Word: astronautical
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Buzz Aldrin might not have been an astronaut at all but for his persistence, raw determination?and good fortune. He was turned down when he first applied in 1962. Though he was a veteran fighter pilot (two MIGs destroyed, one damaged in 66 Korean missions for the Air Force), NASA regulations at the time demanded that astronauts be graduate test pilots. The next year, after the regulations had been eased to let in combat pilots with more than 1,000 hours of experience flying jets, Aldrin was accepted...
Dehumanized or not, the crew fully measures up to Boss Astronaut Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton's tough requirements. "You're really looking for a damn good engineering test pilot," says Slayton. "They've got to be good stick and rudder men, and also real smart." Not many qualify. Of 1,400 applicants for the last batch of astronauts in 1967, only eleven were chosen. There are now only 49 astronauts and, in many ways, all are as precise as the laws of celestial mechanics?and as unforgiving as the machines that hurtle them through space. Says Slayton of his astronauts...
Command Pilot Armstrong is considered tight-lipped and phlegmatic, even in the notoriously taciturn fraternity of astronauts. "Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer," his wife Janet said in an interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell...
...about the same time, the future astronaut was taking his first close look at the moon through a homemade 8-in. reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on roller-skate wheels atop a garage. The wondrous device belonged to Jacob Zint, a neighbor of the Armstrongs and a draftsman in the Westinghouse plant. "I can't recall that Neil ever said he wanted to go to the moon," says Zint. But as early as 1946, Armstrong was regularly visiting the makeshift observatory and often, says Zint, "he looked right into the Sea of Tranquillity"?the prime site...
...work for NASA as a civilian test pilot for the X-15 rocket plane, which he flew at 3,989 m.p.h. and an altitude of 207,500 ft.?both records at the time. In the early days of the space program, Armstrong had no desire to become an astronaut. Says a close acquaintance: "He thought those guys were playing around with a lot of marbles." After the "marbles" began lifting other pilots into space, he changed his mind and in 1962 became one of the second group of astronauts to be chosen. As a civilian, he is paid more...