Word: pilote
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they accomplish their mission, the three men assigned to pilot Columbia and Eagle to the moon will rank with history's most illustrious explorers. Yet each realizes that the privilege?and the peril?of making man's first lunar landing belongs to them only by an unlikely combination of luck and circumstance. Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, 39, who will steer the lunar module to the surface of the moon, puts it this way: "We've been given a tremendous responsibility by the twists and turns of fate...
...Command Pilot Neil Armstrong, 38, could have missed his destiny as the result of half a dozen close shaves. He crashed his Panther jet behind enemy lines in Korea, but escaped a day later. As a civilian test pilot in 1962, he plummeted uncontrollably toward earth when the rocket engine in his X-15 failed to start, but it caught on just in time. As commander of Gemini 8 in 1966, he had to abort the scheduled three-day flight after ten hours when a short circuit threw the spacecraft's thrusters out of control. Last summer...
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...