airspacemag.com

Got time to kill this year? Consider blunting your teeth on the 648-page tome First Man, the 2005 authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, by James R. Hansen. Exhaustively researched doesn’t quite do justice to the book, which starts off excavating Armstrong’s roots back to 13th century Scotland, where his father Stephen’s lineage blurs into folklore amid the ruffian Armstrong clan; and to the German province of Westphalia, ancestral home of his mother Viola Engel’s family. Some people I’ve spoken to preferred to start the book at the X-15 program.

I’ve decided to take on the whole story because, hey, this was the first guy to walk on the moon. And, according to Hansen, Armstrong had no grand plans for himself. He just wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and decided somewhere along the way that a pilot’s license might make sense toward that.

The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle

It’s worth noting that we’re in the middle of the 40th anniversary of Apollo’s busiest and most fruitful year. In less than 11 months, from December 21, 1968 to November 14, 1969, NASA launched the Saturn V, their 363-foot-tall moon rocket, five times. Two flights orbited the moon (Apollo 8 and 10); one took the lunar lander for a spin in Earth orbit (Apollo 9); and two made lunar landings (Apollo 11 and 12). Apollos 13 through 17 would come at a far less feverish pace.

At page 114 I’ve just concluded Armstrong’s 78 combat missions in Korea. What strikes me more than any gee-whiz aspect of his life is his uncanny talent for cheating the Grim Reaper. When Dr. Vernon Noble appeared at the Wapakoneta farmhouse where Viola gave birth to Neil on August 5, 1930, the doctor noted, “Well, I cannot save the child, but we will try to save the mother.” When he was eight years old, Armstrong fell 15 feet from a silver maple and, with his younger sister June watching in awe, landed flat on his back. ” ‘Never to trust a dead limb’ was young Neil’s takeaway,” writes Hansen. At age 16 Armstrong gave first aid to two men who nosed in on approach to Wapakoneta’s airport after hitting power lines. One of the men died, not quite in Armstrong’s arms. But the kid was unfazed. “I never felt he was affected by it in any way,” said his sister.

Just weeks after his 21st birthday, while making a bomb run on North Korean ground targets, a cable set up by the enemy as a booby trap for low-flying aircraft tore six feet off the right wing of his F9F Panther. He was able to get the airplane back to altitude, then back to the South Korean coast before ejecting and settling down into some rice paddies. He later learned that the explosions he heard offshore were the North Koreans mining the bay where he would have come down without the right wind. A couple weeks later, he was below decks on the carrier U.S.S. Essex when a damaged F2H Banshee bounced high during a landing attempt and smashed into a line of aircraft being moved toward the bow. In the horrible fire that ensued, four men died and many were severely burned, some of them jumping overboard. As the youngest member of his squadron, Armstrong would have been parking those airplanes and been caught right in the fire. Instead, he’d been assigned as the squadron duty officer for the day, which entailed staying below deck in the ready room. He never even saw the disaster topside, or took part in the firefighting.

I haven’t even gotten to the more harrowing scrapes with death, such as the time he looked out the window of his X-15 expecting to see Rogers Dry Lake and saw the Rose Bowl in Pasadena; or the frightening Gemini 8 mission he commanded, in which a stuck thruster during orbit sent his capsule cartwheeling wildly out of control at one revolution per second, hurling him and David Scott around like ragdolls in a dryer; or his ejection with hardly a split second to spare during a flight in a machine called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, affectionately dubbed the “flying bedstead” (above).

Yes, Armstrong’s place in history is that classic crossroads of preparation, ambition, and one heck of a lot of lu— well, they may make up a better word for it someday, but for lack of one now, luck.

Sacadura Cabral (left) and Gago Coutinho

On this day in 1922, a pair of Portuguese aviators, Sacadura Cabral and Gago Coutinho, set off on the first flight across the southern Atlantic, from Lisbon to Recife, Brazil. They made it, but with plenty of down time for repairs and waiting on replacement aircraft. They finally finished the 5,100-mile voyage at Rio de Janeiro on June 17, after a total of 62 hours flying.

Along the way they lost two airplanes—their original Fairey III D hydroplane, “Lusitania,” which sank in the ocean off the tiny rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul, and a second Fairey, “Portugal” which didn’t get much farther before it, too, ditched in the sea (the pilots bobbed in the water for hours before being rescued by a passing freighter). The final leg of the trip, from the islands of Fernando Noronha to Brazil, was in a Fairey 17 named “Santa Cruz.”

Cabral, a Naval aviator, had been inspired by two Atlantic crossings three years earlier—a U.S. Navy journey from New York to England in a Curtiss NC-4 flying boat, and John Alcock and Arthur Brown’s first non-stop crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland, accomplished in only 16 hours on June 15, 1919.

At Cabral’s suggestion, the Portuguese and Brazilian governments started planning a South Atlantic crossing within days of Alcock and Brown’s trip. But first, they had to figure out how to navigate to a hard-to-find refueling stop like Fernando Noronha (the biggest island is just six miles long) after crossing 1,450 miles of open ocean. Cabral’s friend Gago Coutinho, a Naval commander and cartographer, developed a new kind of sextant that used a water bubble to create an artificial horizon, and it was this use of internal navigation that made the trip possible.

At the time, Charles Lindbergh was 20 years old. And though he probably hadn’t heard of Cabral and Coutinho at the time, the man who five years later would make the most famous Atlantic crossing in history took his first airplane ride on April 9, when the Portuguese aviators were already halfway across the ocean.

A product of someone's vivid imagination.

Photos of this Soviet behemoth, posing as a K-7 designed by Konstantin Kalinin, have been zinging around the Internet lately, eventually landing on the desktops of National Air and Space Museum curators. “If it’s on the Internet, it must be true,” goes the saying.

Not quite so Soviet, but you get the idea.

No dice, says curator Von Hardesty, who specializes in Russian/Soviet aeronautical history. “No Kalinin design on this scale ever flew. A Russian caption suggests that this is a model of a purely hypothetical Kalinin design. K.A. Kalinin, who was later purged by Stalin, did design a prototype K-7 aircraft, a civilian version that flew briefly in the early 1930s. The K-7 was a large aircraft for its time, with seven engines (one pusher), but it did not match the giant Maxim Gorky (ca 1935). Both aircraft were destroyed in crashes.”

Admits an otherwise anonymous “Randy,” posting on a Web site: “They are actually computer-generated graphics, embellished by the artists.”

To me, they evoke the grandiose designs of Bruce McCall, as seen on the cover (right) of one of his books.

Never mind that the guy in this video sounds like the turtle in Finding Nemo (”He was killin’ it, and you were killin’ it, I was comin’ down, and Dude, you both went ‘Whoaaah!’ and I was like ‘Nooooo!!’”) This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time: wingsuit flyers Jeff Nebelkopf and Mike Mascheff watching the recent launch of space shuttle Discovery from the air.

Researchers Peter Jenniskens, Muawia Shaddad, and University of Khartoum students at the scene of a meteorite find last December.

For the first time, scientists have recovered pieces of a rock tracked all the way from space to its meteoric demise in Earth’s atmosphere. And for the first time, Westerners are hearing how that fireball (which we wrote about in our April/May 2009 issue) appeared to people on the ground in northern Sudan when it came screaming in last October.

According to Peter Jenniskens, a researcher at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, people all over that part of Sudan were just returning from morning prayers when “The whole landscape lit up. It was a very frightening event.”

NASA scientists had predicted the impact—a first—and knew where to direct Jenniskens when he called weeks later to ask where to search for meteorites on the ground. When he arrived in December at the Nubian desert location (near train Station 6, between Wadi Halfa and Khartoum), along with a group of University of Khartoum students led by Muawia Shaddad, it took only two hours of searching to locate pieces of the object formerly known as 2008 TC3. (The first fragment was discovered by a student named Mohammad Alameen, who Jenniskens said was particularly adept at finding them). A total of 47 fragments were recovered, adding up to just under nine pounds of material.

Mike Zolensky, a meteorite expert at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, never imagined that any pieces of 2008 TC3 would be found. Because of the remote location, he assumed they were “lost and gone forever.” But not only has he been able to study the Sudan meteorites in his lab, they turn out to be from an extremely rare type of asteroid. In fact, there weren’t even samples of this type in any of the world’s meteorite collections.

The evidence suggests that these bits of rock were once part of a much larger body that experienced volcanism in its distant past. And based on its rare spectral type, a known asteroid with a similar spectrum, which goes by the name of 1998 KU2, has already been identified as a possible source for 2008 TC3.

Not a bad scientific return for something that wasn’t even planned.

The meteorites, by the way, have been named Almahata Sitta—Arabic for “Station 6.”