Neil Armstrong nearly died in the Gemini 8 mission, ejected from a lunar landing training vehicle seconds before it exploded, and landed the Eagle on the moon with seventeen seconds of fuel remaining. Each time, he responded with the calm of a man solving an equation. He treated danger as a math problem because that is exactly what it was to him.

This episode traces Armstrong from his childhood obsession with flight through his test pilot years at Edwards, the Apollo 11 landing, and his deliberate retreat from public life.

• He landed the Eagle with roughly seventeen seconds of fuel remaining after manually overriding the guidance computer
• He ejected from a lunar landing training vehicle just seconds before it crashed and exploded
• He earned his pilot’s license at sixteen, before he had a driver’s license
• He largely avoided public life after Apollo 11 and taught engineering at the University of Cincinnati