They say behind every great man, there’s a great woman – and Neil Armstrong’s first wife Janet was the astronaut’s rock back home.
While the Apollo 11 spaceman was taking one small step for man, the pretty dark-haired Janet was looking after mankind all on her own in the Houston suburbs of Texas where the families of the NASA space programme lived.
Used to dealing with her husband’s long absences and death-defying space adventures, tough cookie Janet was often a single mother to the couple’s children.
Recently described by her son Mark, now 55, as the “real power behind the throne”, he credits her with holding the family together.
The doctor’s daughter met aeronautical engineering student Neil at Purdue University, Indiana, in 1953, while studying home economics.
Neil reportedly fell in love with champion synchronised swimmer Janet when he saw her taking a dip, and the pair wed in 1956 after graduating college.
Starting family life together in a remote mountain cabin in California while Neil worked as an experimental research test-pilot was good training for Janet.
From their home in Juniper Hills, Jan could see her husband flying experimental aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base in the distance.
In her lonely role as first wife to the first man on the moon, she learned to live with the daily fear that one day her husband would not return from work.
Tragedy struck closer to home when the couple’s second child Karen died aged three from a brain tumour in 1962, leaving sons Eric, six, and baby Mark alone with their grief-stricken mother while Neil joined the NASA space programme and buried himself in his work at Cape Kennedy in Florida.
Even more poignantly, the little girl the Armstrongs called “Muffie” died on their wedding anniversary, and son Mark remembers the date was never celebrated again.
After the moon landings turned the astronauts into the rock stars of the Sixties, the publicity-shy couple moved to a remote farm in Ohio to bring up their boys.
But living in an emotional vacuum eventually took its toll on Janet, and the couple quietly divorced in 1994 after four decades of marriage, during which time Janet once said: “Silence is Neil Armstrong’s answer.
"The word ‘no’ is an argument. He is a very solitary man.”
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While Neil went on to marry Carol Held Knight, a widow he’d met on a golf tour in 1992, before his death in 2012, Janet retired to Utah where she kept in contact with all the unsung female heroes of the US space programme – the Astronaut’s Wives Club.
The much-loved great-grandmother died aged 84 earlier this summer from lung cancer, but Claire Foy’s moving portrayal as the stoic first wife in space guarantees Janet’s star will now shine as bright as her husband’s.
In her obituary in the Houston Chronicle in June her family asked: "Janet received many awards and honors worldwide as a result of her courage and dedication during the American space program of the 1960s.
"By all that knew her, she will be remembered as a strong, willful woman that always reunited with a warm smile and parted ways with tears.
"We ask only that you honor her by standing up for that in which you believe."
First Man is out in cinemas on October 12.
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