Why NASA picked Armstrong to walk on moon first
Published 10:47 pm Sunday, July 19, 2009
It may have been Neil Armstrong’s wary, cautious personality that prompted NASA’s brass to choose him instead of Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin 40 years ago as the first man to step out of the Apollo 11 lunar landing vehicle.
NASA’s official explanation was that Armstrong, the mission’s commander, would be seated closest to the hatch in the cramped landing vehicle and would have to emerge first. But that was largely a smoke screen designed to mollify Aldrin, who had campaigned for the honor.
According to research by Auburn University historian James Hansen, the order was actually determined at a secret meeting, in March 1969, of the Apollo program’s four senior administrators — flight-crew director Deke Slayton, Apollo program manager George Low, director of flight operations Chris Kraft and Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth.
They concluded that Armstrong, not Aldrin, had the temperament best suited to be, as Kraft later put it, “a legend, an American hero beyond (Charles) ‘Lucky’ Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor.”
“Neil was Neil,” Kraft told Hansen. “Calm, quiet and absolute confidence. We all knew that he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego. … If you would have said to him, ‘You are going to be the most famous human being on Earth for the rest of your life,’ he would have answered, ‘Then I don’t want to be the first man on the moon.’”
The decision was crushing for Aldrin, who for a time in the 1970s suffered from depression and fought to overcome alcoholism.
Armstrong, meanwhile, battled his enormous celebrity with characteristic stoicism in public, but with deep private misgivings. Upon returning to Earth, he was feted for months around the world, then settled into a desk job at NASA. Within two years he was gone, annoyed by the constant demands for photo ops and meet-and-greets.
