CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronaut Neil Armstrong may not have been speaking entirely off the cuff when he delivered the most iconic quote in the history of manned space flight.
Armstrong wrote out
the sentence, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for
mankind," before blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in July 1969, his brother now says, according to the transcripts of a documentary recently aired on BBC Two.
Because of a radio
communications glitch, millions of people watching on television as
Armstrong became the first human being to step onto the surface of the
moon never heard him utter the word "a" before man.
Armstrong, who died in August at the age of 82, had
always maintained he composed the words after touching down on the moon
on July 20, 1969, while he waited to leave the Eagle lunar lander.
But Armstrong's younger brother Dean, speaking in an interview for the documentary, "Neil Armstrong - First Man on the Moon" aired on Sunday, said that was not entirely accurate.
"Dean told me that
Neil shared the words with him shortly before he left for the Cape, so
maybe a couple weeks before the mission," producer Chris Riley told Reuters.
An Armstrong family spokesman did not reply to a request from Reuters for comment.
"I find the timing of Dean Armstrong's revelation to be curious," said Robert Pearlman, owner and curator of CollectSpace.com, a space history website.
"Why wait until
after his brother died? He was interviewed for Neil's authorized
biography in 2002 and apparently never mentioned this story, despite
Neil giving permission to his family and friends to speak openly,"
Pearlman said.
Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," which
served as a template for an HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, said
Armstrong was asked many times over the years when he came up with the
quote and always replied that it was spoken spontaneously."He had said that many times publicly before I wrote my book, so I never asked him when he made up the quote," Chaikin said.
In the documentary,
Dean Armstrong said he and his brother were up one night shortly before
Neil left for Florida playing the board game, Risk, Riley said.
Dean said Neil slipped him a piece of paper with the
sentence "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," written
out and asked Dean what he thought of it, Riley said.Dean replied, "Fabulous," a transcript of the documentary shows.
Riley, who was commissioned to produce the documentary after
Armstrong's death, said he doesn't see it as raising any real questions about the astronaut's integrity.
"Anybody making
that historic step onto another world as a human being would have
appreciated the significance of it, as Neil did, and would have given it
some thought beforehand. It wasn't something that just sort of came to
him as he headed down the ladder. But I don't think he fully decided
what to say until maybe after landing," Riley said.
The documentary, produced in partnership with PBS's NOVA is due to air in the United States later this year.
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