"We have serious problems here," Scott told mission control in Houston. Reacting quickly, Armstrong undocked from the Agena, but the release of the other vehicle's weight caused the astronaut's capsule to enter a wild spin.
"I thought the best thing for me to do in that situation was to continue with my work, to keep things as normal as I could and try as hard as I could to not let it affect my ability to do useful things," Armstrong told "60 Minutes." (A third child, Mark, was born in 1963.)Īrmstrong and his co-pilot, David Scott, pulled off the docking without a hitch, but then a malfunctioning thruster caused their space capsule and the attached Gemini Agena target vehicle began to veer off course. Armstrong threw himself into his new job at NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas. Their second child, a daughter named Karen, died from an inoperable brain tumor. The long-awaited call to join NASA's astronaut training program came in 1962, the very same year that Neil and Janet suffered a gut-wrenching tragedy. But to fully break the bonds of Earth's atmosphere, Armstrong would have to become an astronaut. The X-15 reached a top speed of 4,000 mph (6,437 kph) and could climb right to the edge of space. A year later, Armstrong married Janet Shearon and they welcomed their first son, Eric, in 1957.Īrmstrong began his space career at the NACA Lewis Research Center (now NASA Glenn) in Cleveland, Ohio, but made his name as a daring test pilot at NASA's Flight Research Center (now the Armstrong Flight Research Center) in Edwards, California.Īrmstrong flew the famed X-15, one of a line of experimental rocket-powered planes that claimed the lives of several brave NASA test pilots.
He returned to Purdue to finish his degree and was hired by the fledgling National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA, in 1955.