Armstrong's training accident and the alleged instability of the LM...
Another recurring argument, brandished by conspiracy theorists as irrefutable proof that landing on the Moon was technically impossible, concerns the alleged, deadly instability of the Lunar Module. To support this thesis, deniers regularly dig up from NASA's historical archives the dramatic footage of May 6, 1968, which shows Neil Armstrong losing control of a strange flying contraption, ejecting by parachute a split second before the crash and watching the vehicle explode in a fireball on the ground...
The conspiracy deduction is as elementary as it is physically wrong: if NASA's best pilot could not keep the Lunar Module in the air on Earth, ending up crashing miserably, how could he possibly have flown it a year later, without crashing in the same way, in the far more hostile environment of the lunar surface? This question, seemingly tricky, once again betrays a complete ignorance of the facts, of the Apollo program's training technologies, of the laws of aerodynamics and of the enormous physical differences between Earth's environment and the vacuum of space!
To dismantle this paradox, it is essential to clarify a fundamental technical detail: what crashed to the ground was not the Lunar Module at all (LM), but the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), affectionately nicknamed by the astronauts "the flying bedstead". It was an Earth-based simulator, a tangle of scaffolding tubes, tanks and jet engines, designed for a purpose bordering on engineering madness: simulating the LM's descent to the Moon while immersed in Earth's gravity and in our planet's dense atmosphere. To perform this physical magic trick, the LLRV used a powerful turbofan jet engine mounted vertically in the center of the frame on a gimbal. This central jet was not used for maneuvering; its sole purpose was to mathematically cancel out five sixths of the vehicle's weight, counteracting Earth's gravity. Attitude, tilt and lateral movement were instead handled by small hydrogen peroxide thrusters, similar to those that would equip the real LM.
The physical catch that conspiracy theorists completely ignore is that flying this machine on Earth was an aerodynamic nightmare, infinitely more difficult and dangerous than flying the real Lunar Module in a vacuum. On Earth, the LLRV had to fight against air resistance, unpredictable gusts of wind and the brutal force of gravity at 9.81 m/s². A sudden gust could unbalance the simulator, forcing the pilot into violent, constant corrections. On the Moon, on the other hand, since there was no air, the Lunar Module suffered no aerodynamic interference: no turbulence, no drag, no wind. In the vacuum of space and with a real gravity of 1.62 m/s², the real LM responded to the attitude thruster commands with crystal-clear smoothness, precision and stability, described by the astronauts themselves as infinitely more docile than the angry reactions of the Earth simulator. In short, NASA had deliberately built a simulator that was monstrously harder to tame than the real machine: the principle was that if a pilot could survive the "flying bedstead" in Earth's atmosphere, flying the LM on the Moon would be a walk in the park.
And yet, on that May 6, 1968, the nightmare came true. While Armstrong was at an altitude of about sixty meters, a loss of helium pressure in the tanks feeding the attitude thrusters suddenly deprived the vehicle of its ability to be controlled. Without the directional thrusters to keep it balanced, the simulator began to tilt dangerously onto its side, losing lift. Instead of panicking, Armstrong's undeniable skills as a test pilot processed the physical imminence of disaster superbly within milliseconds: he waited for the exact moment when the bank angle would throw him clear of the flames and, just sixty meters above the ground, he pulled the ejection handle! His parachute opened barely in time to slow his fall, while the simulator disintegrated, exploding in a cloud of fuel a few meters away from him. The astronaut's quick reflexes bordered on the superhuman: had he hesitated another half second, the tilt of the seat would have fired him horizontally straight into the concrete below, killing him instantly.
Neil Armstrong was one of NASA's few civilian astronauts, famous for being the first human being to walk on the Moon in July 1969, during the historic Apollo 11 mission. Before his space career, he served as a naval aviator and was a Korean War veteran. He later became an accomplished experimental test pilot, flying cutting-edge aircraft such as NASA's X-15, and commanded the Gemini 8 space mission in March 1966. His academic background included a solid foundation as an aeronautical engineer. Photo courtesy of NASA.
But it is what happened immediately afterward that sweeps away any Moon-hoax rhetoric about "fake heroes" and defines the very essence of the men who reached the Moon. An ordinary human being, after surviving a fireball by hurling himself into the air at the last gasp, would at the very least have ended up in hospital in deep shock, trembling and surrounded by doctors. Neil Armstrong, instead, landed, having bitten his tongue from the impact of the ejection, dusted off his suit, made sure no bones were broken and completely ignored the rescue teams who wanted to rush him to hospital for a check-up. He calmly walked back to his office at the Manned Spacecraft Center, sat down at his desk and placidly began to study the electrical and hydraulic diagrams of the vehicle that had just crashed, to figure out what on earth had happened in flight, taking care of the paperwork related to the accident and filling in the flight reports as if nothing had happened. When, about an hour later, astronaut Alan Bean happened to walk into the office, he saw Armstrong absorbed in his paperwork and excitedly asked him whether he had heard the news that someone had just crashed the LLRV. Armstrong looked up from his papers, gave a half smile and replied with icy calm: "Yes, it was me."
This anecdote, amusing as it may be, is a fundamental scientific and psychological key! It shows what the minds of those explorers were made of. They were not fragile actors ready to crack under the weight of a lie, as conspiracy theorists claim, but human computing machines, forged to analyze danger, make life-or-death decisions in fractions of a second and instantly reset their stress to move on to the next task. The simulator accident was not at all proof that we could not go to the Moon; on the contrary, it allowed engineers to identify and fix a critical pressurization flaw before launching the real spacecraft, and it confirmed unequivocally that at the controls of the most dangerous mission in human history there would undoubtedly be one of the best pilots the entire country had to offer!
