1. To this day it is a mystery as to whether Armstrong said “one small step for man” or, as he thought he said at the time, and certainly planned to say, “one small step for a man,” which would have been grammatically correct. The world did not hear the “a,” no question about that. In the rush of the moment, did Neil forget to say, or just not say, the “a”?
In terms of memory, as Neil recollected, “I can’t recapture it. For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps it was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time there for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said—although it actually might have been” (Armstrong to Hansen, September 19, 2003, p. 6 [see note 3, this chapter]).
When asked how he prefers for historians to quote his statement, Neil told this author during interviews for the authorized biography, First Man, and answering only somewhat facetiously, “They can put it in parentheses” (Armstrong to Hansen, September 19, 2003, p. 8).
2. Quoted in Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. with Wayne Warga, Return to Earth (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 233.
3. Neil A. Armstrong to James R. Hansen, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 19, 2003, transcript p. 6. The cassette tape recordings of all of my interviews with Armstrong, as well as all of the verbatim transcripts of those interviews, are preserved in the Neil A. Armstrong papers collection in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections, West Lafayette, Indiana. All interviews with Armstrong cited in these notes took place at Armstrong’s home in suburban Cincinnati.
4. Willis Shapley to George C. Mueller, Office of Manned Space Flight, NASA Headquarters, April 1969, NASA Headquarters History Office, Washington, DC.
5. Armstrong to Hansen, September 19, 2003, pp. 8–9.
6. William H. Honan, “Le Mot Juste for the Moon,” Esquire, July 1, 1969, accessed at www.classic.esquire.com.
7. For a fuller account of the Apollo 11 astronauts’ reception aboard the USS Hornet, see James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005 edition), pp. 555–57.
8. James A. Lovell Jr., 08:01:02:32 mission elapsed time, quoted in First Man, p. 562. There are two wonderful online resources by which one can follow the second-by-second course of all the Apollo missions. The first is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from July 1969 through December 1972. Edited by Eric M. Jones and Ken Glover, the ALSJ is a tremendous resource for anyone wanting to know what happened during the Apollo missions and why. The ALSJ includes a corrected transcript of all recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Mission Control in Houston. Interwoven into the journal are extensive commentaries not just by the highly informed editors but also by ten of the twelve astronauts who walked on the moon, including Neil Armstrong. The second such resource is the Apollo Flight Journal, which covers the eleven human flights of the Apollo program, including the five that did not land on the Moon, while at the same time relates those parts of the landing missions not taking place on the lunar surface. (One can find the words of Jim Lovell to the Apollo 11 crew just prior to Earth reentry in the AFJ.) Several editors have worked to produce the AFJ, notably Frank O’Brien, Tim Brandt, Lennie Waugh, Ken MacTaggart, Andrew Vignaux, Ian Roberts, Robin Wheeler, Rob McCray, Mike Jetzer, Alexandr Turhanov, and Ben Feist.
9. Armstrong to Hansen, September 19, 2003, transcript p. 35.
10. On Armstrong’s relationship with the Boy Scouts, see First Man, pp. 31, 33, 37–39, 40, 43, 503, and 623–24.
11. Armstrong to Hansen, September 22, 2003, pp. 28–29.
12. Reverend Ralph Abernathy quoted in CBS Television Network, 10:56:20 PM, 7/20/69 (New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, 1970), pp. 15–16.
13. Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov quoted in Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (NASA SP-2000-4408, 2000), p. 667.
14. Soviet academician Leonid I. Sedov quoted in Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 667.
15. Sergei Khrushchev quoted in Saswato R. Das, “The Moon Landing through Soviet Eyes: A Q&A with Sergei Khrushchev, Son of Former Premier Nikita Khrushchev,” Scientific American, July 16, 2009, accessed at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrushchev/?redirect=1.
16. Ibid.
17. Armstrong to Hansen, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 22, 2003, p. 2.
18. Michael Collins, Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 161.
19. Neil A. Armstrong, commencement speech, Wittenberg College, Ohio. Copy in the Neil A. Armstrong papers collection, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections, West Lafayette, Indiana. See also “Wittenberg Honors Armstrong,” Akron (OH) Beacon Journal, November 24, 1969.
20. The 60 Minutes episode on Neil Armstrong, “First Man,” first aired on the CBS Television Network on November 6, 2005, the day before First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon and Schuster) hit the bookstores. This episode is available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/neil-armstrongs-2005-interview-first-man/.
21. Robert Pearlman to James R. Hansen, Houston, Texas, January 20, 2019. Pearlman is founder and editor of collectSPACE, a website devoted to news and information concerning space exploration and space-related artifacts and memorabilia.
22. Janet Shearon Armstrong to James R. Hansen, Park City, Utah, September 11, 2004. These interviews and their transcriptions are not publicly available.
23. The relationship between Neil and Janet is covered quite fully in all three editions of First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon and Schuster). In the 2018 edition the final stage of their relationship, leading to their divorce in 1994, is discussed on pp. 364–66. These quotes are from my private interviews with Janet Armstrong held at her home in Park City, Utah, on September 11, 2004.
24. Armstrong to Hansen, Cincinnati, Ohio, June 2, 2004, p. 4.
25. Ibid.
26. Armstrong to Hansen, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 22, 2003, p. 37. See also James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005 edition), pp. 626–27.