What Made Neil Armstrong the Right Man to Be First on the Moon, as Told in 1969

Neil Armstrong’s stoic nature and personal challenges are at the center of Damien Chazelle’s new film First Man, in which Ryan Gosling portrays the legendary moon walker. As Armstrong, Gosling brings out the astronaut’s quiet side — one that his contemporaries couldn’t help but notice. A 1969 profile of the Apollo 11 crew in TIME calls Armstrong “tight-lipped and phlegmatic” as well as “an inscrutable loner.” His wife Janet told LIFE at the time: “Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer. The word no is an argument.” But beneath the quiet surface, Armstrong had a certain something that left him particularly qualified to make history. As TIME noted in 1969, Armstrong, at first a civilian test pilot for NASA, did not initially have any intention of becoming an astronaut. But as other pilots were brought into the space program, he changed his mind. He was chosen to be an astronaut in 1962. And yet, in some ways, it was as if he had been preparing all his life: Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. More than any other astronaut, Neil Armstrong epitomizes small-town America. He was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio (pop. 7,500), the son of ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized movies neil armstrong onetime space Source Type: news