60 Minutes couldn't resist reuniting the former anchorman with the former spaceman.
That was not the kind of place I wanted to try to make the first landing," Armstrong says.Īrmstrong overrode the autopilot and looked for a safe place to land, but the detour cost them precious fuel, and they were about to run out.Ī worldwide television audience of a nearly a billion people was on the edge of their seats and so was CBS' own Walter Cronkite. "Our autopilot was taking us into a very large crater, about the size of a big football stadium with steep slopes on the crater, covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles. The trip to the moon took four days after achieving lunar orbit, Michael Collins would remain in the command module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed into the lunar module, undocked, and began their descent.īut the landing took an unexpected turn: the onboard guidance system was sending Armstrong and Aldrin right towards disaster. His depth of experience and nerves of steel earned him, at age 38, the command of Apollo 11. You were just almost killed," Bradley says.Īrmstrong stood out, even among a class of astronauts that had the right stuff. There was work to be done," says Armstrong, matter-of-factly. He ejected barely 100 feet from the ground.Īfter the almost-fatal ordeal, Armstrong went back to his office to do some paperwork. When it malfunctioned, Armstrong was sitting at the controls. He cheated death again two years later, while flying an experimental device designed to simulate a lunar landing. He flew his first space mission in 1966 on Gemini 8, and nearly lost his life when his tiny capsule briefly spun out of control. And I was doing the best I could," Armstrong says.ĭuring that same difficult year, Armstrong was chosen to be an astronaut. "At the time I thought the family was handling it well. And try as hard as I could not to have it affect my ability to do useful things." "I thought the best thing for me to do in that situation was to continue with my work, keep things as normal as I could.
It was during that time, in 1962, when he faced his most difficult test, losing his 2-year old daughter, Karen, to brain cancer.Īrmstrong poured himself into his work. After the war, he became a hotshot test pilot, flying the famous X-15 at 4,000 miles an hour to the edge of the atmosphere. By age 21, he was flying combat missions over Korea.
#The first man on the moon movie danny license#
He earned his pilots license at 16 before he learned to drive. Armstrong's entire life had prepared him well, starting with a childhood fascination with flight. And, even more than that, you hope that you don't, you as a person, don't make any mistakes."Īnd he didn't. It took 400,000 workers and $24 billion, intended in large part to prove American superiority over the Soviets.Īrmstrong acknowledges that the hopes of the nation were riding on the mission. Perched atop a Saturn 5 rocket, the astronauts were on their way to meet the challenge President Kennedy had made eight years earlier: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. So, actually, when you actually lift off, it's really a big surprise." "You know, the reality is, a lot of times you get up and get in the cockpit, and something goes wrong somewhere and you go back down.
"Yeah, but a little bit of a sham, I admit," says Armstrong.
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