First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong

"Neil Armstrong stands apart from others in an even greater way. You’ve got a little pyramid of 12 people, some of them more famous than others, and some superstars, like Buzz. Then, even above them, you have the very first human being who landed his spacecraft on the Moon, put on his suit and climbed down onto the surface, laying the first footprint on another world. That has only happened once in the 4.6 billion years of the history of Earth and the 3.8 billion years of history of life on Earth. Neil Armstrong is as significant as the first semi-amphibious fish that slithered out from the ocean and onto dry land and took a gulp of air. That moment in evolution and the first man on the Moon are dots that you can join up in a vision which leads, eventually (hopefully), to a space-faring civilization that carries us back to the Moon and on to Mars and makes us bi-planetary. That all begins with Neil. “Neil Armstrong is as significant as the first semi-amphibious fish that slithered out from the ocean and onto dry land” First Man by James Hansen is this wonderfully detailed portrait of Neil. It’s a very, very thorough insight into who this man was. It’s not for the faint-hearted—there is a lot of detail—but I have a soft spot for this book. I made a biopic of Neil for the BBC in 2012, after he died, with all his friends and family. It was a wonderful privilege to be able to do that and I used James’s book for a lot of the research. Neil was a reserved, quiet man. He didn’t like publicity, he didn’t like celebrity, he certainly didn’t like having the spotlight of Apollo on him and his shoulders. He was always the first to acknowledge all the work that other people had done and the last to ever admit that he’d done anything significant. That made him an extraordinarily humble and worthy human being to be that that ‘first man,’ as James calls his book. No, he didn’t put any value on celebrity . For him, it was a vacuous, hollow and worthless word. All he was interested in was how he was going to get to the Moon—the engineering, the mechanics, the test piloting element of landing there for the first time. In one of the press conferences just before he went, he was asked what he wanted to take with him, because they were all taking personal items of some sentimental value. But all he wanted to take was more fuel. That says everything about Neil. He was a devoted, highly accomplished and supreme aviator, which is why he got to where he did. More fuel was absolutely the right answer, and that comes across—it oozes out of the pages of James’s book. Neil remained in the field that he loved, which was aerospace engineering. He left NASA and took up an academic position, which gave him the freedom to think and write and teach. He continued to fly gliders up until his death in 2012. So flights remained in his blood. He just adored that sensation of being airborne. He famously had a pilot’s license before he had a driver’s license. He thought in three dimensions. That’s what made him the great aviator that he ended up being. “Neil Armstrong famously had a pilot’s license before he had a driver’s license” Of course, being who he was, he would endlessly get asked to come here and open that and give talks and appear on TV and in films. He would accept quite a few of those requests, but because he got so many, it appeared that he was rejecting most of them. He had to, because there weren’t enough hours in the day. But that’s where this perception, that he became reclusive and very private and withdrawn, comes from. The truth was he was out there every week, talking about something and trying to inspire someone. That’s a fact."