Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight Read Online Free PDF Page A

his father wanted.
    The strapping young Armstrong was a permanent fixture on the baseball diamonds and football fields. He soon lost the “y” at the end of his name—especially on the football team where they called him kicker.
    In 2008, I introduced my grandson Bryce to Neil. I proudly told him Bryce had set football records kicking for the universities of East Carolina and Shenandoah. No sooner had the words left my lips the normally quiet Neil Armstrong was telling Bryce all about Rick’s kicks.
    Their conversation became lengthy—each unashamedly stretching the truth. I could only watch a talkative Neil Armstrong—yes, a talkative Neil Armstrong—brag on his first born.
    What was a strong fact was that Neil loved Rick as he did all his children. There were things like family and flying he would go on about with those close to him—but not to the public. There Neil remained a mystery. His blue eyes seemed to reach all the way to his soul—they sent the message “keep your distance.” His boyish face was absent of any lines, and his expression only changed with his distinct smile, his one-of-a-kind grin.
    If you dared ask a question, Neil would stare at you, forcing you to wait and then begin asking again before he would finally speak. His words were perfectly thought-out sentences—a direct product of his scientific research training. Whatever he said he wanted it to be correct. He didn’t like having to defend something his mouth had carelessly gotten wrong.
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    Most assuredly Neil Armstrong was big on fact and accuracy.
    But it wasn’t all work.
    Once in a while there was fun. Neil would fly routine tests over his family’s cabin and waggle his wings.
    When he and Janet first set up housekeeping, they lived in a couple of places in the Edwards area before buying property in the San Gabriel Mountains.
    “On that property on a mile-high perch was a cabin built for a weekend getaway, and compared to the comforts back home,” Neil bragged, “the cabin qualified us for honorable mention in early pioneer folklore.
    “Its floor was bare wood. No bedroom, just four bunks with a tiny bath and small kitchen with primitive plumbing and no electricity.
    “Of course there was no hot water,” he laughed. “The shower was a hose hanging over a tree limb. We did some remodeling. I ran some wiring to get us electricity, and Janet cooked on a hot plate.
    “No one lived near Edwards,” he explained. “It was a big base and you were always at least 30 minutes away.”
    The cabin was located where the flora was lush and the fauna were plentiful. “On a clear day,” Neil assured us, “we could see across most of Southern California.”
    Northwest were the Tehachapi Mountains with their trails winding across the Mojave Desert floor to the fertile green fields of the San Joaquin Valley. To the northeast lay granite buttes amid sandscapes including Saddleback and Piute. And though the harsh summer sun baked the land below to a winter-wheat brown, in the wet springtime the entire valley bloomed into one of nature’s perfect gardens.
    “My job was 50 miles and one stop sign away,” Neil laughed, not in the least aware that if you flew to the opposite side of the planet from his mountain home, you would arrive at another world not unlike Edwards.
    You would be in the land of the sky: not the sands of the Mojave, but the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, a flat plain where the yellowed grasslands turn green only in the spring, where at days end one could see nothing, not even a leaf or twig between self and setting sun.
    It was this bare, unpopulated land that was chosen in the 1950s by a small army of Russian space pioneers to build the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was a sprawling space center located perfectly to launch rockets, where mishaps would do little damage to the sparse life surrounding it. Even more important, the desolation would hide the Soviet’s secrets.
    They developed and tested missiles