Neil Armstrong Quotes
284 Neil Armstrong Quotes
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A dual job as a research pilot and a research engineer. Actually, I think at that point they called them research scientists.
Neil Armstrong
We would fly out in the worst weather we could find out [over] Lake Erie and try to pick up a lot of ice and find out which were the most efficient ways of shedding it.
Neil Armstrong
The only product of the NACA was research reports and papers. So when you prepared something for publication, either as a principal or associate author of some sort, you had to face the "Inquisition," which was the review of said paper by experts who were predominantly lady English teachers or librarians who were absolutely unbearably critical of the tiniest punctuation or grammatical error, and that is what NASA needs today.
Neil Armstrong
The rigor of the language, which I never mastered, but I appreciated after being exposed to those charming ladies [English teachers or librarians] who were so tough.
Neil Armstrong
They made me go out there and do a lot of flights and practice a lot of maneuvers for test purposes, and turn in the results so they could see whether I was starting to get the hang of it. Took me a while, but it was a good experience—
Neil Armstrong
I did a lot of different test programs in those days. That was the first time I ever flew supersonically, when I got an F-100 [Super Sabre], and I flew that aircraft a lot, a very nice early F-100.
Neil Armstrong
I had no aerodynamic controls. That was not a particular problem, because I still have reaction controls to use, but what I couldn't do is get back down in the atmosphere.
Neil Armstrong
There's no power on the aircraft, so you're always a glider after the rocket burns out. The rocket only [burned for] a minute and a half.
Neil Armstrong
I always felt that the risks that we had in the space side of the program were probably less than we [had] back in flying at Edwards or the general flight-test community. The reason is that when we were out exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits. Our knowledge base was probably not as good as it was in the space program. We had less technical insurance, less minds looking, less backup programs, less other analysis going on. That isn't to say that we didn't expect risks in the space program; we certainly expected they would be there, were guaranteed that they would be there. But we felt pretty comfortable because we had so much technical backup and we didn't go nearly close to the limits as much as we did back in the old flight-test days.
Neil Armstrong
That was a very exciting job and very excellent flying, very challenging goals. I think it was certainly one of the memorable parts of my life.
Neil Armstrong
Our principal responsibility was engineering work. We did not do a lot of flying. It was program development, devising simulations, looking at the problems of flight, and trying to figure out ways we could test those things and devise solutions to those problems. It was a wonderful time period and it was very satisfying work, particularly when you found a solution that would work.
Neil Armstrong
It wasn't something we talked a lot about, because in those days space flight was not generally regarded as a realistic objective, and it was a bit pie in the sky. So although we were working toward that end, it was not something we acknowledged much publicly. Not necessarily for fear of ridicule, but probably somewhat.
Neil Armstrong
[On Sputnik] 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.
Neil Armstrong
[More on Sputnik] 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.
Neil Armstrong
[On what Sputnik proved] Well, maybe we can get people up into space." That was instantaneous, that possibility.
Neil Armstrong
[On goal to be an Astronaut when at NASA] 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.
Neil Armstrong
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.
Neil Armstrong
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.
Neil Armstrong
[On Astronaut physical and psychological tests] 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. Not necessarily fun. Survivable.
Neil Armstrong
I came in with a high confidence level that these were people who I could respect, and knew had the background and the inclination and the determination to do what would lie ahead.
Neil Armstrong
[On the difference between a test pilot and an Astronaut] since we were trying to do an operational job, we were extremely focused. A research project tends to be more broad, generic, cover a range so that you have indications as to which might be the best path.
Neil Armstrong
The one-third that was training is training in a different sense than most people think of training, because, after all, there wasn't anybody that had done this and could tell us how to do it, because nobody had the experience. But they could tell us what they did know, and some became systems experts and would know the details of how the inertial guidance system or the computer or certain kind of engine valves and so on would operate and how we might handle malfunctions. So we spent enormous amounts of time gleaning everything we could from the people who were experts in these particular smaller components of the spacecraft or the launch vehicle.
Neil Armstrong
We also spent a lot of time in simulations. Simulators have gotten better over the years at a prodigious rate.
Neil Armstrong
We did them all with analog computers, because digital computers were just far too slow to use for simulations.
Neil Armstrong
We used the digital to do the precise calculations, and used the analog part to do the actual aircraft response things, which had to be a lot faster.
Neil Armstrong
There's an old perception that simulators are always more difficult to fly than the craft themselves. In general, that is true, and it's certainly turned out to be true in Apollo, particularly the lunar module [LM], which was to our benefit that it was easier to fly than the simulator, because we were expecting something that was somewhat more cantankerous and contrary than it actually turned out to be.
Neil Armstrong
[On John F Kennedy’s Moon challenge] The world was caught up in what the Soviets were doing. And he'd campaigned against Lyndon [Baines Johnson] on the basis that we were behind in rocketry.
Neil Armstrong
I think everyone felt we were right on the brink of potential World War III. I don't think anybody, even the people in the back woods of Montana, were unaware of this tension, this heightened sense of tension. I was very aware of it. I thought that we could shove aside all the work we're doing in favor of other things that the country decided were more important from a strategic point of view.
Neil Armstrong
At the time I think the reality was, you've got your job to do and you just go ahead and do it, and keep doing it and hope for the best.
Neil Armstrong
We were a very close team. We spent almost all our time together for months on end, getting ready for that flight, both going back and forth between Houston - spent a lot of time at the [McDonnell] plant in St. Louis [Missouri], working with the spacecraft as it was nearing completion, and participating in the testing of that spacecraft. So we all knew it very well by the time it was shipped to the Cape.
Neil Armstrong
The reality of the world in those days is that a lot of the testing took place at two o'clock in the morning or four-thirty in the morning, and we were spelling each other off. We would spend enormous amounts of time together, working out the details.
Neil Armstrong
I would not say that we never cracked a joke or talked about something off the project, but we were 98 percent focused on the job we had to do. I was and my perception of my colleagues was the same.
Neil Armstrong
I was so pleased to be associated with the program, because it was going, it was happening, it was exciting. The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It's probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they're all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject.
Neil Armstrong
We tried to divide the responsibilities such that each crew person was about equally loaded. We tried for each person to be able to know how to do everything if they had to, but we divided the responsibilities such that each would go into their area in [substantially] more depth.
Neil Armstrong
You had to sort of fill the squares and make sure you had done enough of those that you felt confident in your ability and people that were watching you on the ground, and…grading how you did. You also felt confident that you were in control of your destiny.
Neil Armstrong
[On the Gemini flight] We had so many things we wanted to do, and I know Dave wanted to do an EVA [extravehicular activity] and try out the backpack and do all that kind of stuff. It was very disappointing to have to call it quits and come home.
Neil Armstrong
I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can't take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind.
Neil Armstrong
Murphy's Law says bad things always happen at worst possible times.
Neil Armstrong
Being an old navy guy, I much preferred coming down in the water to coming down in Red China at the time.
Neil Armstrong
[On the calm feeling on seeing the Earth from the Moon] I don't know how to answer that. It probably affects different people in different ways. It is spectacular, and I think everyone is touched by it when they have the experience, but I don't know what goes on in other people's minds.
Neil Armstrong
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