-busting especially if you're dealing with iconic figures you know because there's they're bound to be stories about them and I think if you really want to get at the real Neal you've got to challenge some of these myths myth two and like I said I'm not gonna get through many myths tonight but you know there's this popular notion of the right stuff which goes back to Tom Wolfe's very good book published in 1979 I would invariably assign it to my history of flight courses at Auburn because it's a great read there's a lot of things to discuss but I think the right stuff is a kind of a misleading notion and I think Neal felt that way about it as well this is the closest this is a quote from the right stuff and this is a closest that I can come to you know if you ask well what is the right stuff and I would actually have to ask my students to you know to talk about that and maybe even write an essay as part of their examination but Woolf describes that is the ability of a pilot to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the Moxie the reflexes the experience the coolness to pull it back at the last yawning moment and then go up again even if the series should prove infinite and I'm not saying that there aren't aspects of that to what a test pilots life in experience would be but I think it does it is it is misleading it misleads us into thinking about test pilots in a way that I don't think is very helpful of course you know they made a nice movie about this it's one of the most popular movies about space ever the astronauts hated the movie honestly the mercury astronauts just thought it was a cart of a cartoon caricature and they especially hated the way Gus Grissom was treated in the film with the right stuff you know charisma some degree of arrogance some occasional coarseness very competitive you know so that was what what captured John wolf's attention and that's what he mold it into the right stuff well in my talks in my analysis of Armstrong and other test pilots for that matter I've come to talk about the real right stuff which i think is something very different from what you get from Tom Wolfe I've given talks on this including talks at NASA Armstrong what used to be NASA Dryden Flight Research Center where Neil had done his test piloting back in the 50s and 60s and I'll give you this background this is a story that I'll tell when I was the crucial moment in my conversations with Neil getting him to finally give me the green light to write the book which came during a day when he asked me to come to his home in Cincinnati he lived in a suburb of Cincinnati and to just talk with him for part of the afternoon well I was delighted to do it I thought this might be a breakthrough moment but I thought you know so I went there and had a very pleasant conversation with him and in the same room I would eventually do the interviews and I by that time I had done you know four or five books I think in I had written a lot about aeronautics and engineering and some about space and just I wasn't strategizing or trying to I wasn't trying to work him in any particular way but I mentioned to him a man that I had met at Langley who was a Langley test pilot by the name of Jack reader John P reader who had been a regular had been an engineer worked in a wind tunnel but during World War two so many pilots were being pulled off for military service that NACA needed to create some test pilots so that some of their they got some volunteers and that they chose from and they sent them off and John Jack reader went to Pensacola to train as a naval aviator but then he came back and was a test pilot for the NACA and for NASA an incredible career that lasted the 1980s and when I first started working at namely I got to know Jack pretty well he came to my office a lot and he was sort of semi-retired at that point and he was an author of I don't know over a hundred technical papers you know and that was the point where I thought that's pilots do they write papers well engineering the real test pilots do I mean they're an engineer in the cockpit there they're not there to break records or show their bravado they're there to learn and to have everyone learn about the man-machine interface you know what's going on in the Flynn though in the in the flight if it's transonic research or supersonic research or whatever they're they're trying to they're learning it's it's knowledge it's being hopefully produced so I learned a lot about the real right stuff from Jack reader not a name that you know anybody you know unless you're really into the history of test pilots in American aeronautics you've probably never heard of the guy well the moment I mentioned Jack reader Neal's face lights up and he turns to his wife Carol this is his second wife we married in 94 and Carol was in and out during our conversations he turned to Carol and he said Jack reader was the best test pilot I ever knew and they turned back to me and he said and Chuck Yeager was the worst well that kind of floored me and that's the that's the harshest thing I ever heard and you'll say about anybody there and as I found out and wrote about in the book he had his reasons to say what he did about Chuck Yeager but what was really significant well you know what you latch on to is the second part of that but what was really important for me and my career and my writing of his biography was the first part of it when he said Jack reader was the best test pilot he ever knew and I just happened to mention Jack reader and how I am how I learned so much from Jack reader now if I had said to Neal in that conversation I just love Chuck Yeager I really think he's the greatest test pilot ever I don't think it would have turned out the same way but I had picked Jack reader and he knew jack he knew who Jack reader was he probably had met Jack reader at some point and I didn't really it didn't it wasn't like a light bulb went off or my madam surge of blood pressure or heart beat or anything but I remember leaving and won't driving back to my hotel that afternoon thinking this might work out you know that was a important thing that you know it wasn't it was accidental but it was an important thing that I picked somebody that Neel had a lot of respect for so that's myth number two the right stuff I think is a false notion and I'm concerned I'll admit to you that there is now in production a new TV series for that it's going to be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company based on the right stuff that's meant to be like a sixth season thing they're not just gonna do mercury which was what the bright stuff was about but they plan to do Gemini and Apollo as well and they're calling it the right stuff and they've asked me to be consultant on the series well it's gonna be a challenge for them too because again you know I and I don't know whether I should really get involved or not because I don't like the basic concept you know but maybe I can get them to understand what the right stuff really should be you know not what they what they think it is this is a third myth and I'm not this will I probably just should not even have put this one on should have just let Randy take care of this this afternoon because it's as he knows and most of you might have an imagination about it this is a hard thing to explain but it is in fact a myth that Armstrong was preordained to be the commander of the first landing mission there was nothing preordained about I'm gonna look at what my next slide is because I can't remember yeah it's that it's not what I hoped it could be I remember being at an event in in at Ohio State about a year and a half ago they were bestowing a professorship a Neil Armstrong professorship in the School of Engineering and and it wasn't going to me but I was there to give a luncheon talk and right before me was congressman Rob Portman from south eastern Ohio southwestern Ohio and he was kind of a friend of Neal's and he had just told the audience at the lunch that Neal had been in fact blessed and preordained that NASA had picked him well in advance to be the lunar landing commander and it was because Neal was so excellent and so exceptional and and everybody knew that he was the best and I wanted to tell congressman Portman that he was full of beans but I didn't I just let it go but I knew but it's not true I mean it really is it takes I think this is as far as I'm gonna go with it I'll say some things in general because you know it would go beyond our time limit it's a it is a talk really that deserves to be just itself but Neal became the commander of eleven you know and eleven became the moon landing you know as a series of contingent circumstances a lot of things happened I mean they had a plan let me let me go ahead and maybe move through a couple of these actually my basic point is that it could have been any of the other apollo commanders I mean they weren't picked out I mean deke Slayton he thought you know you picked the best guys for the commanders and then you put in your crews the best you can from there and then the commanders and the crews are trained to do the specific mission types but his idea and I think NASA's idea generally was that that any of the commander's have trained with their crews properly they could all take on just any of the mission so there wasn't any pre choice of Armstrong to do the landing it was never it could have been the idea of these other guys if the contingent circumstances had been different we saw a slide from from Randy today which was similar to this there was a number of different mission types owen maynard a canadian who worked for NASA was very instrumental in thinking through this along with some others but there are different mission types you know you want to get the a mission done before the B mission and you're going to move through the the G mission which is the first landing they actually had pipes all the way through J they were looking through minute what were the missions thought it would be like after the first landing so that was the sequence of things that in theory was going to be planned and I'm don't have time to go through this other than to say the crew assignments deke Slayton originally puts together they have to get shifted around for lots of different reasons and I'll just mention them you know kind of in in order there's the Apollo fire that kills Gus Grissom ed white Roger Chaffee you know Slayton in his memoirs who made this make the comment that Grissom was really his choice you know Grissom was one of the original mercury astronauts as Slayton himself was that really he was kind of hoping that Grissom himself could turn out to be the commander of the first landing mission course Grissom dies in June or 67 along with white and Chaffey the lunar module is not ready in time for I do have a slide I'm gonna have to run yeah the mission it's not ready for the D mission so they have to even the fire sort of puts everything on hold for a while they have to redesign they have to rethink things about the command module about the whole program and by the time the mission for D is supposed to go the lunar module isn't ready from Drummond yet and so there's a man named George Lowe grant graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic brilliant engineer and Space Flight manager who suggests makes this audacious suggestion well let's say we don't have the lunar module ready let's send a command and service module around the moon on a circumlunar flight and that's what they did you know in December of 1968 it was an audacious mission it was a very dangerous mission you know to do this that was the flight with Borman and Anders and Jim Lovell but it's cram Buhl's the order Jim McDivitt was supposed to be a his crew was supposed to do Apollo 8 but they were training with the lunar module and they wanted to do a lunar module mission so they ended up swapping eight and nine they sort of got you know reversed the order of those so those sorts of things come into it again I'm going through a lot of things here that are gonna take longer the e mission was Apollo nine that was that was what big divots group ended up doing flying the dilemma in or in Earth orbit 10 was the dress rehearsal AF mission commanded by Tom Stafford and we heard a lot of good things about this from Randy today other factors changing assignments Borman after Apollo 8 resigns you know he's his wife is doesn't want him to fly anymore borman's moves on to other positions so Borman leaves Mike Collins is having disk surgery so that shakes up the rotation I could go into into the details of that but when his surgery successfully heels then deke wants to get Mike back into the into the crew rotation as quickly as possible so he comes in on Apollo 11 which bumps Fred Hayes you know to Apollo 13 and moose buzz from command module pilot to lunar module pilot there's all these things that happen that weren't planned to be exactly that way so again these are details that I would take me longer to get through for this I guess I will tell the one story because this is original to my research and what's not known until my book because Neil told me and only other person who knew the story was Slayton and he didn't write about it and he was dead by at the time I did the book Slayton came to kneel during the Apollo 8 flight you know of December 68 and told Neil that he was going to command 11 and that if everything went right that 11 would be the landing and he said to Neil Neil if you want Jim Lovell on your crew we can put him there and take buzz off the crew not everybody wanted buzz on their crew Frank Borman flatly had told Slayton he never wanted buzz assigned to his crew and this is significant Neil didn't answer immediately he asked me if he could think it over he thought it over for a day and a night and he went back to deke and he said and and he said it in this order it's the order is significant he said no Jim Lovell who's on Apollo 8 he's circling the moon during this conversation Neil says Jim deserves his own command you know if he came on on Apollo 13 and be lunar module pilot he deserves his own command secondly Neil said and I'm working okay with Buzz it's working out okay but Neil's first concern was for Jim Lovell and him getting a command it wasn't for keeping buzz Lovell knew nothing about this when I interviewed him for the book I told him about it and he said I didn't know that and I said well would you prefer to be on because you know this deal the ultimate impact of this is kind of significant because what happens to Lovell he becomes commander of Apollo 13 which has a problem on the way to the moon and he doesn't get to land and he never walks on the moon whereas if Neil had said yes I want Louisville Louisville would have been Buzz Aldrin and it would have been levelled and all and Armstrong on the lunar surface and Buzz I don't know you have to be a science fiction author maybe to figure out where they have put Buzz would they put I wouldn't have given in a command I mean I I talked to my fellow historians sometimes you know where would the US have gone if Neil had turned him away from 11 I don't know so anyway long story short there were all kinds of things happening and if if eight nine and ten hadn't worked out the way they did 11 might not have been landing it could have been 12 Pete Conrad could have been the first man on the Moon it wasn't preordained it was nothing it's pre-selected about Armstrong being the first this is why when Neil seemingly to some people overly modest this is when he was interviewed for 60 minutes when my book first came out he just one interview that was related to the books appearance and this was it and when he was asked about you know Ed Bradley said something to him sometimes it just seems to people that you're you know that you're maybe a little too modest about your role on Apollo 11 and you would say I wasn't chosen to be first I was just Joe the command that flight circumstances put me in that particular role I just don't deserve it and there's nothing false in that modesty him speaking the reality he was really this was an engineer giving you really it doesn't sound like an engineering answer but it's an engineering answer you know he knew that it wasn't anything particular about him that any of the other commanders could have done it and would have done it if things had been in a different order okay I'm gonna stop with this because it only involves one slide there's an obvious myth it's been ER that was around at Neil in later life became a recluse you know he wouldn't go out at public he was kind of like Howard Hughes and all I have to do is show you this picture I mean Neil was Neil was a very private man and there were lots of things that he chose not to do I have my Armstrong scholarship is sort of coming to an end in the next year so Purdue University Press Neil's alma mater is publishing two maybe three volumes of his correspondence that I've edited I've selected from about a hundred thousand fan mail letters that have come into him not all fan mail some of it's from fellow astronauts and engineers and famous people but I have a selected a broad spectrum of letters that came in to him and I can tell you a lot of them are requests but he got requests like could you come to Geneva Switzerland a an Apollo carwash you know and I'd like you there at the opening ceremonies to cut the ribbon you know he got endless requests like that you know and and 99.95 of the things he's asked to do you know the letters that you wrote back are different ways of him saying no you nope as politely as they can sometimes not so politely you know so because sometimes people just wouldn't let it go I mean he got some angry mail from people who thought he should be doing more than he did but from his own point of view and I think from mine as well and it should be from ours he did quite a bit and I think especially after I think with his second marriage General Armstrong I think brought out made Neil a little more in terms of personality and Neal did more and more I did a lot of traveling he did do more talks he would not do interviews unless he thought it was in something newsworthy that he could contribute to like after the Columbia accident he agreed to give a quote or say a few things to one of the national media but if people wrote him and/or called him finding his somehow finding his own number which wasn't easy to find and wanted him to do they have a feature story they want to do a feature story on Neal you know about how its life has been after Apollo 11 there was no chance he was gonna do that he thought that the feature stories were worthless he thought they they would take off in directions that he want he couldn't control that wouldn't be true that might turn into Jacobs in stories you know so he just wouldn't do him so and I think what journalists would didn't do is they maybe go back to their editors and say you know that Armstrong thing you want me to do he's a recluse and he's not gonna he's not gonna talk to me you know so this myth got started that he was a reclusive personality when in fact you know he I think he did did a lot of stuff he wasn't as ubiquitous as Buzz Aldrin thank god I mean he I think Neil was so choosy about what he what and when he said something that when people when he did say something people hey Armstrong is saying something let's listen to this he had been talking all the time it would have just been noise so Neil sort of became a victim of his own mystique I think and maybe he would have been able to lead a more sane life and because he was stalked and he had all kinds of things that were unpleasant about his existence not unlike Charles Lindbergh see what my last light is Oh guess what we're back to the start and if there I will stop and just say you know I find him a subject of endless fascination I can answer questions about the movie if you have any I guess I'll just say one thing in advance of that about the film it's just a small slice of my book they took a few nuggets from my book to use as the basis for their storytelling and I think it's a brilliant film personally a lot of people who got to know Neil later on either and some that were astronauts with him questioned carry characterization of Neil in the movie but I guess my answer to that is the most important interviews I did for the book that gave me the deepest insights into Armstrong and who he was especially in that period of time after the death of it he had a daughter that died of a brain tumor right before he became an astronaut the most important illuminating interviews were his wife Janet his sister June his mother viola who was dead by that time but I had lots of herb letters and things that she had written about her life and her family and about Neil and Neil second wife Carole before women I got more insights into Neil I mean the guys had guy stories to tell and I listened to them and they are not unimportant but you know when astronauts would come to me you know after the movie and say that wasn't really the Neil we knew or someone who knew Neil later on when Neil was in his 60s or 70s at a cocktail party or something and that's not the Neil I knew well people are complicated and if you're telling an intensely personal story which is what the movie it chose to do you know the person that Neil was with his wives and with his sister with his family what he was Perce Neil was a really tightly packed emotional person you know and so I I think it's significant I'm not denying that there's the character characterization of Neil and the movie it's very different from what a lot of people expected and the renewal that they remember but I think we're all complicated people and you could think about your own life and think about your friends or your business contacts or whatever and ask yourself how well do they really know me and my personal life and I think there's a and even as a biographer you know I don't believe I understand Armstrong America have explained him what maybe I've explained him 80% I don't know you know and maybe our future historians can do can do more with it but there are aspects of personality and personal experience that other people don't share in you know and the movie was really about that part of Neill that people didn't know they just didn't know and it challenges what I call the meta-narrative of space of the space program astronauts as heroes right stuff you know triumphant it's you know triumphs triumphant success it was all part of that but that wasn't the particular story the movie maker was trying to tell so anyway I'll stop with that and ask Nicole to come on up and thank you so much for your attention to be to glad he has requested [Applause] so thank you for that that was a great insight into it because I've always wondered about the myths behind the man I heard that story he's a recluse and he never comes out and I grew up with that so thank you for that and also congratulations on the success of your book and being involved with the movie it's a it's pretty much been a whirlwind for you I think the last few years with me I can say it was it was very exciting but it was very stressful because I felt you know this really awesome responsibility to try to have the movie makers keep it as historically accurate as possible and I think they actually did do did do their best with that I think there's some you know it's it al worden who was command module pilot for Apollo 15 and al has said publicly he thinks it's technically most accurate depiction of Space Flight that he's that he's ever seen in film well you know I hope there's some element of truth to that do we have an IT person okay so I mean all those scenes are like he almost gave me a headache but in a good way because it wasn't it was showing the real you know flight the reality of flight of space flight it was not this it's not this nice bumpy little thing it was this ridiculously shaking space flight so the movie was fantastic and I know I saw you at TIFF is talking about it as well with Neil sons and they said the same thing yeah they thought what the portrayal of their father and especially their mother was done very thought it was right on the mark and and I mean you can't get any better than that and so but I can tell you that my own experience this is the first time you know that a book of mine was made into a film and you got an AK Adam E award-winning director Damien Chazelle you've got caddy me award-winning screenwriter Josh singer you've got Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy is the main actors you've got an Academy award-winning cinematographer so it was pretty you know they knew what they were doing and but my own experience is I kind of went through I started out you know nerve very nervous about what was going on and when I saw and he didn't even admit this when Josh singer sent me the first script and wanted to meet one of the comments from me I sent him back 70 single spaced two pages would not talk to me for three months I got a call from the executive producer saying Jim what are you thinking you know they're you're gonna you're paralyzing our our screenwriter and I said well I'm giving you everything I got you know that's my idea you know take it or leave it you know you're not for taniyama contract doesn't say you got to do any of these things but you know I think you'd rather know them than not know them but in retrospect you know he was still trying to come to terms and you know really a movie is the vision of the director and the screenwriter tries to do what the director in this case Damien Chazelle wanted so Josh in his early scripts where Trump was trying to find what would make keep Damien Chazelle happy he wasn't trying to satisfy me and I probably in retrospect would not have should not have sent so much because I think you mean in fact Josh told me I'm not gonna read it you know I'm not gonna read it sometime later but right now it would you know mess with my creative juices like I kind of wonder about that but but anyway so I was very nervous and then I went to every day almost every day of the shoot and I did what I could to answer questions and Josh later told me he said you know you've got a really good batting average in terms of what you're telling us I think your batting about 350 and if you're a baseball fan and guys must be blue jay fans you know 350s are really good I'm on the all-star team at 350 I might be the MVP of the league but I wasn't sure 350 was that good as the book author you know just making suggestions to the filmmaker that meant 2 or 3 times they could don't want to care what I'm what I'm doing but the genesis or the evolution of my own emotions about it was as I as the movie got made and I got to know everybody better and better I became invested in the film myself and so down the road when I mean movie was well reviewed but it got some snarky reviews both from the mean politically it's a really interesting the reaction is really interesting I'm actually still now trying to step back and make sense of the reaction we got back from the political left and we got attacked from the political right we got attacked from the political middle I mean just across the board there were you know reviewers that had problems with the film although I would say five percent to 90 percent of the reviews were really outstanding and so I started to get defensive you know I started to be defensive about the movie and if you go to my facebook page you know I'm posting favorable review after a favorable review just because I'm so you know my own my own experience was from being pretty critical and judgmental to being a little more and more invested to the point where I was getting defensive and now I'm hoping I'm out of the defensive - let's just take an objective look at this I take a lot of satisfaction in fact the person or two has said this to me here that the movie although it was an academy won one Academy Award for special effects but it wasn't an Academy Award nominee for Best Film but people have told me they think it's a movie that will sustain itself over the years and there are a lot of movies that didn't get academy awards or nominations like 2001 a Space Odyssey for example that everyone would call a classic you know and there's lots of other movies in that same category so I'm trying not to be a defensive anymore so if I start to get defensive just start to boo me or or something like that so let's look let's go back to your book I mean you said you pursued him for two years to ask him to do this book 1 what were his what was his concerns and why did you keep at it for so long well I wrote him a letter I was teaching a graduate seminar in space history at the time and I had the best group of grad students at that time in my whole career and they were in they had we you know the first day of the seminar you go around the room and everybody sort of expresses their research interests and after the students were done they it was they came to me and they said what did you want to do next and I said well I'd like to do an astronaut biography but I only one that really interested me is Armstrong you know but he's so hard I didn't even know how to write him at that point and I got from a inside source at NASA I was given an address that I could reach him and I wrote him and I got a letter back you know it's like getting a letter from the angel Gabriel you know and I took the letter into my seminar just so they could all see the letter from the alarm strong but it was basically a polite no and the and it was you know basically he said well you know I've had any number of authors approached me at some point in time I might agree to do this but I'm still busy he had a number of corporate board positions he was still active with but so he just sort of gave me a polite no and I knew and I told the grad students because they said well don't give up I said well the worst thing I could do is is pester I mean then I really wouldn't have a chance so I waited his his 70th birthday was coming around on August of 2000 2000 and I sent him a gift box it had three of my books in it one of them that had actually had a lot about the Langley history and he wrote me back thanking me for the books and telling me and conversing a little bit about one of the books in particular that he had read and and had some comments and at the end of the letter was well let's keep the door open and now and you would think that maybe it happened really fast after that is probably another year and a half before you know even after the meeting were at his home that I described and I talked about Jack reader and I thought everything went so well it was still probably close to nine months or ten months before we I actually and I what I wanted to keep it simple so I took an old Smithsonian impress contract and I excited anything Neal wood one lawyers involved necessarily so I just rewrote one of my book contracts and it basically said James Hanson agrees to do this Neil Armstrong agrees to do that it was like a page and a quarter long and I asked him if he would sign it he may have shown it to his lawyer I don't know but I I've always suspected that he didn't because I kept it really simple and you know in terms of number of hours of interview and and I went back and looked at that thing that document about six months ago and actually I asked him for a minimum of I think fifteen hours of interview somehow I got 55 hours of interviews you know and I don't think he forgot about the term in terms of the contract that it things had gone well enough I think I built for Neil it was really important to have his confidence and did I tell you the compliment he gave me at the end of the book did I already tell you that I don't know he gave me one compliment just one compliment and he said to me and it was the day of this picture he said Jim he wrote exactly the book he told me you were gonna write that doesn't sound like much of a compliment but from Neil Armstrong someone who had people had tried to manipulate and tell him one thing and do another that was the biggest compliment I could have gotten I'm so proud that he felt that I was honest you know completely honest in how I handled the whole thing so what aside from the two years that it took you to get him to agree to the book what were some of the other challenges you had because you must have had to quite a few yeah I would say then the next main challenge was again was you know he and Janet had divorced in 1994 and so I'm writing this book in the early 2000s and Janet had a home in Park City Utah which was their second home it was where they would go for ski trips and so in the divorce settlement she got the Park City home and that's where she was living and Neil and Janet you know like a lot of divorced couples I suppose that they don't didn't communicate anymore and I wanted to talk to Janet because Janet was you know she was there through all of the most of his professional life up through 19 I mean they were married 38 years and I thought her story's crucial her story's really crucial to knowing the whole space I mean she was I became a historical character himself and I in you know so I did asked Neil I said is it okay if I talk to Janet and he said he wasn't sure he said I want to talk to Carol to see if it's okay with her and so this was after we had a agree got the agreement to do the book and maybe my next time I was in Cincinnati at the beginning of one of our spaces they set downs he said to me I talked to Carol about it and we think if you think you need to talk janet than you should but they weren't I didn't I wasn't gonna ask them you know like would you contact her for me that was not a good idea so I contacted Janet and Janet invited me out to Park City and we just just to have dinner together just for her to get to know me and who I what I was doing so we had dinner and then she put me in contact with her lawyer in San Francisco and I worked out an arrangement through her lawyer and I won't go into the details of it but I got an agreement to do 16 hours of interview with her which were which has been never put on the public record other than the quotes that are in the book there and there were many times in the conversations where Janet said turn your tape recorder off and so this was a very insightful I mean Janet was in had tears in her eyes through a lot of it of course there's a lot of difficult subjects I mean talking about the death of their infant daughter in 1962 the divorce I mean here's I mean and I could understand why she was hesitant to have me talk because on the one hand in the main hand you know why should she share her life story with her husband's biographer what's in it for her you know and and but it turned out to be I I would I would not whatever I had to do to get that done I would never I would do it again because I felt and if you saw the movie you saw how Claire Foy depicted Janet and what an important I think the and what Claire talked to me a lot about Janet I did from Janet Janet died during the shooting of the movie but Janet gave me the permission to share the tape recordings with Claire partly they so Claire could get Janet grew up in suburban Chicago and so there was a particular accent that was not British if Claire was British but also Claire wanted deeper insights into into Janet and I think I feel good that that she did such a terrific job playing Janet and I think the fact that I had that you know those interview transcripts and through tape recordings that Claire could draw on I think they were invaluable in her performance now there are two different versions of the book actually is it three that's Arizona so what are the differences I mean obviously before he died and after he died and it can you talk about some of the challenges yeah I hope I don't get too critical of my publisher at this point but they're the original 2005 book which was what I use as the cover is still my favorite book because it's not been edited down in any way the subsequent editions were but the problem with the 2005 book is well a problem Nield lives until 2012 and so the last seven years of his life he was pretty active in some ways and so I needed to do a later edition of the book which would cover those last seven years what he did his death his legacy and so that's what the new edition in 2018 does we did put a 2012 late 2012 edition out after his death that that edition just had a new preface and so there was nothing new but then the new edition now has the ending of the life story which is important and I think there's some really valuable things in there but the publisher wanting to keep the book certain length insisted on some of the early chapters to be cut down in size so really to read the book I want you to read you need to read the first volume you know through the first several chapters and then when you know then you need to move to the new edition of the book and read the last chapter because that's covers the last years of its life so you know dealing with publishers that are I mean you wanted you wanted to get it to as many people as you can but when you're dealing with you know with commercial presses they're also thinking about bottom line and books a certain length are hard there they cost more they're harder you know they're harder to sell and so you know you bite the bullet and then agree to do some cutting so we all have to go buy both versions that's that's the magic so talking about Neil himself did he ever talk like you we you touched on here especially about his level flying and you know as an engine like trying to do those test flights while he was young did he ever talk about what really inspired him why he fell in love with it yeah that's a really good question and those were the types of questions that I did ask but you know you would think that you would you know Neil wasn't the type that waxed philosophical very much you know you could looking back he does make some pretty profound statements here and there so I wouldn't say that he didn't do it but I mean he did talk to me once if you fee I mean I think I think Ontario is probably similar to Ohio in some respects I mean when you're and I know from and I grew up in north eastern Indiana when you're in the cornfields or in the flat fields of Ohio the sky is so big you know you're surrounded by these vast cornfields but and Neil was born you know at his grandparents farm and spent a lot of time as a boy at his grandparents farm and and of course Wapakoneta is itself surrounded by farmland I think there was something about the sky of you know the Big Sky of the Mid American Midwest and lower Ontario maybe that attracted him to this of course you know Wapakoneta is only 60 miles north of Dayton and what happened in Dayton the Wright brothers were there and Neil as a boy was aware quite aware of the Wright brothers and and and he never Orville Wright lived into the 1940s and I don't think Neal ever Wilbur died of typhus I think in 1911 so I don't think Neal ever met Orville but he certainly knew about the Wright brothers and for whatever reason I think it's also in the you know and the years after Lindbergh it wasn't like Neil was the only one who became enthusiastic and passionate about airplanes I think it was the combination of the passion for airplanes and and just who he was you know very very cerebral young man who did have this know proto engineering kind of personality about him he could be very focused he if something interested him he gave it a hundred percent hundred ten ten percent if it was something that wasn't really and this this is a great story I gotta tell it's a short one we're reviewing the first chapters of the manuscript and he put little pencil marks out on pages that he thought he needed to talk to me about something and I had written that when he was when they moved to Wapakoneta that his grandmother Armstrong Laurel Armstrong had moved in with his Armstrong family because she had had she'd broken a hip or something and her husband was deceased and so grandma Laura came in and lived with them all through Neil's high school years when you had a pencil mark there and he said Jim you got that wrong because grandma Laura didn't come to live with us until I was I left for Purdue you know four years later I said well you you know me you should know but I think I got this from June who is Neil sister and Neil June gave me lots I told you about how important her interviews were and she had she had the family history down really good and I said I think June told me this story and he said well let's call her so he got on the phone June lived in southern Arizona and of course I could only hear one end of the conversation but I think I know how it went and it was you know Neil saying June Jim's here we're looking over the book and he says grim Laura is you know lived with us from the time I was and we moved to opponet I was a freshman and I think he's got that wrong don't you and June says back Neil the reason you don't remember this is it you didn't have to give up your bedroom to it didn't if it didn't affect you at all you know so Gemma Laura was there but so what does it mean it means Neil Armstrong for four years can't remember his grandmother is living within the house for four years and I told this story to June and she said doesn't surprise me he just if it wasn't in his you know orbit of what he was interested in which was airplanes to Boy Scouts you know the paint in the marching band if it wasn't something he was doing he paid no attention to it whatsoever and I learned basically that when it came to his family not only his family as a boy but his family as an adult if you wanted information about the family good luck because he just didn't you know he didn't pay much attention to it and that's I think partly why in the end Janet leaves him you know because she she lived with that personality you know too many years that she that's what she told me she left note on the on the table kitchen table said she's divorcing she just can't live with and it wasn't because she was tired of Neil Armstrong first man on the moon it was I'm tired of a man who won't engage me in the issues I need him to engage me with you know and and I was always surprised when I was writing the book I always kept rooting you know fix this you know fix this problem in the marriage it's you know it's been a it's not gonna work out well and you know and what really amazed me was at Janet stayed with him as long as she did basically not that he ever I there's no evidence that he ever cheated on her or there was ever anything like that unlike a lot of the other astronauts but he was just a I mean she said to me in an interview she said you couldn't even get an argument with him you know that if you wanted to hit an argument with Neil was him saying no that was the argument was over and I went when I did my interviews I talked to Gene Kranz by Collins I talked to everybody said did you ever see Neil in an argument and they said you know I never thought about that but no he didn't argue he might not have agreed with you but he just didn't argue with you know and I think actually and I don't try to do much psycho biography in the book but Neil's mother was a very devout evangelical Christian and she wanted her children to grow up that way too and they talked about Bible passages at dinner and and all of that and made sure the prayers were said but neilton grow up to be that type of religious person and I think my own take on it and this is confirmed by evidence from interviews with the sister and the brother with Neil to some extent I think Neil as a boy learned a strategy he loved his mother but he didn't want to disappoint her or he wasn't gonna fight with her or argue with her about God or religion or anything so he just June told me he said if Neil was talking if mom was talking to us about religion Neil would stand there listen politely and then walk away you wouldn't say anything so I think it was like a it was a tremendous strategy to deflect and not to get involved with things that he didn't care to get involved with that's a long answer my answer so really long answers finally in the nasca because I know we're gonna go to questions a couple of lost things cuz it's not about the moon-landing itself and some of the myths or the things surrounding that so a Neil being chosen to walk out to be the first one and also the first words yeah well yeah there's ongoing controversy really about both of those items in terms of him being first out it would the question then would be you know armstrong and aldrin they land together who's going to go out first and maybe people that didn't live through the time or studied the history would think well of course it's gonna be the commander he's going to go out first but in the Gemini program which preceded Apollo there was a two-man spacecraft in Earth orbit and these were the first spacewalks the first EVs and it wasn't the commander always stayed in the spacecraft and it was the other guide that went out during Gemini 8 dave scott was going to do a spacewalk but they couldn't because they had the emergency in-flight and had to come right back home but coming out of Germany one could it's one could argue or think that there was a precedent in the space program that if there was going to be an Evo it would be not be done by the commander because it hadn't been done by the commander before so when when the moon landing is it starts to become clear it's gonna happen in early 669 the press gets really interested and who's going to come out first they want to know who's going to be the first man on the moon and because late and really kind of answers the question at the first press conference about this and eek says well we're gonna do a lot of you know simulations and in mock-ups full-scale mock-ups of the lunar module to see you know and the first person I will be the one that makes most sense technically to go out and that in the end is what NASA told people he told the world and told their own astronauts is that the interior layout of the LEM was such you know they didn't need seats for what they were going to do in the LEM so Neil was standing on the left side and Buzz is on the right side and the hatch was kind of down in front of them and it opened you know kind of up against Aldrin and so the answer was when Neil the commander is gonna have to go out first because it would be too difficult for the lunar module pilot to go out first and the structure of the LEM is so fragile that in spacesuits you could bump and hit levers and switches and damage the spacecraft so it needs to be it needs to be the commander going out first so that was taken as sort of the truth of the matter for many years my book Toula tells a different story based on essentially interview interviews with Chris Kraft and with Bob Gilruth when gilworth was living before I was even involved in the Armstrong biography I did interviews with kill Routh and their stories are that there was a private meeting between George Lowe Chris Kraft deke Slayton and Bob Gilruth where they talked about this issue of who was going to be out first and they understood that whoever and went out first was going to be another Lindberg as they called he was going to be world-famous he was going to be an important person forevermore and it was gonna be us gon be all kinds of publicity could be a difficult situation the and they said Neil has no ego Neil is the right he's another Lindbergh he's the right person to do it Kraft and even in some recent publicity Kraft who's still living has said there was no way we're gonna let Aldrin be in that role I mean Aldrin was a very different sort of personality than Neil and they they didn't they didn't think it would be good for the agency good for the country maybe even good for bus to have that role of being first man put on him but always when I interviewed buzz-buzz said he really didn't care that much about who was first you know there's Conor evidence to that I mean I there are some astronauts say he came into their offices and lobbied you know and tried to convince them why he would be better than Neil he'd be more articulate he would talk more all these sorts of things and Buzz told me when I interviewed him that he just wanted it decided that it was too much uncertainty and he was getting questions and and he couldn't answer look and he just needed it to be decided and that's all he wanted yeah I don't buy it because I in the in the documents I found there's a memo from George Lowe from 1972 and the in that low is recording a meeting buzz came in wanted time with George Lowe and Jordan and Buzz wanted Lowe to explain to him the decision why Neil was first out if if buzz didn't care and he was only interested in the decision being made why is he talking to George Lowe three years later wanting to know how the decision was made I think he cared a lot and that kind of gets to the issue Randy brought up in his talk this afternoon there are no really good pictures of Neil on the lunar surface all of the pictures that you think are Neil coming down the ladder saluting the flag those are all abuzz and it's not because I mean still get all kinds of wrong answers out there about this or people that say well Neil had the camera the whole time camera was taken off the Hasselblad German kiss still camera and Buzz took lots of pictures when I interviewed buzz I asked him why no pictures of Neil and he said he said it just wasn't in the mission plan to do any pictures and I said so all the pictures you took were in the mission plan yeah he said no I took some that weren't in the mission plan I said just they weren't none of them were of Neil so you what you get is a picture I mean Randy showed him you have a picture of a part of Neil's backpack Neil messing around by the Mesa you're watching from behind and and so do I think that buzz purposefully did not take pictures of Neil no I don't think it was purposeful but I don't think it was in buzzes personality to think about Neil having pictures taken pictures taken of Neil and Neil when I asked him you know aren't you disappointed that there aren't any good pictures of you on the lunar surface and he said you know Buzz was just more photogenic than me yeah typical typical Armstrong answer you know but I talked to him you know I asked this question of Collins I asked this question of Gene Kranz the flight director and and I mean Collins it was when they first saw the first pictures they were still in Laurel lunar quarantine when some of the pictures started coming back and Mike couldn't believe that buzz hadn't taken any pictures of Emile and might sort of gave him the brass for that and gene crayons when I interviewed him he said it's a minor tragedy that we don't have pictures really good still photography pictures of Neil on the surface what the picture we have now and Randy showed this this afternoon is there was a film camera in the window on Buzz aside on the right side of the limb and what they've done to get a picture of Neil is to freeze frame you know one of the best still frames from that film camera and enhance it as best as they can so you can sort of see Neil's face so that's the best we got of Armstrong on the surface so take that you know you guys can interpret that for your for yourself as for the first words Neil intended on saying he thought he did say one small step for a man nobody heard that he thought he said that there's been all kinds of linguistic and kaku Stickle analysis of this and the experts don't agree some say you know even though you can't hear it that you see in the electronic register if that's the right correct it may not be the correct technical term but you can see some effort of making a sound it just doesn't come out audible there's people at University of Michigan in Lincoln someone linguistics person who says that it really was a consequence of Neil's Midwestern accent and that he said four and a together so quickly he said four man like I just said it and I had the four and the a together but I'm a Hoosier from that part of close to Ohio and I can say it that way too so maybe that explains it you know when I it'll never be resolved it's definitively I don't think and kneeled never thought it could be either but so I asked him what do you do he said well put the in parentheses yeah another Armstrong answer okay I'm gonna ask the final question but this has nothing to do with Neil because you started to tell a story about who was going to be who was going to be with Neil was it gonna be buzz or at level and and how he said but level and you asked level about it but you never said what he said yeah I should have I remember this was in a hotel room in Dayton Ohio at the National Aviation Hall of Fame and I got to interview both Jim and his wife Marilyn and I remember telling this story and I asked him I think this is what you're asking I asked him are you would you have preferred it for Neil to it even would have been he would have walked on the moon and jimsy answer and this is pretty close to verbatim Jim's answer was well I think I ended up where I was supposed to be you know and I don't know I mean it's another what if what if Jim Lovell hadn't been commander of Apollo 13 I mean could another commander have done as good a job in that emergency antek probably I don't think you know I think probably good Louisville did an awfully good job but again I think you know so so I think Jim you know he was intrigued by the story he owned the fact that he had never heard and Neil had never shared it with them but you know it's it's that's a tough call you know do you want to be walking on the moon or do you want to be in a spacecraft where you might not even make it back I mean that's essentially so the ramifications of Neil's decision to say no let's stay with Buzz you know enormous ramifications not just for those two people but potentially for for our missions for missions success who knows yeah absolutely well thank you so much I think we're gonna open it up now um is Randy Randy go oh they're so I think we're gonna open it up for questions all right oh we have a microphone you want them to come to the mic give me if you have a question come up to the microphone don't be shy uh as you can tell I by retirees oh it's Randy and people should know that during the walkout scene I showed the walkout scene Harry my top today and Jim is in the walk that we taking he's a match that guy sort of looking like this well you know like I said before it was really exciting but stressful for me I'm more evolved and some people have asked me you know if Neil had been alive what would he have thought of all of it I think we could have I talked to Rick Armstrong his oldest son who was on set quite a bit I think Neil would have been fascinated by the technical side of the filmmaking I mean the model-making I mean we didn't use computer graphics for them for the film for the most part I mean it was this huge LED screen which is like to slot the whole size of the wall here and then full scale replicas of the spacecraft with the x-15 were put on on a platform on a gimbal and flown with a mouse and so the actors were actually in in the machines in front of this LED screen which wasn't a green screen or a blue screen or black screen it had imagery of whatever you needed whether it was landing at extra Edwards or Earth orbit or lunar orbit or whatever so and so all of the motions that are in the film mean actually this is not terribly well known but right and when we did the Gemini 8 liftoff scenes I mean and there's number a number of takes I was amazed at how many takes you know a director would require I mean 15 20 takes on a scene and and Gosling had experienced all this himself one night he had to be taken to the emergency room we thought we had given him a concussion you know baby shaking syndrome or whatever they call it you know cuz he had been that there had been so much motion on that particular day that he was he was not making sense you know we could somebody could tell he was like getting a little goofy and so watching that movie making meal would have been fascinated by the technology of the filmmaking itself would he have gone to see the movie I'm not sure you would have ever gone to see the movie he was not a great film goer honestly originally worn when Eastwood was gonna make the film and you know went out and met with Clint and I remember Neil telling me that he was a little and it didn't work out but I remember Neil telling me that he wasn't a huge fan of Eastwood's films because he thought they were too violent you know but Neil I don't know if Neil would have actually gone to see the film it might have made him uncomfortable - I mean I don't think he would have liked the whole I mean he he knew that was happening when he was still living in fact he met with there were two screenplays written before the the one for first man was done and he met with both of those screenwriters and he met with once when I was out in LA with him we met with executives from Universal Studios so he knew the films were the film was being made but he didn't want any you know he wasn't gonna consult he wasn't gonna be any part of it other than you know talking to the people so I'm not sure that that goes far beyond your yeah no no sj1 good question because other people here with one important thing in the film that I don't know if it's controversial or finishing or whatever is dropping of the Karen's Hospital bracelet could you comment on that yeah well it's really sort of the culminating scene of the film in a lot of respects and here's what we know we know that Neil did go over to that crater and it was unscheduled and he had to get over there and back in a relative hurry in fact there's the cardiac evidence is his heart rate zoomed up into the nearly 180 you can see in the video he's running getting over there and we don't know what he did over when he was over there necessarily I mean because there wasn't any camera on him you know and again buzz wasn't taking any pictures of him so we don't really know and we also don't know there's never been the manifest for his personal property kid is PPK where they took personal items the astronauts were supposed to fill out you know a little form saying what all was in them Neil's PPK manifests has never surfaced it may be one of the things that's been put in the Purdue archives that's boxed up and it's not supposed to be open for a number of years possibly it'll be there and we can find out but even if he had taken something like that you know he may not have listed it on his PPK anyway so the truth of the matter is he did make it we don't know what he did we don't know for sure what he took we don't have any evidence that he did take it but there's really no absolute evidence that he didn't take something that high I asked him it was one of the very last questions I asked him because I I didn't want to spook him with a couple question like that early on so I waited till the very end of my time with him and I said did you take anything any memory of Karen with you and his answer was so classically Armstrong he said I didn't take anything that was personal so maybe that does answer the question but I do know and I've you know researched and talked and about Armstrong for 20 years now if I got to the Sea of Tranquility I would go over to the quarry the first thing I do is go over to the crater and start looking around because I'm not convinced that he didn't take something and so it isn't is it dramatic license could very well be like I have been I've created a quote for this very question I think I if I can remember it maybe he'll go in Bartlett's under my name at some point sometimes the the power of poetry triumphs over the ambiguity of or the uncertainty of fact that's I'll have to get that a little cleaned up thank you Jim thank you for your wonderful talk I understand that John Glenn reminds now just wondering if mercury 13 or Jerry came out yeah it did and I think Neal felt like that it was a reflection of the time unfortunately that women weren't considered I mean the criteria that NASA established was you know with such that if you had to be a military you know a test pilot or military pilot to qualify that excluded women because that's the situation in the military at the time he you know one thing about the mercury 13 and there were some excellent books on them Jerry just died within the past few months the they became a part of a program at the Lovelace clinic in New Mexico Randall Lovelace was head of that clinic a doctor and he was very interested in comparing the data from the other women would perform and the women per outperformed the men in some key respects but that program was never an official NASA program NASA could have made it that but NASA didn't so it was never it would never was a NASA program per se and sometimes that may be that's splitting hairs that don't need to be split but it wasn't like NASA had a program and then they abolished it they just did not embrace the Lovelace clinic results and make it part of their program and I think Neal felt I mean he he felt like it was a reflection of the time unfortunately but fortunately times changed you know he was he got to know a number of the women astronauts he served with Sally Ride on the Challenger Commission at an immense Express you know respect for Sally and and for a number of the other I mean all of the women astronauts oh I think he just felt like well that was a time where things just didn't work out like they should have worked out but we've moved on and we're better for it look too young to remember this morning 57 I started in 65 Australia and actually look at the moon with my little refractor TV look at the moon awesome the last 30 to 45 seconds when Neil's got the joystick let's going through his mind I'm sure he did he had in Bellator explained more it was like to his mind did he have something down the site he want to get to as the fuel is going down yeah well I did talk you know we went through this second-by-second I will recommend to you that Neil there was something he that he narrated where they had the film from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter you know they made the same approach the Apollo 11 site and split screen so the LRO film and the film of the landing from the camera and Neil narrated that and he did it a couple of different times he did it at in Flagstaff Arizona I think for the US Geological Society and I think he did it one other time and you can get that on the internet I think on YouTube and you can hear him narrate the last couple minutes and so that would be the best answer for you is you can get it from the horse's mouth from him but yeah I think what I would just say generally is his heart again his heart rate goes up pretty high during that stretch higher than any about any other lunar landing caster on Neil always was a little sensitive about talking about heart rates because they were high during the x-15 program for him too and he you know for the average person we would think that high heart rates mean anxiety and nervousness and Neil said that this was actually studied as far as the x-15 pilots were their experience and he said for him the peak of his heart rate would come right before in anticipation of performance in other words it wasn't nervousness or anxiety in a negative way but it was the body in the mind gearing up for what had to be done and so he put that kind of a spin on it and you know and so I think I think what he got to take over when he realized that the computer was taking them down into a boulder field and you know they were they were long and they were he was gonna have to start flying that thing in a way that euston didn't expect and he you know wouldn't wouldn't have done if they weren't gonna be long I think that's when he really that was real flying yeah I think that's when he really you know he I think he would have enjoyed it I think he told me the computer alarms were more distracting than they were you know making him nervous about it the fuel situation you know you know we know a lot more about as Randy made clear today we know a lot more about the fuel situation and maybe wasn't quite as bad as that but they didn't know exactly but Neil he was confident he told me that he thought he had enough to get to work get to where he needed to go so you know it yeah by the time he flew that lunar lander and he did say that you know it's a lot easier to fly the real LM and it was to fly the simulators and certainly easier than flying the lltv that he ejected from but you know he had been in a lot of tight situations as a pilot going back into his teenage years you know I'm probably most of those guys had been but Neil certainly had been in some tight tight spots and I think you know he was kind of I won't say he was this is all I made for the moment but he was well prepared to fly and the pilot the thing the way that he did I'm sure not lapse the center if you were leader words I'm sure well hey we know he wouldn't have said but I'm sure he did yep you bet hi something you mentioned at the beginning resonated me with me as a younger member of this audience is that for people of my generation it was more of the roses kind of thing and something I've been wondering about thinking about is as we come to the 75th and the hundredth anniversary of Apollo 1 have you given some find how and if you haven't that's fine as how the landscape will change because I'm noticing a lot of journalism a lot of attention movies coming out about Apollo right around the 50th anniversary different yeah it's it will be a lot different for one thing we won't have any of them left in any nobody that was involved with Apollo will be Iran for the 100th I was you know we had a recent anniversary 75th anniversary of d-day and we had you know some survivors of d-day that were still there still here my father went in the second day of d-day and I lost him when I was 8 years old and so I never got to talk to him about it I think one of the reasons I became interested in history was that I lost a father and I did and I lost a story that I never learned but yeah I think when we get to the hundredth you know right now would be a hundred years ago you know it's 1919 right and so it's we had the end of the war at the First World War perspectives change I think historical understanding changes when you don't have World War two soldiers living anymore you might very well have I mean revision is history I think gets kind of a bad name because if when you hear the term revisionist history it's like oh the historians are just making stuff up you know they're they're just writing writing a new book and they're making stuff up and it's a political correctness or whatever I think it's a bad name because you know what history does it's constantly revising because you learn new things you know there are new archives I mean the things we wrote about the Soviet Union and the Soviet space program before the end of the Soviet Union you know was most of it was really wrong you know we had to get into the archives as best as we could after the early 1990s and we've learned some of our notions of what was going on in the Soviet space program and we're totally off-base you know and and so it's important to confer historians generation after generation to to ask new questions to find new sources if they can and learn and illuminate history in ways that make sense and may have meaning for the generation that's alive today like I you know I think one reason in our movie was problematic for some people was I think we challenged what I call the meta-narrative of the Apollo program in the astronauts it's been told a certain way for a long time and and and usually there's some sort of an agenda for why the narratives are told the way that they are and our movie challenges the narrative and people that don't want it the narrative challenge maybe they're partly responsible for the narrative if they've written books or you know done movies or you know whatever and and so they don't so I think well you will continue to I think historians as they're trained are trained to ask challenging questions not to not to make stuff up but to put put new insights into history that's it's always been there but you know not you don't know enough to ask every question you learn and so 100 years from now I think people won't be so concerned about now I mean the meta-narrative that has persisted over the Apollo program and the early space program for the last 50 years will probably be long gone by 20 69 I think it'll maybe you'll be a new meta-narrative you know I press a historian I actually prefer an approach where there's no controlling narrative that there's you know that there's different case study insight two things but they don't all have to fit the pattern you know that's some pre-existing pattern that somehow you know you've got to fit into or you're not accepted you know and this gets into some post modernists if you're familiar with any post modernist criticism and stuff like that they're very critical of the meta-narrative because they think it's actually sort of politically oppressive to have a storyline that's controlling all the storylines in it so I kind of without being a post modernist I'm kind of interested in that kind of an approach to things and I think - without being explicitly methodologically or philosophically oriented toward post modernist approach I think my own work you know but just because I'm trying to find the truth to a story you know I think I've been very pretty successful in resisting you know just fitting into the pattern that other historians have established I'll try to keep my answers to two-and-a-half minutes just a brief equation as you know there's a new push to go back and a worker assuming her cheaper to get it done in four years with all the delays of the sls and you know I was down at the Kennedy Space Center two years ago I saw a tower under construction growing up with the Apollo missions you know change my life we shaped my life I love it all what do you feel is do you think it really happening or do you like you know we have all this the history but it's taking 50 years to get back to one and go back to the moon but this time it's for different reasons obviously and just wondering if you think it's going to work out but we're really going back for the right reasons and what's your opinion about that thank you oh boy you know and you want me to do that two and a half minutes yeah we need to have a long conversation about that I don't think there's much chance it's going to get done by 2024 and I think the announcement to do it by 2024 and I cants I think it's going back for the wrong for the wrong reasons i I I'm in favor of going back to the moon but I want to go back for the right reasons and I don't I think we'll be back on the moon and I say we mankind I mean one thing that you know in our movie our movie caused controversy because we didn't feature the flag planning in the way that some people wanted the flags all over the movie you know let's make that clear but you know the nobody seemed to be concerned that we didn't feature the fact that on the a plaque was on one of the legs of the lunar lander that said be coming peace for all mankind or the fact that we left a silicon disk on the chip a chip on the moon that had the microscopic engravings of goodwill messages from over 70 world leaders no-one was seemed or that we left metals in memory of two Soviet cosmonauts and Komaroff and Kagera no one seemed to be concerned we didn't have that in the movie it was just we didn't show the American flag in the movie I would want to go back and my Collins it Mike's been very active in doing interviews for the anniversary and Mike has been very strong in his statements about how when they went around the world on a world tour after Apollo 11 to so many different countries in so many days that everybody wherever they were what impressed Mike was that people would say we did it it wasn't you Americans did it so we did you know humankind did it now maybe that's just an idealistic you know approach but I would hope that it's not in some sort of nationalistic sort of thing that that isn't the reason to go back to the moon there's lots of good scientific and other reasons to do it and it's and just just to be doing it at trumpeting American achievement and don't that's not my that's not my agenda and I don't think there's a prayer in the world to be interesting to watch in the elections but already when when the announcement came out of 2024 being you know that the goal I mean the Democrats are not going to spend a penny unfortunately you know I mean because of the reasons the way it's being set up Democrats are not gonna support this as a as a as part of the Trump administration you know set of goals I mean so it's sort of a kiss of death to be suggesting that you do it in by 2024 when that would just happen to be the second end of the Trump second term so I don't think you're you're gonna need a bigger budget and what's been laid out and I think Brandon Stein the NASA Administrator is already stepping back from being able to do it by 2024 I think he's pushing it back and so yeah it'll be real interesting to see what really does happen you got a pass because that was going to be my question as well when are we going back but thank you very much well I think we are going back I think the next voices we hear from the lunar service will be speaking Mandarin you know I think the Chinese will do it before anyone else does it they have a very incrementally systematic program they don't need to have popular support you know for it the Chinese military basically runs the program as I understand and I think they it seems to me that they all don't do it and there's final question thank you so after his memory we can look at my question is is that amends or was it really I did it but why wait was it good man that came from the family I'm not sure which family members sent that particular message it was either Carol the wife or the sons and you might think well why not both of them there's there's not there's some hard feelings actually between the sons and the second wife which maybe I shouldn't have even mentioned but I don't think I don't think they did it together I actually I mean there's nothing I think the sentiment is a nice sentiment you know wink at the moon but I think it's kind of a misplaced emphasis because again for Neil Neil was about flying you know I think about Neil more when I see a plane flying overhead because I played a lot of I played some rounds of golf with Neil whenever a plane would fly overhead Neil would identify the airplane for me you know Neil was Neil was still that boy with the model airplanes more than he was winking at the moon and so I think you know in if it's more in character to remember him in terms of flying than it is to necessarily remember him as the link to the moon in fact he made a couple of points early after his astronaut experience he would ask the question when will I be thought of as more than just a spaceman and so he Randy made this point I think earlier you know today you would talk to you at length if you wanted to talk about aeronautics or aviation with him if you wanted to bring up the moon landing he probably weren't gonna have much luck he just he wasn't that interested in talking about it honestly thank you next time I see a plane I would wink wink at the airplane yeah that's a nice mix of metaphorical well I wanted to say thank you so much for coming here and speaking to us and shedding some light on not only the movie your interviews and your book but it's been fabulous thank you I really appreciate the audience thank you very much are we off the air oh we're off the air okay now we can ask the real dirty questions right Jim our speakers this weekend have been receiving some stylized prints of astronomical objects and yours is a lunar eclipse so thank you very much Pete okay well we have the room for a while if you'd like to come up and do some maybe have a book that you want to assign or if you want to you

Channel: RASC Toronto

Views: 2,998

Keywords: Neil Armstrong, RASC, Ruth Norcott, James Hansen, first man

Id: PHqobxWCt5w

Length: 129min 38sec (7778 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019