[stblack]

Excuse me, but if you're ever called upon to enumerate badass solid individuals, remember Gene Kranz.

Do you put him ahead of Neil Armstrong? History does, and always will, but I'm not sure that's a clear choice.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz

[cameldrv]

Not to take away from Kranz, who was an incredible man, but Armstrong was on another plane.

On Apollo 11, he was 100,000 miles from Earth, with bad navigation and the (fly by wire) computer blaring errors into his ear, and had to manually fly to a better area and land with seconds of fuel left.

He wouldn't have been put in that position though if he hadn't come through in a lot of other tricky situations though too. In particular Gemini 8 where the thrusters malfunctioned, and he had to troubleshoot the problem while being spun at 50 rpm.

[nirav72]

Armstrong was also quite good at handling the Lunar Module Research Vehicle. A flying machine that was notoriously difficult to fly. Even though he had a close call when he had to eject out it during one training flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle...

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Was? He's still alive!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz

[slater]

> Armstrong was on another plane

Different rocket, actually. eyyyyy!

[elteto]

Kranz, while an important character in the Apollo saga, wasn’t even an astronaut.

I don’t know what history puts him “ahead” of Neil. Or even ahead of the other greats like Grissom.