Word: tested
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Armstrong went to 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...
...Mike Collins was fired by any particular ambition in his early years, he managed to conceal the fact. Even as a test pilot, and a member of a traditionally no-nonsense profession, he remained relaxed and easygoing. "He lived from day to day and didn't care too much about the future," recalls Bill Dana, a classmate of Collins' at West Point and a fellow test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. Adds Dana: "He didn't really take hold until he got into the space program." That happened in 1963 when NASA accepted his application to be an astronaut...
Neither, it seemed, was there anything more difficult. Before Kennedy made his moon-landing announcement, the nation's entire manned space experience totaled 15 min. 20 sec.-the length of Alan Shepard's suborbital fling down the Atlantic test range on May 5, 1961. Rockets had been blowing up on their Cape Canaveral launch pads with humiliating frequency; from 1958 to 1964, the U.S. suffered 13 straight failures in its efforts to send rockets around or onto the moon...