He talked to us for about fifteen minutes, and the whole time he didn’t say anything about walking on the moon, not one word about being an astronaut—nothing. Instead he talked about his days as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, flying the X-15, the hypersonic rocket plane that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s by flying 50 miles above the Earth, the outer limit of the atmosphere, the edge of space. That was how Neil Armstrong thought of himself: as a pilot. Not as the first man to walk on the moon, but as a guy who loved to fly cool planes and was grateful for
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