Neil Armstrong in the Pages of PopSci: 1958, 1969 and 1989

Our coverage of the first man on the moon

By Rose Pastore Posted 08.27.2012 at 9:16 am 2 Comments

PopSci's guide to the moon landing

Popular Science first printed the words “Neil Armstrong” in June 1958, when the 27-year-old “tall, slim, crew-cut blond” aeronautical engineer was training for a flight in the X-15: an experimental “mile-a-second rocket plane” that would take a man to the edge of space. “The men who first fly it will take a tentative dip in the mysterious sea of outer space before future men plunge in,” wrote PopSci reporter Wesley S. Griswold.

But before he could fly the 4,000-mile-per-hour space plane, Armstrong had to test his skills under extreme G-forces in a giant Navy centrifuge in Johnsville, Pa. He would be strapped in to a working model of the X-15’s cockpit, inside a gondola attached to the end of a 50-foot rotor arm. “An incredibly complicated and ingenious hook-up between gondola, centrifuge and an analog computer enables the pilot in the gondola to put the centrifuge through dizzying maneuvers that simulate the X-15’s expected flight behavior,” Griswold wrote.

(Though Armstrong took the X-15 on seven low-altitude test flights, pilot Joseph A. Walker was the only person to fly the plane higher than 100 kilometers, the definition of a spaceflight. The X-15, retired in 1970, still holds the record for the fastest manned aircraft.)

Neil Armstrong in "Snoopy Hat":

Just weeks before the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, PopSci published a breathless moment-by-moment guide to what Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would face on their trip to the moon:

“[T]he moon’s surface, out of sight of the crew before, creeps into view from the bottoms of their windows. What they see is a flat and comparatively crater-free lunar plain...

Finally comes the high spot of the mission – an action-packed program of two hours and 40 minutes of ‘moonwalking.’ Descending a ladder from the forward hatch, Commander Armstrong is to be first to set foot on the moon. Almost his first act is to scoop up a bagful of loose lunar soil, and hand it up to Aldrin to stow away.”

The moon landing, PopSci said, “will be an epic achievement – the conquest of the greatest engineering challenge we have ever faced.”

PopSci's 1873 imagining of the lunar surface; Aldrin on the moon:

PopSci’s June 1989 issue contains perhaps our sweetest tribute to Armstrong. Cosmochemist James R. Arnold, of the University of California, San Diego, developed a way to estimate the erosion rate of lunar rocks and soil. Because the moon lacks an atmosphere, and therefore wind and rain, the only threat to Armstrong’s footprints are slow-working cosmic rays. Arnold calculated that the momentous steps will be visible in the dust for another half million years. “The moon is a quiet place,” he said.

Armstrong died Aug. 25 following complications from heart bypass surgery. He was 82.

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