Because of the patriotic nature of the script, and the success of using Top Gun (1986) as recruitment material, persuaded NASA to allow Bay and Co. to shoot in the normally restricted space agency. This included the neutral buoyancy lab, a 65 million gallon, 40 ft deep pool used to train astronauts for weightlessness and the use of two ten million dollar space suits. The crew was also allowed to shoot in the historic launch pad that went out of service after the Apollo 1 disaster, and parts of the movie were filmed at Edwards Air in California.
This was the first movie that the cast was allowed to use genuine NASA spacesuits. The cast are the only civilians to ever wear NASA spacesuits, which cost over 3 million dollars each.
According to the Criterion Collection commentary, many of the errors found in the film were acknowledged by the director and known even during filming/production and were left in deliberately (such as fire in space) because he said "it's a movie and not many people know about it" these things were kept in for entertainment value.
Director Michael Bay had the actors write their list of demands on the papers that Bruce Willis read from.
The convenient existence of a fault plane passing right through the asteroid is not unrealistic. Several asteroids are now believed to be "contact binaries", each apparently consisting of two separate lumps of rock that are just sitting on each other.
The second movie that depicts a fictional shuttle launch using actual launch footage. (The first was SpaceCamp (1986).)
Armageddon (1998) opened on Liv Tyler's 21st birthday.
In the movie trailers the shuttles that are being launching are the real space shuttles not the ones that appear in the movie.
Director Cameo: [Michael Bay] as a NASA scientist.
Liv Tyler turned down the role of Grace Stamper twice before finally accepting.
Space Shuttle Freedom's armadillo contains a Terminator Robot toy.
During the training of the mission team, an Aerosmith song ("Sweet Emotion") is playing in the background with vocals by Liv Tyler's father, Steven Tyler.
Rockhound's line about sitting on a million pounds of fuel in a rocket built by the lowest bidder is sometimes attributed to one of the Mercury astronauts, usually Gus Grissom or Wally Schirra.
One of two major asteroid-hitting-earth movies released during 1998. The other was Deep Impact (1998).
The film crew was also allowed to shoot sequences at the top of a real launch pad with an actual space shuttle docked to it. The only condition was that they not step into the shuttle itself. Ben Afflek admitted to stepping inside the orbiter for a brief moment before NASA technicians ordered him out of the spacecraft.
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