Neil Armstrong earned his student flight certificate on his sixteenth birthday, before he had a driver's license. This episode strips away the mythology to find the meticulous, private engineer behind the 1969 television image: the Ohio boy who rode a Ford Trimotor, became an Eagle Scout, studied aeronautical engineering at Purdue on the Navy's Holloway Plan, and in September 1951 flew a Grumman F9F Panther back over friendly territory after a North Korean cable sheared six feet off its wing.

We follow him to Edwards Air Force Base and the X-15, the windmilling propeller that disintegrated on a B-29, the comic disaster of the Nellis affair, and the clash between stick-and-rudder pilots and pilot-engineers. We cover the 1962 death of his two-year-old daughter Karen, the violent one-revolution-per-second spin on Gemini 8, ejecting from the fl ...