Book Review
Neil Armstrong's space-race heroics leap off the page

By Andrew Hamlin
Special to The Seattle Times

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At the Pacific Science Center in the early 1980s, I played an Apple II game called "Lunar Lander" with my friends, using computer keys to steer, shift and fire the lunar module's engine towards a safe, soft landing. This seemingly simple exercise proved almost impossible in practice, and we usually settled for seeing who could leave the biggest crater wreck.

Actual astronauts often didn't fare much better in their own, far more advanced "games," according to author Leon Wagener in his new book, "One Giant Leap." Just a few weeks before Apollo 11 blasted off to the moon in July 1969, Neil Armstrong crashed the lunar-module simulator, ignoring stern words to abort from Buzz Aldrin, standing next to him, and finally ignoring Mission Control itself. The two astronauts argued long and loud into that night.

Aldrin felt humiliated. Armstrong responded that they couldn't respond to a threatening real-life scenario without knowing the outer parameters of the craft. Command-module pilot Michael Collins, the man who would not make the landing, crept off to bed as the two moon-mates steamed at each other.

"One Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong's Stellar American Journey" by Leon Wagener Forge, 368 pp., $25.95

Armstrong turned out to have a point. Four hundred feet above the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin beheld NASA's selected landing site and found, not the smooth plain promised but a deep crater. Armstrong disconnected the computer and grabbed for manual control. The lunar module "Eagle" shot from 8 miles an hour to 55. The low-fuel warning light's red shine filled the tiny cabin. Radio communication with Houston fizzled. "I got a good spot," Armstrong remarked, looking out the window.

He came in 40 feet high between a set of craters and a field of boulders, dropped to 30 feet, "gunned forward a tad" to avoid drifting backward into the boulders and made history with 30 seconds of fuel left. His voice, coming through once again on Earth, sounded calm and confident: "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The 'Eagle' has landed." His pulse began backing down from 155 beats per minute.

An edgy encounter with seemingly certain doom — but Neil Alden Armstrong, born and raised in small-town Ohio, had made a career of calculated outward calmness in the face of death: ejecting from a crippled Korean War fighter after wrestling it back over friendly territory; grappling with a stuck thruster on Gemini 8 as it threatened to keep him and his crewmate spinning in their seats until blackout and burn-up (the 1966 orbital mission was Armstrong's first journey to space).

Author Wagener often tiptoes to a topic, backs off and then inexplicably plunges back. But he starkly renders the sweat and risk involved with space missions. Nothing seems inevitable in this account of the space race except maybe Armstrong himself. Age 10, he told one of his teachers he would one day go to the moon. And he sheepishly confessed to his father that sometimes, when lying in bed on the edge of consciousness, he felt himself leaving the ground, the house, the Midwestern countryside of Wapakoneta.

He flew.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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