Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0097/00972.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00972}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Apollo Expeditions To The Moon
Chapter 8: Men For The Moon}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Sherrod, Robert}
$Affiliation{NASA}
$Subject{astronauts
apollo
first
astronaut
flight
without
armstrong
aldrin
moon
president
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1975}
$Log{See Lunar Footprints*0097201.scf
See Apollo 1 Team*0097202.scf
See Apollo 11 Team*0097203.scf
See Apollo 15 Team*0097204.scf
See Desert Training*0097205.scf
}
Title:       Apollo Expeditions To The Moon
Author:      Sherrod, Robert
Affiliation: NASA
Date:        1975

Chapter 8: Men For The Moon

     On a June day in 1965, following their spectacular Gemini 4 flight, James
McDivitt and Edward White flew up to Washington from Houston with their wives
and children.  The helicopter bearing them from Andrews Air Force Base, Md.,
had no sooner settled on the White House lawn than Lady Bird Johnson said she
wanted them all to spend the night; babysitters would be provided. The two
astronauts heard the President call them "Christopher Columbuses of the
twentieth century," and he pronounced the United States now caught up with the
Russians.

[See Lunar Footprints: Footprints on the plain at Hadley, beneath the
unearthly Apennines.]

     The two astronauts had a parade.  They lunched with Vice President
Humphrey and congressional leaders, and in the evening they went to the State
Department for a reception.  Before a packed assemblage of foreign diplomats
they showed a 20-minute movie of their flight, which included the first
American walk in space by Ed White.

     In strode Lyndon B. Johnson himself, who told McDivitt and White, "I want
you to join our delegation in Paris." Furthermore, the President wanted them
to go now, as soon as they and their wives could pack.  He was seething
because the Russians had humbled the Americans at the Paris Air Show, where
Yuri Gagarin was standing by his spacecraft, shaking hands with everybody and
passing out Vostok pins.  The French press noted that the lackluster American
pavilion was shunned by the crowds.

     Patricia McDivitt and Patricia White wailed in unison, "But we have
nothing to wear!" Never mind, said LBJ, Lady Bird and Lynda Bird and Luci have
plenty of clothes.  The ladies retired to the White House bedrooms, and the
two Pats were duly outfitted.  Long after midnight the Presidential plane took
off, bearing as additional passengers Hubert Humphrey, James Webb, and Charles
Mathews, the Gemini program manager.

     The astronauts made it only in time for the last day and a half of the
eleven-day show, but they gave the Russians some real competition.  Wherever
they appeared, the American jumeaux de space were followed by masses of
Frenchmen.  "A partial recovery for the United States" was the Paris
newspapers' verdict.

     Such were the glory days, when to be an astronaut was to be in heaven -
if one could endure the slavery that was the obverse of the coin.

     Altogether there were seven groups of astronauts, a total of 73, of whom
43 flew before the long night settled on manned space flight after the
Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975.  Twenty-nine of these filled the 33 slots
in Apollo, with which we are principally concerned here.

     What did it take to become an astronaut?  Dr. Robert Voas, a psychologist
who was the Mercury astronauts' training director, detailed the required
characteristics as he saw them: intelligence without genius, knowledge without
inflexibility, a high degree of skill without overtraining, fear but not
cowardice, bravery without foolhardiness, self-confidence without egotism,
physical fitness without being muscle-bound, a preference for participatory
over spectator sports, frankness without blabber-mouthing, enjoyment of life
without excess, humor without disproportion, fast reflexes without panic in a
crisis.  These ideals were fulfilled to a high degree.


[See Apollo 1 Team: Apollo 1: Edward H. White II, Virgil I. Grissom, Roger B.
Chaffee.]

[See Apollo 11 Team: Apollo 11: Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E.
Aldrin, Jr.]

[See Apollo 15 Team: Apollo 15: David R. Scott, Alfred M. Worden, James B.
Irwin.]

The Strenuous Selection Process

     In December 1958, plans had been made to post civil service notices
inviting applications for astronaut service, GS-12 to GS-15, salary $8,330 to
$12,770.  President Eisenhower thought this ridiculous, and decided that the
rolls of military test pilots would furnish all the astronauts necessary. "It
was one of the best decisions he ever made," said Robert Gilruth sixteen years
later.  "It ruled out the matadors, mountain climbers, scuba divers, and race
drivers and gave us stable guys who had already been screened for security."
From the records of 508 test pilots, 110 were found to meet the minimum
standards (including the height and age limitations, 5 feet 11 inches and 40
years).

     After further examination, the 110 were narrowed to 69, then to 32, who
were put through strenuous physical tests: How much heat could the man stand?
How much noise?  How many balloons could he blow up before he collapsed?  How
long could he keep his feet in ice water?  How long could he run on a
treadmill?

     Worst of all, the astronauts thought, were the 25 psychological tests
that entailed minute and painful self-examination ("Write 20 answers to the
question: 'Who am I?'") From the 18 survivors, seven were chosen in April
1959, and they would remain the Nation's only astronauts for three and one-
half years.  Their IQs ranged from 130 to 145, with a mean of 136.  Even
before they had accomplished anything they became instant heroes to small boys
and other hero-worshipers around the world.

     Among those who flunked the first round were James Lovell and Charles
Conrad, who were picked up in the Second Nine in 1962 and went on to make four
spaceflights apiece - a record they shared only with John Young and Tom
Stafford.  The Second Nine proved even more stable than their predecessors.
Excepting Ed White, killed in the spacecraft fire of January 1967, and Elliott
See, who died in a plane crash, all commanded Apollo flights.

     The Second Nine were test pilots, too, but two of them were civilians:
Neil Armstrong, who had flown the X-15 for NASA, and See a General Electric
flier.  By the time the third group of fourteen was selected in 1963 the test-
pilot requirement had been dropped - as had most of the outlandish physical
tests - but the educational level had risen to an average of 5.6 years of
college, even though the IQ average fell a couple of points below the first
two groups.  Four of the fourteen would die in accidents without making a
spaceflight.

     The fourth group of six men wasn't even required to be pilots because
they were scientists (doctors of geology, medicine, physics, and electrical
engineering) who, after selection, had to take an extra year to learn to fly.
Because three missions were cut from the program, only one, Harrison Schmitt,
was to fly in Apollo.  Three others flew in Skylab.

     The fifth group was the biggest of all, nineteen pilots, of whom twelve
would fly in Apollo, three in Skylab, and one in Apollo-Soyuz.  The sixth
group, eleven more scientists, scored the highest mean IQ, 141, but they came
too late to fly and six resigned before 1975.  The final group of seven
transferred from the Air Force's defunct Manned Orbital Laboratory in 1969 and
their hope had to rest on the resumption of flight with the Space Shuttle
about 1979.

     One thing all astronauts had in common: hard work.  Each astronaut was
assigned one or more specialties, which he had to learn with dizzying
completeness.  Neil Armstrong, for example, was assigned trainers and
simulators, John Young environmental control systems and personal and survival
equipment, Frank Borman boosters.  In the third group Buzz Aldrin, who had
earned a doctorate with a dissertation on orbital rendezvous, was a natural
for mission planning; Bill Anders, who had a master's degree in nuclear
engineering, drew the environmental control system; Mike Collins had the
spacesuit and extravehicular activity.  The astronauts worked with and learned
from scientists and engineers, and suggested many ideas from a crewman's
viewpoint.

Preparing for All Eventualities

     Training was the name of the game, and they trained until it seemed the
labors of Hercules were child's play - how to make a tent out of your
parachute in case you came down in a desert; how to kill and eat a snake in
the jungles of Panama; how to negotiate volcanic lava in Hawaii.  An Air Force
C- 1 35 flew endless parabolas so the astronauts could have repeated half-
minute doses of weightlessness.  They wore weights in huge water tanks in
Houston and in Huntsville to get a feel of movement in zero and one-sixth
gravity.

[See Desert Training: Desert survival training was part of the regular program
of what-ifs.]

     Hair-raising was the device called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, a
sort of flying bedstead, which had a downward-pointing jet engine, gimbal-
mounted and computer-controlled to eliminate five-sixths of gravity.  In
addition, it had attitude-controlling thrusters to simulate the way the LM
would act before touchdown on the Moon.  If the trainer ran out of fuel at
altitude, or if it malfunctioned, the Apollo commander - for he was the only
one who had to fly the thing - had to eject, which meant he was catapulted
several hundred feet into the air before his parachute opened.  That was
exactly what happened to Neil Armstrong a few months before his Apollo 11
mission, when his bedstead started to tilt awry a hundred feet above the
ground.  Armstrong shot into the air, then floated to safety; the machine
crashed and burned.

     Dozens of training aids sharpened astronaut skills, but the most
indispensable were flight simulators, contraptions built around copies of CM
and LM control areas and complete to every last switch and warning light.
Astronauts on prime status for the next mission would climb in to flip
switches and work controls.  The simulator would be linked to a computer
programmed to give them practice too.  What made it exciting was that training
supervisors could also get in the loop to introduce sneaky malfunctions,
full-bore emergencies, or imminent catastrophes to check on how fast and well
the crews and their controllers would cope.  Surrounding the mockup spacecraft
were huge boxes for automatic movie and TV display of what astronauts would
see in flight: Earth, Moon, stars, another spacecraft coming in for docking.
When John Young first encountered a simulator he exclaimed, "the great train
wreck!" Hour after weary hour the spacemen had to solve whatever problems the
training crews thought up and fed into the computer.  The Apollo 11 crew
calculated they spent 2000 hours in simulators between their selection in
January and their flight in July 1969.

     Some of this bone-cracking training was done in Houston but much of it at
the Cape, in Downey, Calif. (the CM), or Bethpage, Long Island (the LM). When
the astronauts were not training they were flying in their two-seater T-3 8
planes from one place to the other, or doing aerobatics to sharpen their edge,
or simply to unwind.  Their long absences proved a plague on their home lives,
and there was hardly a man among them who did not consider quitting the
program at one time or another "to spend some time with my family."

Their Origins and Characteristics

     The 29 Apollo astronauts tended to originate in the American heartland,
in such places as Weatherford, Okla.; Columbus, Ohio; Jackson, Mich.; and St.
Francis, Kans.  Four states gave birth to three astronauts each: Texas, Ohio,
New Jersey, and Illinois.  Only one astronaut was born in New England, and
none in New York City; only two in the Deep South and two on the West Coast.
Birthplaces in the twentieth century can be deceptive, however: Frank Borman
was born in a steel-mill town, Gary, Ind., but because he was a sickly child
(sinus problems and mastoiditis) his family moved to Arizona; John Young first
saw light in San Francisco, but his accent was authentic grits and red-eye
because he grew up in Orlando and rural Georgia and attended Georgia Tech
(where he stood second in engineering).  Two were born overseas of U.S.
families, Anders in Hong Kong and Collins in Rome.

     The service schools educated nearly half the Apollo astronauts: the U.S.
Naval Academy eight, West Point five.  As might be expected of superachievers
they were good students, the median class - standing pegged at the top sixteen
percent.  Only two other colleges produced more than one Apollonian: the
University of Colorado and Purdue with two apiece.  Three of the twenty-nine
earned doctorates: Aldrin and Mitchell at MIT, Schmitt, the only one with no
military experience, at Harvard. (Pete Conrad was the lone astronaut to do his
undergraduate work at an Ivy League institution, Princeton.)

     The average Apollo astronaut was medium-sized, slightly under 5 ft 10
in., about 160 pounds.  He was 38.6 years old when he made his flight or, in
the case of the four who flew two Apollo missions, his first one.  The blue-
eyed outnumbered the brown, 16 to 8, and five had eyes described as hazel or
green.  Nineteen had (or had had) brown hair, seven blond, one black, and
there were two redheads, Schweickart and Roosa.  Six of them were well over on
the bald side, Stafford almost at the peeled-egg stage.

     The twenty-seven who were married (Swigert and Schmitt were not) produced
an average of 2.8 children.  Generally the astronauts - twenty-three
Protestants and six Catholics - adhered more closely to formal religion than
their contemporaries; a high proportion of them served as elders, stewards,
deacons, or vestrymen.  Presbyterian Aldrin administered holy communion to
himself inside Eagle after it landed on the Moon, and when Frank Borman was
orbiting the Moon he apologized to his fellow members of St. Christopher's
Episcopal Church because his absence made it impossible for him to serve as a
lay reader on Christmas Eve.  The prayer he did say reached a somewhat larger
audience and caused an atheist to sue NASA, unsuccessfully, on a
separation-of-state-and-church issue.

     The astronauts were big on sports and flashy cars, but weak in the
classics.  Mike Collins, who combined the fastest game of handball (nobody
could even come close to beating him) with a taste for literature, used to say
that the space program needed more English majors to get away from the
engineerese in the exhaustive checklists.  He proved his versatility by
writing a literate, perceptive, and witty book called Carrying the Fire.

Advantages of Being the Eldest Son

     Let us proceed to the anomalies, space jargon for the surprises.  Who
would have imagined that seven of these superboys-next-door would turn out to
be left-handed (over twice what the percentages would predict), particularly
since it is more convenient for test pilots to be right-handed?  Was it
another symptom of the determination to beat the odds?  Similarly, nine of the
twenty-nine didn't make it the first time they applied for admission (two of
them had to apply three times).  Was it the "I'll show 'em" obsession that
prompted them to try again - and win?

     Then there is the eldest-son syndrome.  As long ago as 1874 a
psychologist noted that the first child in a family tended to excel.  He got a
headstart: his doting parents taught him to read early, to study hard, to take
on responsibility for himself.  A survey of the twenty-nine confirms this
thesis to an astonishing degree.  Twenty-two were first-born (six of them in
the only-child category).  Five others had older sisters but were eldest sons.
Only two, Stuart Roosa and Mike Collins, had older brothers, and in the case
of Collins there is a qualification: he hardly knew his brother, who was
thirteen years older, and Major General and Mrs. Collins gave Mike the
only-son treatment the second time around.

     To be dubbed astronaut, by way of the thrilling telephone call from Deke
Slayton or, in some cases, his deputy Al Shepard, was to achieve knighthood.
This occasion the chosen one never forgot, like the day he got married or the
day JFK was shot.

     Soon he learned that this was only the beginning.  An astronaut didn't
join the peerage until he got assigned to a flight, initially to a back-up
crew and then later prime.  "I would have flown alone, or with a kangaroo - I
just wanted to fly," Mike Collins wrote.

     Men assigned to a crew not only were in the public eye.  They and their
families achieved status with their peers; they went to the head of the line
when it came to time in the simulators, or in access to the T-38 planes.

     The men with missions got invited to the White House; Congress welcomed
them.  Even as late as Apollo 13, whose crew appeared before the Senate Space
Committee, Senator Curtis credited the astronauts with the ability "to
increase the attendance of this committee more than anything I know of."
Senator Symington observed that Lovell & Co. represented "all the best in this
country," and Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine said that "this is
certainly one of the most momentous occasions of my career."

     Sometimes fate played a hand, as in the case of Buzz Aldrin.  Deep in
despair over his failure to be assigned to a prime Gemini crew - he was back-
up on Gemini 10, and there would be no Gemini 13 - Aldrin was suddenly
catapulted to the last mission because his next-door neighbor Charles Bassett
was killed in a plane crash.  From his superb walk in space on his Gemini
mission Aldrin went on to back up Apollo 8, succeeded to prime on Apollo 11,
and assured himself a front seat in the history books.

     Spaceflight was the sine qua non, but ironically the man who sat atop
this bastion of power was an unflown astronaut.  Donald K. Slayton, a dairy
farmer's son from Sparta, Wis., got his wings at age 19 and flew 56 B-25
missions in the Mediterranean theater before he was 21, followed by seven
missions in the Pacific.  After World War II he went to the University of
Minnesota (aeronautical engineering) and became an Air Force test pilot.

     A blue-eyed, steel-nerved flier, he was a natural for the second orbital
Mercury mission, after John Glenn's.  But doctors discovered he had a slightly
irregular heartbeat, which raised an issue that assumed vast proportions - his
six colleagues even appealed to President Kennedy to overrule the faction of
doctors who wanted to ground Deke.  Kennedy assigned this hot potato to his
Vice President, who invited the astronauts, along with Robert Gilruth, to a
weekend at the LBJ Ranch to thrash out this complaint and others.  Deke
remained grounded but his comrades elected him their leader, thereby
conferring on him (with Gilruth's concurrence) immense power that would
control the destinies of all astronauts for the next decade.

Which Men for Which Flight Crews?

     How did Deke select the men to fly?  Mostly by seniority.  An astronaut
stood in line until his turn came, though the order of assignment within his
own group was important.  "They are a durn good bunch of guys, real fine
troops, a bunch of chargers," said Slayton in 1972.  "It's not the kind of
organization where you have to keep pointing people in the right direction and
kicking them to get them to go.  Everybody would like to fly every mission,
but that's impossible, of course.  They all understand that, even if it makes
some of them unhappy." Slayton was rarely accused of unfairness, a remarkable
achievement considering the stakes involved; his own eventual assignment at
age 48 to the Apollo-Soyuz mission was universally popular.

     Not all astronauts were equal, of course.  Before the first manned Apollo
flights six crews had been formed, commanded by Schirra, Borman, McDivitt,
Stafford, Armstrong, and Conrad, who had shaken down as the natural leaders
with appropriate seniority.  Before he flew Apollo 7 Schirra announced he was
quitting afterward, and that left five.  Which one would land first on the
Moon?  It depended on the luck of the draw.  "All the crews were essentially
equal," said Slayton, "and we had confidence that any one of them could have
done that first job."

     Either Borman or McDivitt seemed likeliest to be first on the Moon; after
they flew their early Gemini missions they were sent straight to Apollo
instead of being recycled into later Gemini flights.  But in 1968 two things
happened to derail this prospect: McDivitt, scheduled to lift off on the first
Saturn V (Apollo 8), declined the opportunity because it would not carry the
LM, on which he had practiced so long.  Borman, scheduled for Apollo 9, was
"highly enthusiastic" about Apollo 8, LM or no LM, but in deference to wife
and children he decided that this would be his last flight.

     Borman's back-up was Armstrong; McDivitt's was Conrad.  In each case, the
back-up shifted with the prime, so Armstrong in the normal rotation became
Apollo 11, and Conrad lost his chance to be first man on the Moon by becoming
Apollo 12.  There was also the possibility that Apollo 10 (Stafford) might be
the first Moon lander -- George Mueller initially saw no point in going to the
Moon a second time without touching down.  But for this one the LM wasn't
completely adapted for the task (it weighed too much) and the program
management decided they were not ready for the big step.  When the batting
order was aligned in the summer of 1968, nobody could have forecast how the
assignments would sort out.

Choosing the First Man on the Moon

     Once it was fairly certain that Apollo 11 was it, newspaper reporters and
some NASA officials predicted that Aldrin would be the first man to step on
the Moon.  The logic was that in Gemini the man in the right-hand seat had
done the EVA, and the early time line drawn up in MSC's lower engineering
echelons showed him dismounting first.  But the LM's hatch opened on the
opposite side.  For Aldrin to get out first it would have been necessary for
one bulky-suited, back-packed astronaut to climb over another.  When that
movement was tried, it damaged the LM mockup.  "Secondly, just on a pure
protocol basis," said Slayton, "I figured the commander ought to be the first
guy out. . . I changed it as soon as I found they had the time line that
showed that.  Bob Gilruth approved my decision." Did Armstrong pull his rank,
as was widely assumed?  Absolutely not, said Slayton.  "I was never asked my
opinion," said Armstrong.  "It was fine with me if it was to be Neil," Aldrin
wrote, half-convincingly.

     Five days before he sent McDivitt and White on that 1965 midnight ride to
Paris, Lyndon B. Johnson had thrown a monkey wrench into the Pentagon's
machinery by jubilantly announcing that he was promoting those astronauts,
both Air Force officers, from major to lieutenant colonel (he didn't bother to
find out that both had only recently made major).  The astronauts were
naturally delighted.

     In justice to Maj. Virgil Grissom USAF and Lt. Comdr. John Young USN, who
had flown Gemini 3 three months earlier, the President accelerated promotions
for them, too, again without saying anything to NASA or the Defense
Department.  He also went back and picked up some unpromoted Mercury
astronauts.  Admiral W. Fred Boone, NASA's liaison officer to the Pentagon,
noting "some dissatisfaction both among the astronaut community and in the
Pentagon," undertook a study.  Wrote Boone: "We agreed it would be preferable
that meritorious promotions be awarded in accordance with established policy
rather than on a 'spur of the moment' basis."

     The upshot was a policy, approved by the President, providing that each
military astronaut be promoted after his first successful flight, but not
beyond colonel USAF or captain USN.  Civilians would be rewarded by step
increase in civil service grade.  Only one promotion to any individual.

     That policy came unstuck on Apollo 12, flown by three Navy commanders,
Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean.  Conrad and Bean, having been upped
from lieutenant commander to commander after their Gemini 11 flight, were
ineligible for another promotion.  Rookie Bean was.  But should Bean be
promoted over the heads of his seniors?  Hang the policy, said President
Nixon, promoting all three.

     Of all the amenities accruing to astronauts, the hard cash came from "the
Life contract." Between 1959 and 1963 Life magazine paid the Seven Original
astronauts a total of $500,000 for "personal" stories - concerning themselves
and their families - as opposed to "official" accounts of their astronautical
duties.  This arrangement increased the astronauts' military income by about
200 percent.  It also simplified NASA public relations, since the famous young
men's bylines would be concentrated in one place and the contract called for
NASA approval of whatever they said.

     There were drawbacks.  The rest of the press took a sour view of what it
considered public property being put up for exclusive sale (the dividing line
between "personal" and "official" was wafer-thin).  Since the same
ghostwriters put their stories in print, the astronauts (and their families)
all seemed shaped in the same mold, utterly homogenized for the greater glory
of home, motherhood, and the space program.  "To read it was to believe we
were the most simon-pure guys there had ever been," wrote Buzz Aldrin in
Return to Earth.  "The contract almost guaranteed peaches and cream, full-
color spreads glittering with harmless inanities," was the way Mike Collins's
book had it.

What Happens to Ex-Astronauts?

     The exclusive-story gambit almost ended when the Kennedy Administration
took over, and Kennedy's press secretary actually announced there would be no
more contracts after Mercury ended.  But John Glenn went sailing with the
President one summer day in 1962 and enumerated the costs and risks that came
with fame.  The President relented and more contracts were signed after the
Second Nine entered, this time with not only Life but also Field Enterprises.
But as more astronauts were selected, the pie sliced thinner until finally
each astronaut was receiving only $3000 per year for his literary output.  One
last surge came with Life's European syndication of the stories of Apollo 8
through 11 in 1969, which brought about $16,000 for each of sixty astronauts
and widows.

     A principal advantage of the contracts was the insurance, $50,000 worth
from both Life and Field for each astronaut, and the widows of the accident
victims were left with nest eggs.  Congress might have been able to provide
extra income and extra insurance, but the Vietnam War got in the way, and who
was to say a man dying in space was more deserving than one who stepped on a
land mine in a jungle path?

     Unfortunately, this easy money led, directly or indirectly, to money
acquired less scrupulously when the Apollo 15 astronauts sold 400 unauthorized
covers to a German dealer in exchange for $8000 each (the dealer got $
150,000).  The three returned the money, and were subsequently reprimanded.
It also turned out that each of fifteen astronauts had sold 500 copies of his
signature on blocks of stamps for $5 apiece, without saying anything to bosses
Slayton and Shepard about it (five of the fifteen gave the proceeds to
charity).  Deke and Al were incensed, but threw up their hands. If a man has a
claim to owning anything, it is his own signature. Nevertheless NASA put a
stop to this business and also placed heavy restrictions on what astronauts
could and could not carry into space.

     Homogeneous the astronauts never were.  Frank Borman learned to fly a
plane before he was old enough to get a driver's license, and so did Neil
Armstrong, but at the same age Dick Gordon was considering the priesthood,
Mike Collins was more interested in "girls, football, and chess" than in
planes, and Jim Irwin had never flown until he rode a commercial aircraft to
begin flight training.

     John Glenn went into politics and, after several disappointments, was
elected U.S. Senator from Ohio on the Democratic ticket in 1974.  Alan
Shepard's $ 125,000 from the Life and Field contracts became the egg that
hatched a fortune in real estate.  Borman, success-prone as always, spent a
semester at Harvard Business School, went to work for Eastern Airlines, and
became its president.  For several years Donn Eisele served as director of the
Peace Corps in Thailand, which was as different from Dick Gordon's executive
job with the New Orleans Saints football team as was Mike Collins's
directorship of the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum.  Armstrong
became a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Ed Mitchell
founded an organization devoted to extrasensory perception, and Jim Irwin
became a fundamentalist evangelist.  Jim McDivitt became an executive of
Consumers Power Company in his home town, Jackson, Mich., and Jim Lovell
stayed put with the Bay-Houston Towing Company.

     Once in awhile some them still turned up on television or radio: Schirra
plugging the railroads, Aldrin Volkswagens, Armstrong and Carpenter banks, and
Lovell insurance.  Collins was offered $50,000 to advertise a beer but he
turned it down, "although I like beer." Lest he appear too upright, Collins
did confess that he once made an unpaid commercial for U.S. Savings Bonds,
although he had never seen one in his life.

     If the astronauts sometimes dwelt in an aura of public misconception,
they nonetheless performed dazzling feats with skill and finesse.  You may
search the pages of history in vain for deeds to match theirs, and many years
will pass before similar feats occur again.  All hail, then, to these daring
young men who married technique to valor and in barely a decade transformed
the impossible into the commonplace.