Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also an aerospace engineer, naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. Armstrong became an astronaut in 1962. He trained on the revolutionary flight control system at the MIT Instrumentation Lab in Cambridge, MA. (now Draper).
The Command/Service Module (CSM) was one of two spacecraft, along with the lunar module (LM) which was used to transport astronauts to the moon and back. It was built for NASA by North American Aviation and was guided by the first ever digital spaceflight computer system known as the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
The Digital Fly-By-Wire (DFBW) program, flown from 1972 to 1985, proved that an electronic flight control system, teamed with a digital computer, could successfully replace mechanical control systems. Electric wires are the linkage between the cockpit and control surfaces on a DFBW aircraft. Command signals from the cockpit are processed by the digital flight control computer and transmitted to actuators that move control surfaces correspondingly.
Armstrong was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and after Apollo he served as a Deputy Director at NASA where he is credited as being instrumental for the U.S. Military transition to digital fly by wire technology (used during Apollo missions) which has revolutionized modern aviation. He was assigned as command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission. Gemini 8 was launched on March 16, 1966, and Armstrong performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space. As spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission, Armstrong gained the distinction of being the first man to land a craft on the moon and first to step on its surface.
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Gus suits up for Mercury-Redstone 4 mission, the fourth mission in the series, as well as the second US manned suborbital spaceflight.
Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom had been part of the U.S. manned space program since it began in 1959, having been selected as one of NASA's Original Seven Mercury Astronauts. His second space flight on Gemini III earned him the distinction of being the first man to fly in space twice. His hard work, drive, persistence and skills as a top notch test pilot and engineer had landed him the title of commander for the first Apollo flight. Yet for Grissom, Apollo I was to be just the beginning. He had been told privately that if all went well, he would be the first American to walk on the moon. Although Grissom already had stacked up a very impressive list of career accomplishments, being first on the moon would be the ultimate achievement for the man who grew up in a small town during the lean years of the Great Depression.
Virgil Ivan Grissom was born on April 3, 1926 in Mitchell, Indiana, a tiny Midwestern community of about three thousand residents tucked away in the southern half of the state. Virgil was the eldest of Dennis and Cecile Grissom's four children, which included two brothers, Norman and Lowell and one sister, Wilma. Dennis Grissom managed to hold on to his job at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in spite of the numerous layoffs which were going on all around him. Although they were far from being wealthy, Mr. Grissom's twenty-four dollar per week salary allowed his family to live comfortably in their white frame house in town.
Although Grissom was too short to participate in high school sports, he found a niche for himself in the local Boy Scout troop where he eventually served as leader of the Honor Guard. To earn spending money, he delivered newspapers twice a day throughout the year and, in the summer, he was hired by the local growers to pick peaches and cherries in the orchards outside of town.
Throughout high school, Virgil used a good portion of his money to take Betty Moore to the late shows at the local theater. He had first met her during his sophomore year and he immediately knew that she was the girl for him. "I met Betty Moore when she entered Mitchell High School as a freshman, and that was it, period, exclamation point! It was a quiet romance, as far as anyone could see, but a special closeness started then and has developed into something light years beyond the power of mere words to describe."
Grissom was, in his own words "not much of a whiz in school". (2) Without having set specific goals for himself, he simply seemed to drift through his classes. He excelled in math, but only pulled average grades in his other subjects. His high school principal remembered him as "an average solid citizen who studied just about enough to get a diploma".
However, World War II helped Grissom start forming some personal and career goals. He enlisted as an aviation cadet as a high school senior and reported for duty in August 1944 following graduation. He took a short leave during July 1945 to marry Betty Moore and returned to the base with high hopes of receiving flight instructions and flying combat missions. However, Japan surrendered a short time later and the war ended before he could receive his training. Grissom found himself going from one routine desk job to another. Knowing that he had joined the Air Force to fly and not to type, he decided to leave the service. His discharge came through in November 1945.
"Neil was very excited about the project, but balked when he heard that they planned to use an analog computer. When told about the difficulty of finding a reliable digital computer, he said 'I just went to the Moon in one' referring to the highly reliable Apollo Guidance Computer.
Video Node/Entity Description, this week in 1966, the AS-203 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo AS-203 mission was an uncrewed test of the vehicle’s second stage, the S-IVB stage, and the instrument unit of the Saturn V to obtain flight information under orbital conditions. The configuration of the Saturn IB was designed to match the Saturn V as closely as possible. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center designed, developed and managed the production of the Saturn I and the Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the moon.
