neil armstrong first man on the moon history

The toll of this period on Armstrong’s relationship with his wife Janet is the movie’s central thread. First Man ends with Apollo 11, emphasizing the tense, alarm-interrupted landing and some of Armstrong’s private moments on the Moon. It speaks to the director’s attention to accuracy that he had a full-scale replica of the strange, spider-like vehicle built and then deliberately crashed it to film the scene. Two years later, while practicing for Apollo 11, Armstrong had to eject from a Lunar Landing Training Vehicle that was going out of control. Among those killed were Armstrong’s friend and next-door neighbor, Ed White, the first American to walk in space. Less than a year later, on January 27, 1967, the first crew that was to fly an Apollo mission died in a fire during a spacecraft ground test at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That invoked a mission rule that required them to land quickly. Thanks to Armstrong’s astonishing coolness under pressure, even as the spin threatened to make them black out, he told Scott to turn off all the regular thrusters and then used the reentry ones to stop the roll. Their spacecraft went into wild gyrations, forcing an undocking from the Agena rocket, and then into a violent roll that threatened to kill them. He and his co-pilot, David Scott, had just executed the world’s first docking with another space vehicle when a thruster on Gemini VIII stuck open. That mission became the first American human spaceflight to be forced into an emergency landing. The prime crew for Gemini IX, led by Armstrong’s friend Elliott See, was killed in a plane crash in early 1966, shortly before Armstrong commanded Gemini VIII.

It then takes us through becoming a NASA astronaut and a series of accidents and near-fatal incidents that highlighted how dangerous it was to be in the program at that point. First Man opens with one of Armstrong’s flights in the X-15 rocket plane, one in which he got into some trouble because (the film seems to suggest) he was distracted by the cancer of his daughter, Karen, who would die at the age of 2 not long afterward. Although the book covers Armstrong’s full life, the movie for quite practical reasons treats only 1961 to 1969.

Neil armstrong first man on the moon history