Armstrong meant to say, ‘That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’ — and when he is quoted that is usually what people say. But in the excitement he forgot to say the ‘a’.
It wasn’t a speech made by speechwriters, carefully calculated to make the greatest impact. On the journey to the Moon Neil Armstrong had given some thought about what to say, but it wasn’t until they landed that the right words came to him. They were words from the heart, and will long be remembered in human history.
Meanwhile the world was watching. Honeysuckle Creek got the TV images first, then transmitted them to the Sydney Video Centre, where a delay of several seconds was built in. If anything went wrong on the Moon the NASA representative could cut the transmission, so that the astronauts would not have to die with the curious eyes of the world on them.
The operations room at Honeysuckle Creek was silent now. There wasn’t even much chatter on the intercom channels. We were all listening to the voices of the astronauts on NET 1, and watching as the black-and-white fuzzy pictures flickered across the large closed-circuit TV screens throughout the operations area. My headset cord stretched as I moved closer to the video-processing equipment, where I could see the picture at the ‘first point of emergence’ before it was ‘patched to line’. I will always remember the extraordinary privilege it was to see these events ever so slightly ahead of the rest of the world.
And I’m sure if you ask almost anyone over 60 what they were doing on the day Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon they will be able to tell you exactly where they were.
MOON MYTH: THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON NEVER HAPPENED
This is a bit of lunacy (the word ‘lunacy’ comes from the time when it was thought that anyone with a mental illness was ‘moonstruck’ — affected by moonlight).
There are websites and even the odd (very odd) TV and radio programs devoted to ‘proving’ that human beings never walked on the Moon. These cynics say that the Moon landing was filmed by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) on a back lot in Hollywood. ‘Proof’ of this includes:
• there are no stars in the photos taken on the Moon;
• the moon rocks are fakes;
• shadows in the photos appear at different angles, ‘proving’ that it was taken on a movie set using artificial lighting;
• there is no crater under the Apollo landing craft;
• the flag casts no shadow and is at right angles to the flag pole as though being blown by wind.
Why were there no stars? The moon landings took place during bright sunlight — and you don’t get clouds on the Moon! The stars were too faint to see just as they would have been under the same conditions from/on Earth. The astronauts were not there to photograph stars — they were there to look at the lunar surface, the rocks in particular.
Couldn’t the moon rocks be fake? No. Moon rocks have been formed in a vacuum — no Earth rocks were formed that way — and moon rocks have no water in them. They are also different in other ways from Earth rocks. (You can see a moon rock at the Visitor Information Centre at Tidbinbilla Space Tracking Station outside Canberra — this is about as close as most of us will get to a small bit of the universe beyond our Earth!)
Why weren’t the shadows clear? Lunar dust reflects light, so the shadows were less distinct.
Why was there no crater under the Apollo landing craft? Why should there be? The lunar module Eagle weighed less than two tonnes when it landed and put out thrust of about 100 grams per square centimetre, with the exhaust gas cooling down fast in the Moon’s vacuum. That is not enough to make a crater!
Is the United States flag really on the Moon? It’s definitely up there. And no, it was not blowing in the wind — it hung that way because it was supported across the top by a horizontal strut.