Neil Armstrong, In His Own Words The first moonwalker's storied
aviation career - By Tony Reichhardt - AirSpaceMag.com, August
27, 2012 One of the more harrowing events in Armstrong's career
was his ejection from a crashing lunar landing research vehicle
(LLRV) in 1968. He described the accident in "First on the
Moon": “It was my twenty-first flight in the LLRV. I was flying
the terminal portion of a simulated lunar landing profile; I
lifted the vehicle off the ground and reached an altitude of
about five hundred feet in preparation for making the landing
profile. I had been airborne for about five minutes and was down
to about two hundred feet when the trouble began. The vehicle
began to tilt sharply. Afterward this incident was reported as
an explosion, but that was erroneous. It’s just that there are
all the exhaust products of those rocket engines going off, and
since there were a lot of engines firing at once people on the
ground thought they were seeing an explosion. They were
mistaken… This particular