Neil Armstrongs Corvette

Neil Armstrong is one of my all time best heroes. Mainly because he didn't seek fortune because of his fame.

I remember reading in Yeager's autobiography that he didn't think a whole lot of Armstrong. The two went up in a T-33 for whatever reason, Armstrong in the front seat and Yeager in the back seat. Armstrong wanted to set it down on one of the dry lakes, and Yeager, who had been flying out there for years, told him the surface wasn't dry enough. He said Armstrong didn't listen, set it down, and the -33 promptly sank halfway up the landing gear into the mud.

Will wrote: I remember reading in Yeager's autobiography that he didn't think a whole lot of Armstrong. The two went up in a T-33 for whatever reason, Armstrong in the front seat and Yeager in the back seat. Armstrong wanted to set it down on one of the dry lakes, and Yeager, who had been flying out there for years, told him the surface wasn't dry enough. He said Armstrong didn't listen, set it down, and the -33 promptly sank halfway up the landing gear into the mud.

To be fair, Yeager is widely acknowledged to be a self-promoting shiny happy person. Which isn't exactly a bad thing in his line of work.

Corvette's are popular with Space Cowboys, real or fiction:

Armstrong was a really strong engineer. Different breed than Yeager - but he also did one hell of a landing on the moon, so he was not without chops.

Keith wrote: Armstrong was a really strong engineer. Different breed than Yeager

Which would make him more of a Porsche guy.

Keith wrote:

alfadriver wrote: But why so high a price? I would pay more for his '69 Vette, since that's the year he actually went to the moon. In '67, he was just another face in the NASA portfolio....

I dunno, he did a few things before landing on the moon.

He was the command pilot on the ill-fated Gemini 8 mission. There was an attitude problem after docking with the Agena and set off a blizzard of computer controlled corrections with the attitude thrusters. The capsule-Agena combination was tumbling through the air and spinning like a top simultaneously. Undocking from the Agena did not solve the problem.

Armstrong coolly wrested control from the computer and stopped the spinning by using the re-entry retro package at the front of the spacecraft. Unfortunately, doing so meant an instant mission abort and Gemini 8 reentered one orbit later under Armstrong's manual control. They splashed down right on target in their secondary landing sight in the Pacific. A post mortem on the spacecraft found one thruster stuck wide open.

It was Armstrong's performance under duress that led him to be named the command pilot on Apollo 11. They made the right choice when he and Aldrin found their planned moon landing sight to be full of boulders. Once again, Armstrong took manual control and found a place to land with 15 seconds of fuel left in the lunar module's descent stage.

Yeager may not have been impressed with Armstrong's jet-jock cred but he was a superior spacecraft pilot and deserves every accolade.

Osterkraut wrote:

Will wrote: I remember reading in Yeager's autobiography that he didn't think a whole lot of Armstrong. The two went up in a T-33 for whatever reason, Armstrong in the front seat and Yeager in the back seat. Armstrong wanted to set it down on one of the dry lakes, and Yeager, who had been flying out there for years, told him the surface wasn't dry enough. He said Armstrong didn't listen, set it down, and the -33 promptly sank halfway up the landing gear into the mud.

To be fair, Yeager is widely acknowledged to be a self-promoting shiny happy person. Which isn't exactly a bad thing in his line of work.

I'm a Yeager fan too, but he truly scorned any engineers and wasn't too happy that he was turned down for the astronaut' program.

Woody wrote:

Keith wrote: Armstrong was a really strong engineer. Different breed than Yeager

Which would make him more of a Porsche guy.

Ha! So true.