Neil Armstrong Took One Small Step, Then Made a Giant Retreat Into Private Life

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The Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon

Apollo 11, the historic eight day mission to the moon, which took place from July 16-24, 1969, and made astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin household names, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

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In his own book, "Men From Earth," Aldrin wrote that he thought the man who preceded him onto the lunar surface had worked his way through his career "carefully watching everything he did and said.''

Talkative and opinionated, Aldrin may be the anti-Armstrong. In his post-Apollo career, Aldrin has done what Armstrong would find inconceivable. He once did a guest voice on "The Simpsons," sat for a hilarious interview on "Da Ali G Show," made a rap video with Snoop Dogg and Quincy Jones, and loaned his name to a computer game, Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space. Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, there's Aldrin in an ad for -- what?! -- Louis Vuitton luggage. Aldrin once punched a guy who accused him of "lying" about the moon landing.

Someone once described Aldrin and Armstrong as "amiable strangers," but Hansen says that's inaccurate. "I'm not even sure 'amiable' is the right word. Neil did not appreciate how (Aldrin) went off in such strong, aggressive ways with his ideas. They worked well together, but I'm not sure there was much personal rapport. Buzz never figured Neil out." From time to time, Hansen says, Aldrin would contact him and ask for help to persuade Armstrong to attend some event -- a reflection, Hansen says, of the astronauts' uneasy relationship.

Hansen says Armstrong's reticence may have been reinforced by the example of Charles Lindbergh, another 20th-century pioneer who knew much about the soul-twisting powers of fame. The two men met in 1968, and Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were Armstrong's guests for the Apollo 11 launch. They corresponded until Charles Lindbergh's death in 1974.

A solitary country boy who dreamed of flying, Armstrong grew into a skilled Navy combat pilot (he flew 78 missions in the Korean War), an engineer and a test pilot who flew the experimental X-15 rocket plane to the edge of outer space. As a pilot and astronaut, his unflappable calm was more than a personality trait; it was a survival skill. On his first space mission, in 1966, Armstrong docked Gemini 8 with a second vehicle, but the craft immediately fell into a continuous, stomach-churning roll. Armstrong fired the vehicle's reentry controls, aborting the mission but saving the spacecraft, himself and pilot David Scott.

As Tom Wolfe described him in "The Right Stuff," Armstrong's facial expression "hardly ever changed. You'd ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you'd start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn't understood, and -- click -- out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories. . . . It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer.''

It may have been Armstrong's wary, cautious personality that prompted NASA's brass to choose him instead of Aldrin as the first man to step out of the lunar landing vehicle.

NASA's official explanation was that Armstrong, the mission's commander, would be seated closest to the hatch in the cramped landing vehicle and would have to emerge first. But that was largely a smoke screen designed to mollify Aldrin, who had campaigned for the honor. According to Hansen's research, the order was actually determined at a secret meeting, in March 1969, of the Apollo program's four senior administrators -- flight-crew director Deke Slayton, Apollo program manager George Low, director of flight operations Chris Kraft and Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth.

The four men concluded that Armstrong, not Aldrin, had the temperament best suited to be, as Kraft later put it, "a legend, an American hero beyond Lucky Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor."

"Neil was Neil," Kraft told Hansen. "Calm, quiet and absolute confidence. We all knew that he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego. . . . If you would have said to him, 'You are going to be the most famous human being on Earth for the rest of your life,' he would have answered, 'Then I don't want to be the first man on the Moon.' "

The decision was crushing for Aldrin, who for a time in the 1970s suffered from depression and fought to overcome alcoholism.