First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong
By James R Hansen
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2005

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The giant who leapt

The long-awaited biography of Neil Armstrong makes ‘the Eagle has landed’ seem like only yesterday. My review for The Nation, published on April 30, 2006.

Buzz Aldrin claimed in his autobiography that soon after he joined Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Isn’t it fun?” Neil insists – in this, his first authorised biography – that he said, “Isn’t it fine?” and he was talking about the lunar dust they were both scraping up to bring home.
That pretty much says it all about the first man on the moon. No fun, just stoic attention to his work. And even today, at 75, having dodged the spotlight for three decades, he wants the record clear about that.
Neil Armstrong’s famous reticence may be the effect as well as the cause of so many interviewers’ dismay at getting answers that are anything but the dramatic ones they’d expect of such an icon. He’s a dull gig, as Norman Mailer discovered at the pre-launch press conferences. Mailer called him a “spiritual neuter” focused only on doing the job he was assigned, one that he always insisted could have been done by any of the other astronauts. He was no Columbus embracing history in his Columbia. There was no room for mythology in his mechanics.
Nevertheless, what a story. All 700 pages of it.

Once the tickertape parades were over, Armstrong pretty much vanished back into the Ohio countryside where he came from. He’s been such a quiet anomaly among his fellow astronauts, especially the moonwalkers, that a lot of people speculated something must have happened to him to him – maybe he did see a UFO up there and was keeping out of sight lest he blurt something out he’d been told not to.
One of the first duties for the official biographer of the man who will always be the first man on the moon is to clear away as many of the bouquets that have piled up around him as possible. A lot of them shouldn’t have been put there in the first place, and they’re all obscuring our view of the frustratingly enigmatic king of space.
For James Hansen, in the wonderful story “First Man”, the floral cull ranged from Armstrong’s hometown astronomer who was quoted, often, as saying Neil had told him while still a Boy Scout that he’d be the first to walk on the moon, to the tenacious conspiracy theory that no man has ever landed on the moon at all. He scythes through the lot with skill and verve.
A former Nasa historian, Hansen isn’t a great writer, but his journeyman prose is suited to the daunting task of bringing down to earth and making recognisable an honest-to-God living hero who appears to have never done a bad thing in his life. Only occasionally does he allow a burst of florid enthusiasm for his subject, yet far less than the reader might expect. Armstrong’s own modesty keeps Hansen on a leash.
There is an admirable supply of technology in the telling of the tale – the science of aeronautics and astronautics is not glossed over, but it never slows the pace. Emotional heartbeats keep pace with painstakingly logged heart rates.
And Hansen is adept at setting the scene, capturing the mood of the times as well as the thinking processes behind every fateful decision.

From a clever lift-off in the “Strong of Arm” clan’s European origins, he follows Neil through a slew of childhood homes, through Purdue University (he always considered himself an engineer first and foremost, and that’s why he got better moonrock specimens than anyone else) and into the Navy, which put the young flyer, who’d obtained his pilot’s licence before he could drive a car, into fighter jets over North Korea.
From that war to his years test-flying the X-15 and F-104, there were plenty of “incidents” in the air and on the ground, a few of them nervy close calls, so there’s no chance of the book’s pace slackening. The mighty Chuck Yeager puts in several brutish appearances – he was no fan of Armstrong when they were both pushing the hypersonic limits out in California in the early ’60s, but his veracity comes up short when Hansen is forced to answer his criticisms of Neil.
Enter the men of Mercury 7, all Right Stuff shimmer and glimmer, and Armstrong realised there might be something beyond the grasp of mere gravity. He was among the second batch of astronauts chosen, the “New Nine”, and emerged from the excruciating process of crew selection – which Hansen demystifies with aplomb – to skipper Gemini VIII.

I wondered at first how I’d somehow forgotten that Armstrong went aloft with Gemini in 1966. Apparently we weren’t supposed to remember; no doubt it was barely mentioned during the moon shot. Armstrong and Dave Scott had a terrible time, barely pulling off history’s first space docking before having to scuttle back home after just seven of their planned 55 orbits.
It’s during these always-dramatic flights – and several other astronauts’ missions are considered in detail as well – that Hansen really shows his skill. The science kicks in, great swaths of radio dialogue are given verbatim and little-known facts are hoisted into place to illuminate where the glory ended and the guts took control.
The beginning of the Apollo programme naturally ratchets up the suspense, not least because it commenced with the very first flight crew’s horrific incineration. Readers will be recalling scenes from the film “Apollo 13” as the moon mission progresses, and may be as surprised as I was to learn that, when his turn came, Armstrong was offered Jim Lovell for his Apollo 11 squad as a replacement for the ornery Buzz Aldrin. Neil stuck with Buzz, of course, and Lovell went on to command unlucky No 13, on which the machinery cheated him out of the moon. He could have been at Tranquility Base with Armstrong.

Then there was the second most infamous astronaut controversy (after the UFO business, which is rendered laughable): Aldrin was logically supposed to be the first man on the moon – co-pilots always went out first.
Hansen is forced into a lot of to and fro here. Armstrong was the senior guy; he was closer to the door; every moon shot after him put the commander out first; Neil didn’t care either way; Buzz wanted the glory; no, he wanted protocol, or at least a rational explanation. In the end, it turns out, the big-shots at Nasa wanted another Lindbergh hero, and Armstrong was quiet, confident and unassuming – just like Lindy.
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, however, had the first pee on the moon.