From the moon to UC: new movie showcases Armstrong

Aldrin and Armstrong had contrasting personalities. Aldrin cracked the first joke on the moon when in closing the hatch of the Eagle lander he quipped he was “making sure not to lock it on my way out.”

Students at UC also found Armstrong to be surprisingly reserved for someone who strived to push the boundaries of human accomplishment in feats requiring equal parts daring and discipline.

“He would stay in his office. He wasn’t roaming the halls at Baldwin. He would put on his sunglasses and find the shortest distance to get somewhere — head down,” Stear recalled.

Armstrong was an international celebrity despite his misgivings about fame. More than 70 news outlets from as far away as Europe stood elbow-to-elbow at the press conference announcing his appointment to UC. Armstrong set an early tone. To avoid favoritism, he granted no personal interviews, except to the UC student newspaper The News Record. And during his nine-year tenure at UC, he declined most all other interview requests.

Stear, who grew up in upstate New York, applied to UC after learning that his childhood hero was teaching there.

“I saw a news blurb that he was going to be a professor of aerospace engineering. I thought, ‘aerospace. That’s cool,’” he said.

UC was one of the first universities in the world to launch an aerospace program. At UC, Armstrong taught courses on aerodynamics and flight mechanics. He also worked with UC chemist George Rieveschl and Dr. Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, to develop an artificial heart pump. In 1979, Armstrong continued to set aeronautic records when he flew a commercial Learjet to 50,000 feet in 12 minutes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for a company demonstration.

Armstrong served on the board of Gates Learjet, along with several other companies. He resigned from the university in 1980 to pursue new business projects but returned to UC in 1982 to accept an honorary doctorate.

“Everyone who had him as a professor felt very privileged,” said Stear, who considers Armstrong to be the best professor he ever had. Armstrong inspired his career in aviation sales, he said.

“He could stand there and derive an aerodynamics or control theory from memory on the chalkboard. And then he would put the chalk down and sit on his desk and talk about his flight test days and how those principles played out in actual tests,” Stear said. “That was rare for any professor to do that. To say here’s a theory and here’s where you’ll see it in practice.”

Even if Armstrong never let his two space missions define him, his students couldn’t help but think about where he had been and what he had done. Stear recalled staring at Armstrong’s shoes in class and thinking about the famous Life magazine photo Armstrong took of his spacesuit boot next to his footprint in the moon dust.

“That’s the foot right there. It blows you away,” Stear said.

UC engineering graduate Dan Littmann (1976) spent his career in aviation labs and earned a commercial pilot’s license. He credited his time at UC for giving him a foundation for his engineering career. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact the Apollo missions had, both in technology and inspiration for future generations, he said.

“I doubt the world will ever again see the rate of technological progress achieved during the 1960s,” Littmann said. “To be sure, it was the Cold War that spawned Apollo. Interest in spaceflight died off quickly once the race to the moon was won.”

UC engineering professor George “Tom” Black was 15 when his family loaded up the car at four in the morning while on vacation in Florida and drove an hour in the dark to Titusville. The coastal town was rural and small, so thick with mosquitoes that the county misted the marshes with pesticides to make it habitable. But in the 1960s, it was known by another name — Space City, USA.

As the family car crested the north side of Titusville, Black could see what brought them there: a rocket standing 36 stories tall, lighted on all sides and venting hydrogen gas like a dragon.

They lucked into a good parking spot and set up lawn chairs and radios to wait for the launch of the spacecraft that would land the first humans on the moon. Hundreds of thousands of people crowded around Merritt Island to watch in what became a communal festival, Black recalled.

Black took Armstrong’s introduction to aerodynamics class and his signature class in aircraft flight testing. While at UC, Black returned to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch the 1975 launch of another Apollo spacecraft, which would dock in orbit with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for an astronaut summit in space. Black said he was eager to share his photos of the launch with Armstrong when he returned to campus.

“He wasn’t the most captivating speaker. But he was fascinating in his own way. Anything he told you about airplanes, you realized he had probably tried it and did the math to figure out how it worked,” Black said. “He had an excellent ability to teach. He wanted you to learn the subject so you could think like an engineer.”

Black got his pilot’s license while studying at UC. He still flies today. He applied his UC degree to an engineering career perfecting the flight performance of the U.S. Air Force’s advanced fighter aircraft, in particular the F-22 Raptor. Black worked as a test pilot like Armstrong while conducting graduate research at Ohio State University.

“I considered that to be as big a part of my technical education as my degrees,” Black said.

Today, Black teaches the same class on flight-test engineering that he took with Armstrong as an undergraduate.

UC Magazine covers Neil Armstrong

Armstrong Collection: UC's Engineering Library assembled a tribute to the astronaut.

News Obituary: The professor left quite a mark on the university community.

Averting Catastrophe: His brushes with danger extended to campus parking.

No Cheese: The professor pens a poem for children about his remarkable "summer vacation." 

Commencement Address: UC awarded the famous pilot an honorary degree in 1982. Read his commencement address to graduates.