BRINKLEY: With Sputnik, do you recall where you were when you heard about that?
ARMSTRONG: Yes. The Society of Experimental Test Pilots was holding a symposium in the
Beverly Hilton Hotel [California] in October of '57, and I was working on—I think I may have been
program chairman—I'm not sure about that now—for the symposium. But in any case, I was very
much involved in the symposium, and we were trying to find ways to get the Los Angeles press
interested in the kinds of technical presentations that were being produced there, and get a little
coverage of what our industry was doing and what was happening in the test-flight world. But it
was a very hard sell, and it became completely impossible once Sputnik came across the sky, and all
of a sudden we couldn't get any people to come listen to problems about airplanes flying.
AMBROSE: And your own reaction to Sputnik? Curiosity or more than that? Or "God almighty" or
what?
ARMSTRONG: I don't remember exactly what my reactions were at the time, too much colored by
intervening events. But I guess it was disappointing that a country who was the "evil empire" in our
minds at that time would be beating us in technology, where we thought we were preeminent. At
the same time, it was encouraging, because it demonstrated the kinds of things that we were
interested in really might be achievable and perhaps it would encourage people to look at our world
with somewhat more curiosity and perhaps approval than they had before.
It did change our world. It absolutely changed our country's view of what was happening,
the potential of space. I'm not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would
lead. President Eisenhower, I think, was saying something like, "What's the worry? It's just one
small ball." But I'm sure that was a facade behind which he had substantial concerns, because if
they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United
States, because the navigation requirements were quite similar.
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Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Neil A. Armstrong
AMBROSE: Something you said a minute or two ago reminded me of all of the—how did the
Russians get the bomb? They must have stolen our secrets. They couldn't possibly have done this
on their own, and they must have stolen our secrets. And they did in some part. But the real secret
of the atomic bomb was revealed in August 1945. That is, it works. It seems to me that's almost
what you're saying about Sputnik. It can be done.
ARMSTRONG: It can be done. That was an eye-opener, I think, to a lot of people [and to Killian].
Maybe there was substantial interest in, "Well, maybe we can get people up into space." That was
instantaneous, that possibility.
BRINKLEY: Here you are a test pilot and you're flying the most advanced aircraft in the world.
What makes you at that point in time want to join the astronaut corps? What is it that made you
decide, "This is what I want to do"?
ARMSTRONG: It wasn't an easy decision. I was flying the X-15 and I had the understanding or
belief that if I continued, I would be the chief pilot of that project. I was also working on the DynaSoar, and that was still a paper airplane, but was a possibility. Then there was this other project
down at Houston, [the] Apollo program. Gemini hadn't been really much identified yet at that
point. It wasn't clear to me which of those paths [would be best]. Recognize that people who are in
this world see projects come and go. A project's established, begun, it may run for several years,
finally get canceled, and I had been assigned to aircraft test projects and never, never flew the
airplane, because the need changed or something else became more important. I never got to that
goal.
We sort of saw every project of this type as something that, it may go or it may not.
Although you learn a lot when you're on a program that eventually gets canceled, there's a lot more
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Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Neil A. Armstrong
satisfaction in being in a program that really reaches its fruition. I can't tell you now just why in the
end I made the decision I did, but I consider it as fortuitous that I happened to pick one that was a
winning horse. But there would be no way to predict that at the time when it got to that fork in the
road. In my case, a three-way fork.
BRINKLEY: Some of the other test pilots that didn't go into the Apollo program, that stayed at
Edwards, that believed, "We're flying our own planes," and had that attitude, did you ever catch like
"Space, that's for like the dog that went up or the monkeys."
ARMSTRONG: Monkeys.
BRINKLEY: Is that kind of an attitude that prevailed?
ARMSTRONG: On the part of some, yes. At the time the Mercury program was started, it might well
have gone that way. In a sense it did, in that they had a lot of monkey flights and so on, chimp
flights. But I believe that the reason it did not keep that characterization was that the Mercury
crewmen insisted on making it an airplane-like device, have the same conventions as normal
airplanes, so that your natural instincts were proper, and insist that the crewmen be able to perceive
enough and see enough and have sufficient information available, … that he could make reasonable
choices about proper alternatives in how to control the craft in a manner that would maximize the
ability to get toward the objective.
So I think that was a great contribution on the part of the Mercury guys, who were probably
abrasive to some of the engineering managers in that time in their demands that the craft be built in
this way. So that certainly was important.
BRINKLEY: Did you have any encounters with Chuck [Charles E.] Yeager during this period at all?
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Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Neil A. Armstrong
ARMSTRONG: Oh, I've known Chuck for, you know, forty-something years.
BRINKLEY: I'm just curious, is he somebody that other pilots look up to as this extraordinary pilot,
or is he just another one of the guys?
ARMSTRONG: I think people recognize that he was a good pilot, a stick and rudder man.
BRINKLEY: He's become almost a mythological pilot. The legend of Chuck Yeager has become—
do you think that's just through books and media, things like that?
ARMSTRONG: I'll pass.
BRINKLEY: What was the astronaut selection progress like, and what kinds of physical and
psychological tests were you subjected to once you made that decision on your part?
ARMSTRONG: Well, I don't think the community of flight medicine and flight physiology knew very
much what they needed to do at that point. There were widespread predictions that humans could
not survive in space, for a variety of reasons, both physical, physiological and mental and
psychological, all kinds of reasons. So they didn't really know exactly what to test for, I think, so
they did everything. They didn't miss anything, as far as I know. They did every test known to
man. [Laughter] Not necessarily fun. Survivable.
BRINKLEY: You obviously passed all those with flying colors.
ARMSTRONG: I don't know what the results were. 