In 1966, three years before her husband, Neil, became the first person to walk on the moon, Janet Armstrong was pictured at home by Life magazine. Neil was in orbit in the Gemini 8 spacecraft, but it had started to spin dangerously out of control. Suddenly, his safe return was in doubt.
At that moment, to protect Janet and the family from any bad news, Neil’s Nasa bosses restricted the family’s access to its live radio feed, known as the “squawk box”.
Life magazine showed her kneeling in front of the device, as if praying for Neil’s safe return. In fact, she was furious. “I was on my knees there with my eyes closed trying to concentrate on what was being said,” she later explained. “But it came out that I was in a praying position and blah, blah, blah. Well, that’s not true.” Later, she would confront Nasa bosses and warn them not to pull a similar stunt again.
It’s a small story, one of hundreds of tiny insights in the book First Man: The Life of Neil A Armstrong, which has now been adapted into a film. Small, but significant, as the psychological effects of being an astronaut, or the family of an astronaut, are rarely explored.
In this instance, the mass media were camped in the living room of a mother of two living sons and one daughter, who died aged two from a brain tumour four years previously. The photographer is watching through the lens as Janet tries to establish whether she will ever see her husband again.
While he’s certainly having a bad day at the office, it’s no picnic for the loved ones he left at home, either.
“It can be harder for the ones left behind than the one doing it,” says psychotherapist Jennie Miller. “If you’re the one doing it, you have a sense of some control, of having been trained to do your level best to get back. With control we get a sense of being OK. It’s the difference between learning to drive a car and being a passenger. But if you’re the loved one, you have zero control.”
Janet Armstrong was an intelligent, thoughtful woman whose frustration at her treatment by both Nasa and her husband occasionally pokes through even the sanitised Life magazine interviews conducted between 1966 and 1969.
“People are always asking me what it is like to be married to an astronaut,” Janet told the magazine. “What it’s like for me to be the wife of Neil Armstrong is the more appropriate question.”
In public, common with the other wives of astronauts, Janet maintained the wholesome picture-postcard image of the all-American family. In private, many of the wives felt like they didn’t have much say in what was going on. “We would meet over in the Nasa auditorium,” she is quoted as saying in First Man. “We would get all dressed up and we would have to put our gloves on to get, what I felt was, lectured: ‘Keep a stiff upper lip, girls.’”
Why would Janet always be the one to confront authority? Perhaps, says psychotherapist Miller, the roots of her outspokenness lay in the premature death of her daughter, Karen Anne.
“The impact of losing a child can sometimes affect people in remarkable ways. They think: ‘I’ve experienced the worst pain that life can throw at me, so I don’t give a damn what you think about me any more.’
“I live and work near Portsmouth naval base, so I see couples who don’t see each other for 18 months, or even two years at a time. While they’re not going to the moon, it’s not that dissimilar. Even when an astronaut is home, with all the training and so on, I imagine their head is in a different place.”
It’s a theory borne out by the recollections of astronaut Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17, the last lunar mission.
“There is no doubt that I was so overwhelmed and excited, caught up with being an astronaut, that when I came home for a weekend, all I wanted to talk about was our training and the program [sic],” he wrote in his autobiography. “… I realise my family suffered because of my tunnel vision.”
But could such problems be avoided, and how would an expert today prepare families for what lies ahead?
“If you’re going to do work like that, you’d want to talk to someone before any training begins and prepare people for the impact on their lives,” Miller says. “If I were seeing a couple like this, I’d do empathy work with the pair of them, so they each get a sense of what it is like to be the other. In the case of the Armstrongs, he needs to realise that she’s lost a child, and she may now lose a husband in such a public way.”
When a couple are facing a big challenge, what can happen is that each withdraws into themselves and they build up too solid a boundary in order to survive, in order not to be vulnerable. You need to make sure you let the right people in.”
This one small step could be a giant leap.
First Man is released nationwide on 12 October – book tickets here
