Getting into space required a lot of inventing, a lot of craziness, and a lot of badasses.

Most people know Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon and some even know of his modest, down home family type of personality which was somewhat juxtaposed with the other astronauts.

What most people don’t know is Neil’s journey to the moon was preceded by several times looking straight at death and calmly saying, not today. I have work to do.

Neil is considered to be the first civilian astronaut because he was not employed by the armed forces at the time he became an astronaut, however he had served in the Navy as a pilot before attending Purdue.

During the Korean war, he was on a bombing run and was hit by anti-aircraft fire and had to bail out.

After the war, he came to Purdue and got his degree and went on to become a test pilot.

He flew in the experimental rocket plane, the X-15 seven times.


One of the flights he was flying so fast and so high, that when he attempted to start to descend to land, there wasn’t enough air around the plane for the planes controls to be effective. He managed to get the plane slowed enough and low enough that his controls started to work again, but now, still traveling at 10 football fields per second, he had passed his landing site and had to turn around, which the plane wasn’t really designed to do. He managed to get it turned around and landed in his original landing site instead of bouncing off the atmosphere and breaking apart in the air, or gliding uncontrollably into the ocean. https://youtu.be/xSJ-Oo9G0Qk?t=42

After the X-15 program, Neil joined the Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest program (no really, that’s what it was called) which later became Project Mercury after NASA was formed and took over space operations from the Air Force. Neil was also selected to fly Boeing’s X-20 Dyna-soar (they were really good at naming things back then) which was a tiny plane that was launched on a rocket.


Though the program was cancelled during construction and the X-20 never flew, the concept for a plane being launched by a rocket later turned into the Space Shuttle Program.

But probably Neil’s biggest moment of simply shrugging off death came while preparing for the moon landing and flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV).

Neil had flown the LLRV 30-40 times, but on May 6, 1968 experienced a failed thruster, ejected at the last second, and after being checked out medically, simply went back to his office to continue working without mentioning his crash to anyone in the office as if it were no big deal. (You can skip to 1:25 if you don’t want a short description of the actual Lunar Lander) https://youtu.be/OlJGQ92IgFk