A grammatical debate has plagued one of the most famous lines in history, ever since it was first spoken.
You’d think this would be a nice easy question to answer, wouldn’t you?
What with audio and video clips of the historic event not just readily available, but counting among some of the most-viewed footage of all time.
But no.
One small step for a man?
It’s hardly a moonlanding conspiracy theory, but over the years there’s been quite a bit of discussion about what Neil Armstrong actually said on the Moon.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” is what millions of TV viewers around the world heard Armstrong say on that fateful July day in 1969, when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon.
The problem is, that wasn’t what he meant to say at all.
What he meant to say was “one small step for a man”, which makes a lot more sense.
And for many years, Armstrong insisted that that was what he HAD said.
The “a”, he said, either simply hadn’t been picked up by the fairly primitive communications equipment, or had been obscured by static.
After listening to the recording many times, however, Armstrong eventually conceded that there was no “a” detectable and acknowledged, reluctantly, that he may have misspoken.
The twist
So that’s that all cleared up then, yes?
Well, no, actually, because in 2006 a computer programmer and speech analyst called Peter Shann Ford went back to the original recording, re-analysed it using ultra-sensitive modern equipment and came to the conclusion that Armstrong was right all along: he had indeed said “a man” but the “a” was covered up by static.
Shann Ford published his findings in a paper called Electronic Evidence and Physiological Reasoning Identifying the Elusive Vowel ‘a’ in Neil Armstrong’s Statement on First Stepping onto the Lunar Surface, but other speech therapists have since called them into question.
So we may never know for sure.
And as an aside… it’s not like there’s an original script we can refer to, either.
Armstrong traditionally said that he only started thinking about what he’d say when they touched down as the lunar module Eagle was approaching the surface of the Moon.
Yet his own brother, David Armstrong, claimed in 2012 to have seen a draft of the famous line months before the mission took off.