What happened to Neil Armstrong’s daughter?

Life is a funny, strange, uncomfortable thing, for it was the loss of his two-year-old daughter, Karen, that drove Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, to sign up for NASA’s Space Program in 1962.

This is, at least, the version of events portrayed in multiple media accounts about the man’s life. Both Damien Chazelle’s 2018 biopic of the trailblazing astronaut, aptly titled First Man, and National Geographic’s documentary The Armstrong Tapes, which relies on testimonies from Armstrong’s friends and family, trace Neil Armstrong’s battle with grief and how the space race came into his life as a welcome distraction. “It’s the kind of loss that can drive you across the cosmos,” Chazelle accurately captured it in a Time interview.

The intimate film is less about Armstrong’s historical achievements and more about the forces that drove him to achieve them, Karen’s devastating death being chief among them. Among its final scenes is one where Ryan Gosling’s Armstrong strays from partner Buzz Aldrin on the moon and, once alone, drops his daughter’s bracelet on a lunar crater.

Although Neil Armstrong’s younger son Mark told WCPO 9 that “to his knowledge” the sequence isn’t true to life, he concedes that if his dad did leave something on the moon, he wouldn’t have told anyone. It’s true, however, that Armstrong spontaneously went off on his own for a beat during the moonwalk.

How did Karen Armstrong die?

Karen, nicknamed Muffie (short for Muffin) by his parents, died on the day of her parents’ sixth wedding anniversary on January 28, 1962, from a form of malignant brain tumor known as diffuse midline glioma (DMG). She was only two years old.

Reports say the young girl received both radiation treatment and chemotherapy, but not only were they too aggressive on her small body, but they were also ineffective. DMG, a condition caused by genetic mutations in the nervous system, is most commonly found in children and, more than 60 years on from Karen’s death, remains incurable.

Neil and Janet Armstrong never celebrated their anniversary again. According to Karen’s baby brother Mark, her death wasn’t something they ever discussed as a family, and Janet herself confessed it was very hard to talk to her husband about the topic.

Eight months after Karen’s passing, in September of 1962, Neil Armstrong officially entered the astronaut corps. It would be seven years before he would land on the moon.