by Dora Jane Hamblin

When he was a small boy, he had a recurrent dream: he could, by holding his breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much ever happened--he neither flew nor fell, just hovered, and the whole thing must have been frustrating to a child as captivated by th e idea of flight as Neil Armstrong was even then. Today, he remembers the dream with a characteristic flickering smile. "I tried to do it later, when I was awake. It didn't work."

From age 9 Neil Armstrong was an aircraft nut, loving all types of aircraft with a single-mindedness bordering on obsession. When he joined the elite group of astronauts in the autumn of 1962 he did so almost reluctantly. For seven years as a civilian pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., he had been test-flying the most exotic aircraft the U.S. had to offer, and working as engineer and researcher far out on the fringes of flight.

"In those days it wasn't a question of 'Do you want to be an astronaut or do you want to sweep streets?'" he says. "A whole array f approaches to space was in the works. We were doing some exciting, way-out things in which we were more than just pilots . We were engineers and developers using airplanes merely as tools, the way an astronomer uses a telescope as a tool. We considered the space flight task group," he concludes with more diffidence than arrogance, "as babes in the wood."

Not until after John Glenn had orbited the earth and "space programs had become well-defined, the lunar mission a definite reality," did he come to NASA as an astronaut. He entered the program as a senior NASA research pilot, a civilian, at the highes t salary ever offered an astronaut. He is still, at something over $27,000, the highest-paid astronaut and as such is occasionally resented by some of his colleagues who are still on military discipline and military pay. He is probably the most intense of the astronauts, and the most enigmatic.