In May 1961, JFK announced: ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’And sure enough, on 20ish July 1969 (of which more momentarily), Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and ‘that other one’ (Michael Collins) were able to announce, ‘The Eagle has landed.’ The Eagle being the American-metaphor-laden name of their landing module. The Russians were not best pleased, having hoped to beat the Americans to the moon, and put out a sombre message on national radio, while an American flag flapped about (of which also more momentarily) beyond the night sky.
Poor Michael Collins never actually made it to the moon since someone had to man the space shuttle Apollo 11, so, like someone’s impatient mum, he was forced to circle round and round while Neil and Buzz bounced about and collected samples.
So that’s all quite a nice story. But there are a couple of popular misconceptions about the moon landings. Firstly, while the landing module did indeed touch down on 20 July 1969 (at 2017 hours GMT, to be militaristically precise about the timing), Neil Armstrong didn’t actually step onto the surface of the moon until 0256 GMT on 21 July – and surely GMT is the standard time by which non-earth-based events should be judged? It wasn’t any specific date by the moon’s standards, what with nobody ever having established time zones or an annual calendar on the moon. I think a strongly worded letter is in order.
Secondly, Neil Armstrong made a total balls-up of his pre-planned ‘one small step’ line, allegedly written by a weirdy-beardy British scientist called Gary Peach (although Gary Peach looks like the kind of weirdy-beardy old man who’d allege to have done such a thing – he probably shot JFK as well). The line should have been:‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’
So, like, a small step for a single specific man called Neil, but a big advancement for humankind in general. What Armstrong said was:
‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’
- which is pretty much ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other’, since ‘man’ used in that non-specific context means the same as ‘mankind’. So essentially, one of the most famous lines in the history of the world doesn’t actually mean anything. A fairly epic mistake.
Not as epic as some of the conspiracy theories, although unfortunately I really don’t have time to go into all that here. The main theory, however, seems to be ‘the flag was flapping in the wind despite there being no wind on the moon.’ WELL, unless I have been entirely duped by trick photography, I can proudly announce that this is total nonsense. The flag was crumpled from being squashed into the glovebox for a week, and, as these two slightly-different photos show, remained crumpled in the non-wind of the moon. It later fell over when the Eagle took off.The other theories involve mysterious letter ‘C’s marked on rocks (printer error, apparently) and vital tapes going missing in Australia (it’s a big place), and are all rather dull.
So, in conclusion, some people landed on the moon at some point in July 1969 and talked gibberish. And that’s (probably) a fact.
