"Wait...you mean THAT was Neil Armstrong???"

It's still unreal to me that the first human being to set foot on the Moon was an usher at the church I was involved with as a kid. It's doubtless a mercy that I had no idea who he was, and that nobody had any idea what lay in store for him after his test-flying days. Those quite random circumstances spared me and a number of other aviation-addicted kids from making fools of ourselves around a modest, circumspect guy. Neil Armstrong didn't make a big deal out of his job. Much less just how VERY good he was at it.

Now that the biographical film FIRST MAN is in release, I'm interested to compare its' portrayal of the space program(s) of the 1960s with both history and memory. Most people today have no idea what the X-15 program was, or what it accomplished. As a NASA test pilot, Armstrong routinely flew that extraordinary aircraft/spacecraft across the boundary into space, which the film depicts in superb detail. (In audio interviews, he described how he had to let the X-15 fall out of control back into the atmosphere, until there was enough air resistance for the aerodynamic controls to be effective.  And he was so offhand about it that he could have been describing someone ELSE's hairy flight. It's mildly weird to listen to.)

The 'controversy' over the moon landing as depicted in the film ("Where was The American Flag???") comes across as political misdirection. It's simply not true in any event. NASA was always pitching the 'made-in-America' aspects of the space progrm. even when a substantial percentage of the talent pool consisted of emigre Britishers and Canadians building new careers in the US after major aerospace cancellations in their countries of origin. (Look up the phrase "The Brain Drain' sometime.)