Read Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight for Free Online Page B

Neil’s second child on April 13, 1959. They spoiled her, loved her, and Neil nicknamed her Muffie. Muffie brought a world of happiness into their mountain cabin.
    For the next two years Karen grew into a happy toddler demanding much of big brother Ricky’s time while their father Neil flew his X-15 higher and higher. The Mercury Seven astronauts hopped and jumped across the country, training and helping engineers develop and perfect the hardware they needed to reach orbit.
    Cape Canaveral became America’s early astronauts’ favorite port. Its hard beaches were perfect for jogging, and if you were forever learning and training, where better to do it than in a warm winter sun, while those building your spaceship and rockets shivered in northern climes.
    Falling in love with the Cape was not difficult. Even on the few occasions Neil’s work brought him there he found the Florida spaceport’s isolation equal to Edwards’s.
    There were the Cape’s stand-alone complexes, thousands of electrical arteries, and a finely woven network of state-of-the-art computers, underground cable, and transmitters through which flashed the impulses and vital messages necessary for launching.
    The astronauts loved it. They loved their beachside hideaway, and with the persistent mosquitoes, their smaller cousins the sand fleas, and other biting and crawling creatures under control, air-conditioning and tropical libations simply made the hot days and balmy nights a pilot’s paradise.
    But there was this continuing gnawing question: Who would fly first?
    Then the day with the answer finally arrived.
    The Mercury Seven waited at their desks. It was January 19, 1961. President-elect John F. Kennedy would be sworn in the next morning. But for the moment Robert Gilruth was more important to the Mercury Seven; he ran Project Mercury. “How about hanging in after quitting time, guys?” he called out to the men. “I have something to tell you.”

    John Glenn jogs on Cocoa Beach’s hard sand beach. (NASA)
    There it was. He’d decided, and the astronauts were grateful Gilruth got right to the point. “What I have to say must stay with you. You can’t talk about it, not to anyone, not even to your wives.”
    He hesitated only to take a breath.
    “Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital Redstone flight, Gus Grissom will follow Alan, and John Glenn will be the backup for both missions.”
    Six hearts sunk as the seventh raced ahead with pride.
    John Glenn stepped forward and shook Shepard’s hand. The other five moved in and offered their congratulations.
    But before Alan Shepard would fly, there was a chimpanzee to launch. It was necessary to convince overly cautious officials that all was ready.
    *   *   *
    Ten thousand miles to the east on the steppes of Kazakhstan they did not take caution to its final step.
    A man was trying to sleep. For a long time he had been drifting between slumber and wakefulness. This is how it had been for hours. He fidgeted with his thoughts, of what awaited him. He tried to escape by filling his mind with sights and sounds, with pleasing memories of his father—a carpenter, a skilled craftsman who had worked long hours to build their wooden home in the village of Klushino.
    Those were the welcome memories, but he could not forget the nightmares—sights and sounds of a frightened boy covering his ears and eyes to block the memories of great guns blasting, shells exploding, the ground beneath his feet shaking from the rumble of the German tanks followed by even louder sounds. Airplanes. The high-pitch squeal of bombs falling toward them, exploding, taking lives, destroying homes.
    At first it was only German planes. Then others came, planes with red stars on their wings—faster planes. The fighting was now up there, between the aircraft, and their fighting grew even louder while on the ground more tanks pushed into Klushino—Russian tanks. And finally when it seemed there was nothing left to kill, the