Three years before the moon, Neil Armstrong was strapped into a spacecraft that was rolling over about once a second, with his vision closing in at the edges, working out which thruster had jammed open. He shut down the entire control system, switched to the separate set of jets meant for coming home, and stopped the spin. Then he ended the mission early, on purpose, because the fuel he had just used was the fuel he needed to come back.
That is the man. This is a cheap short biography of him, $6.99, banded 3 to 6, running from an Ohio boy building model aeroplanes to a Navy pilot to a test pilot to Apollo 11 and afterwards. The reason to own it is the flying, which is the half of him that usually vanishes behind the footprint.
The science it actually teaches
A test pilot is not a daredevil. He is a measuring instrument with a licence. Armstrong flew the X-15, a rocket plane dropped from under a bomber's wing, out to the top of the atmosphere and back, and the point of every one of those flights was the data he brought home about how the aircraft behaved where nobody had flown before. He came back and wrote it up. That is the job.
Gemini 8 is the story above, and it teaches three things at once. First, why anyone cared: you cannot get to the moon without joining two craft together in orbit, so somebody had to prove docking worked, and he did. Second, how a pilot debugs. The tumble started after the docking, so the obvious suspect was the other vehicle, but the spin got worse after he separated from it, which proved the fault was in his own ship. That is a clean piece of reasoning done while blacking out. Third, and this is the one children never hear, he aborted. Deciding to stop is a skill, and it is taught nowhere in the hero version of spaceflight.
The training machine deserves a page of its own. The moon has one sixth of Earth's gravity and no air, so a lander does not behave like anything that flies here, and no ordinary aircraft can teach you to set one down. They built an ugly rig with a jet engine pointing down to cancel most of the weight, and it flew like the real thing precisely because it was awful. It rolled out of control with Armstrong aboard and he ejected less than a second before it hit the ground. He was reportedly back at his desk the same afternoon.
Then the landing, which is where the actual engineering is buried. On the way down the guidance computer threw alarms. It had been handed more work than it could finish in each cycle, and it had been built to deal with that by dropping its least important jobs and carrying on with the one that mattered, which was flying the spacecraft. The alarm did not mean broken. It meant overloaded and coping. Somebody on the ground had to know that inside a few seconds and say keep going.
And the last piece is human, not electronic. The computer was steering them into a crater field strewn with boulders. Armstrong took semi-manual control, flew on across the surface looking for somewhere flat, and put it down with the fuel callout inside the final half minute. Two systems, one automatic and one not, and a pilot who knew which one to overrule and when.
He kept being an engineer afterwards. He taught aerospace engineering, and he sat on the boards that took apart what went wrong on Apollo 13 and, years later, on the shuttle Challenger. The same habit of mind that finds a stuck thruster in orbit is what finds a bad joint on the ground.
The child it lands with
If there is a child in your house who has already watched the landing footage twice and wants the next layer down, this is the book to put in front of them. It also does well with a reluctant reader who will read about aircraft and nothing else, because the chapters are short and the flying starts early. And it suits the child who takes things apart, because Armstrong is that grown up: not brave in the film-poster way, just extremely hard to rattle.
One place to stop and talk
Stop where the computer alarm goes off during the landing. It is the one page in this book that teaches something your child will use on a machine in their own house.
Set the problem up as a design question. A computer can only do so much work each second. Somebody hands it more than that. What should it do? Give up and stop, which in a landing kills you. Or decide what matters most, throw the rest overboard, and keep flying. Ask your child which one they would build. Then tell them the second one is what was built, in the 1960s, for a computer with less power than anything they own, and that this is why the alarm was not the emergency it sounded like.
Then the human half, which is better. Somebody in the control room had to recognise that alarm number and call go within seconds, with two men falling toward the moon. Ask how a person gets to be that calm. The answer is not courage. They had seen that exact alarm before, in a practice run on the ground, because the team had spent months rehearsing failures on purpose. Being ready is a thing you build, not a thing you are.
What to know going in
People die in this story. Three astronauts burned to death on the launch pad during a test before any of this succeeded, and test pilots of that era were killed regularly enough that Armstrong lost friends. A short book will handle those deaths in a sentence or two, which is often enough for a nine year old and sometimes not enough for the child who then wants to know exactly what happened.
Armstrong also lost a daughter. She died at two years old of a brain tumour, before he became an astronaut, and it changed him. Some tellings for children include it and some skip it entirely. Look ahead before you read this out loud so you are not meeting it cold with a child on your lap.
Last, the weakness of the format on this particular life. The gravity of the moon landing pulls the whole book toward eight famous words and a flag. If your child finishes it believing he was picked because he was brave, the book has done him a disservice, and one sentence from you fixes it: he was picked because he was an engineer who did not panic.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at Who Was Neil Armstrong?, with the rest of the shelf at Stealth Science. Read it in a month when the moon is up in the evening, then take a pair of binoculars out to the porch, because the Sea of Tranquillity is a dark grey patch a child can find themselves and it makes the whole thing stop being a story. If your house already owns three books about the landing, this is still the one to add, because it is the only one likely to spend its pages on the flying.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
The Mighty Mars Rovers: Ninety Days That Lasted Years
The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity by Elizabeth Rusch
Grade 5 to 8
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
