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Dehumanized or not, the crew fully measures up to Boss Astronaut Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton's tough requirements. "You're really looking for a damn good engineering test pilot," says Slayton. "They've got to be good stick and rudder men, and also real smart." Not many qualify. Of 1,400 applicants for the last batch of astronauts in 1967, only eleven were chosen. There are now only 49 astronauts and, in many ways, all are as precise as the laws of celestial mechanics—and as unforgiving as the machines that hurtle them through space. Says Slayton of his astronauts: "They don't have any technical weaknesses. If they did, we wouldn't have them aboard."
Like so much else at NASA, the selection of the moon-landing crew seemed totally routine. Indeed, when the crew was selected in January, there was no assurance that Apollo 11 would make the first moon landing. Apollo 10 was then still a candidate for the mission; there was also the distinct possibility that if problems developed, the attempt would be postponed until Apollo 12, 13 or even 14. "There isn't any big magic selection that goes on for each mission," says Slayton, whose crew recommendations have never been overruled. "It is like every squadron of fighter pilots. You've got a mission to do and you've got so many flights to fly and you assign guys to fly them. It's that straightforward."
Command Pilot Armstrong is considered tight-lipped and phlegmatic, even in the notoriously taciturn fraternity of astronauts. "Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer," his wife Janet said in an interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. More than any other astronaut, Neil Armstrong epitomizes small-town America.
He was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio (pop. 7,500), the son of a career civil servant who is now assistant director of the state's Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction. As a youth, Neil limited his social life mainly to school and church functions; when he went out with a girl it was usually on a double date to the ice-cream parlor. He played baritone horn in the school band. He studied hard, and while his teachers do not remember Armstrong as a particularly brilliant student, he impressed them all with the thorough, meticulous way he went about his work. Says Professor Paul E. Stanley, who taught Neil aerodynamics at Purdue: "He was a Boy Scout [in fact, he made Eagle Scout at 17], and he literally lived up to the motto 'Be Prepared.' "
Faith in Machines