Jay Barbree

“The consensus among those who knew Neil was that he takes a long time coming to a decision on the ground and when he makes a decision that is that! But, say the astronauts, in the cockpit there’s no pilot faster. He can read a problem and immediately correct it. That’s Neil Armstrong. Neil in the Gemini spacecraft learning the machine he would fly.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“Alan Shepard’s successful suborbital spaceflight had settled questions for President John Kennedy who accepted that Russian rockets and spacecraft were bigger. But he was coming to realize the Soviets weren’t better because their technology could only build large nuclear warheads. They needed monstrous missiles to carry their monstrous bombs, but not America. With the significant breakthrough in size reduction in America’s hydrogen bomb warheads, the same bang could be carried to any target by a rocket a third of the size. For this reason President Kennedy was convinced we were actually ahead of the Russians in rocketry, space vehicles, and the digital computer. He felt confident that in any technological race we could beat them. And Kennedy was ready to take what many considered a huge gamble.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight