CHRIS KNIGHT

First Man is based on the 2005 authorized biography of Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen. It’s a fascinating read and a thick book; here are 10 things we picked up that didn’t make it into the film.

1. Neil Armstrong was convinced he’d been born too late for aeronautical greatness. “The record-setting flights ... across the oceans, over the poles, and to the corners of the Earth, had all been accomplished,” he once said. “I had missed all the great times and adventures.”

2. Buzz Aldrin comes off as a bit of a jerk in the movie, but for real sour grapes, listen to astronaut Walt Cunningham complain about Armstrong’s “botched” first mission: “(Neil) parlayed a busted Gemini VIII flight into the Buck Rogers grand prize mission, the first lunar landing.”

3. During the summer of 1966, Armstrong was part of the backup crew for Gemini 11, and would sometimes spend time on a NASA-owned Florida beach with other astronauts, drawing orbital trajectories in the sand. In case you thought it was all blackboards and white shirts.

4. All the fuss over whether Armstrong or Aldrin would be first on the moon came to a head in March, 1969, when four NASA bigwigs got together and decided that calm, quiet, confident Armstrong had to be first. He was “the Lindbergh type,” a reference to the first man to cross the Atlantic non-stop, though presumably not to Lindbergh’s racist views.

5. In case you think Armstrong never displayed a sense of humour, here’s a geology prank he almost pulled: “I was tempted to sneak a piece of limestone up there with us on Apollo 11 and bring it back as a sample. That would have upset a lot of apple carts!” He adds: “But we didn’t do it.”

6. In another lighthearted moment, just before entering the moonship, Armstrong gave launch pad leader Guenter Wendt a small card that said “Space taxi – good between any two planets.”

‘I never did get to tell the First Man of my gratitude for his job as the vanguard of our next great step’